What is a run of show?

A run of show is not the attendee schedule. Attendees see times and rooms; the run of show carries the cues, the handovers and the names. Its real job is to hold the event together on the day something goes wrong.

In practice at an event

The format is one row per action with six columns: clock time, duration, what happens, owner, cue, and notes. Every row has exactly one person’s name, because shared ownership is how a row gets skipped by two people who each thought the other had it.

Transitions get far more detail than sessions. A forty-minute keynote is one row; the five minutes before it are six. Nothing goes wrong during the keynote that a document can fix, and everything goes wrong in the changeover.

The notes column is where the exceptions live, and it is worth more than the happy path: what to do if the speaker is not in the green room by 08:40, where the spare microphone is, the venue duty manager’s number.

What to look for

One author. Everybody contributes, one person holds the pen and publishes versions. Two run of show documents is worse than none, because both will be wrong and each holder will be confident.

Print it, version-stamped, the night before. The day it matters most is the day the venue Wi-Fi is unreliable or a phone is dead.

How event67 handles it

event67 does not produce a run of show, and no event app does. What it does is give the document a place to point: when a session moves, the run of show should carry a row naming who edits the app and who sends the notification, in that order. Editing without notifying sends attendees to the old room; notifying without editing leaves the app contradicting itself.