I'm slowly catching up with the internet - sorry for the delayed response. I think it wasn't the topic of the session that made some people uninterested, but the scheduling.Â

It would have been a great breakout session, attracting the people who wanted and needed this discussion at this level, but it didn't quite work as an overall thing for everyone, as not all attendees had been thinking about incentives a lot (that day, or ever). Especially people who had gone to all of the science communication-type breakouts, this just felt very much like something that would have been part of some of the *other* tracks.Â
I *have* thought about incentives before - in fact I do so a lot - and even I had a hard time getting into the session simply because I had spent the day filling my head with thoughts about *other* topics. I'm sure that if I'd gone to a few other breakout sessions, the panel would have flowed naturally from that, but now it just felt like I was joining in the middle of something.Â Maybe if it had been scheduled right after Michael's talk, at the start of the day, it would have been more on people's minds (and then the arsenic story, which was far more generally accesible, could have been the closing thing.)

But of course, I know scheduling is challenging in and of itself, and I don't blame the organisers for this, nor you for moderating. It just felt a bit out of place for people who had just come out of breakout sessions about storytelling and colour perception and whatnot. The variety of attendees and topics at science online, while amazing, comes with its own little problems.