A brown bag seminar, session or lunch is generally a training or information session during a lunch break. "Brown bag" is representative of meals brought along by the attendees, or provided by the host. In the USA, those are often packed in brown paper bags. Brown bag seminars normally run an hour or two.
The aim is to use regular breaks, e.g. the lunch break, to provide some information to the attendees in a voluntary and informal setting. It is often followed by a discussion of the topic. These sessions are common at universities and private companies. They are an interesting medium for knowledge management and internal communications.
In universities, especially for graduate students, brown bag seminars are often offered to update the researching community about ongoing research. Usually held by schools, universities and governmental institutions, they involve lectures, presentations, or talks by researchers, mostly professors about their ongoing research. Professors may visit from other universities to talk about their research.
Famous quotes containing the words brown, bag and/or seminar:
“Piles of scrapbooks, the cuttings turned by time to the colour of the freckles on an old lady’s hand. Her hand. My hand, as it is now. When you touch the old newsprint, it turns into brown dust, like the dust of bones.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“I am not naturally ... “A bag of wind”; yet ... I mean deliberately and decidedly “to cut” in future all my old ideas on this head. I don’t think modesty “pays.” It is a good quality in a family, it is a domestic virtue, it makes a home happy after you have got a home, but it is not potent in getting homes. It is not a money-maker, neither is it lucky in gaining a reputation. I am of the impression that gaseous bodies do better.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“A child of three cannot raise its chubby fist to its mouth to remove a piece of carpet which it is through eating, without being made the subject of a psychological seminar of child-welfare experts, and written up, along with five hundred other children of three who have put their hands to their mouths for the same reason.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)