FOSS4G2007 Lessons Learned - Revision history

Wiki-Leo at 11:30, 11 February 2015

2015-02-11T11:30:27Z

Jmckenna at 19:37, 2 February 2015

2015-02-02T19:37:36Z

Neteler: +Category:Best practice

2008-11-08T17:16:08Z

+Category:Best practice

Pramsey at 23:44, 10 October 2008

2008-10-10T23:44:39Z

Pramsey: /* Breakdown by Country */

2008-03-31T22:09:08Z

Breakdown by Country

Wiki-Camerons: /* Within the Conference */

2007-12-31T19:40:40Z

Within the Conference

Pramsey: /* Conference Evaluation */

2007-12-12T01:01:50Z

Conference Evaluation

Pramsey: /* Printed Handouts */

2007-12-03T19:39:49Z

Printed Handouts

Pramsey: /* Quirks */

2007-12-03T19:38:33Z

Quirks

Pramsey: /* Complimentary Registrations and Volunteers */

2007-12-03T19:31:41Z

Complimentary Registrations and Volunteers

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-Back to [[Conference_Committee]]
+Back to [[Conference Committee]]
 This page is a collection of information, comments, and suggestions, based on the planning, organizing, and hosting of the FOSS4G 2007 conference. The intent is to provide a resource that can be used by organizers of future FOSS4G conferences. This is not a forum for conference attendees to comment on the conference.  Use [[FOSS4G2007_Comments]] for that.
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 [[Category:FOSS4G2007]]
 [[Category:Best practice]]
 [[Category:FOSS4GLessonsLearned]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 19:37, 2 February 2015
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	[[Category:FOSS4G]]		[[Category:FOSS4G]]
	[[Category:Best practice]]		[[Category:Best practice]]
		+	[[Category:FOSS4GLessonsLearned]]

← Older revision		Revision as of 17:16, 8 November 2008
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	[[Category:FOSS4G2007]]		[[Category:FOSS4G2007]]
	[[Category:FOSS4G]]		[[Category:FOSS4G]]
		+	[[Category:Best practice]]

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 Back to [[Conference_Committee]]
-This page is a collection of information, comments, and suggestions, based on the planning, organizing, and hosting of the FOSS4G 2007 conference. The intent is to provide a resource that can be used by organizers of future FOSS4G conferences. This is not a forum for conference attendees to comment on the conference.
+This page is a collection of information, comments, and suggestions, based on the planning, organizing, and hosting of the FOSS4G 2007 conference. The intent is to provide a resource that can be used by organizers of future FOSS4G conferences. This is not a forum for conference attendees to comment on the conference.  Use [[FOSS4G2007_Comments]] for that.
 = Bidding =

@@ Line 69: / Line 69: @@
 **  USA (265), Canada (253), Mexico (3)
 * Europe, 139, 19%
-**  Italy (21), France (18), United Kingdom (15), Spain (12), The Netherlands (12), Germany (11), Switzerland (10), Norway (6), Belgium (5), Austria (5), Czech Republic (4), Sweden (4), Finland (3), Portugal (2), Poland (2), Romania (2), Denmark (2), Hungary (1), Luxembourg (1),  Latvia (1), Slovenia (1), Swizerland (1)
+**  Italy (21), France (18), United Kingdom (15), Spain (12), The Netherlands (12), Germany (11), Switzerland (11), Norway (6), Belgium (5), Austria (5), Czech Republic (4), Sweden (4), Finland (3), Portugal (2), Poland (2), Romania (2), Denmark (2), Hungary (1), Luxembourg (1),  Latvia (1), Slovenia (1)
 * Australasia, 40, 5%
 ** Korea (11), Japan (11), Australia (4), Indonesia (3), China (3), New Zealand (3), Fiji (2), Taiwan (1), Thailand (1), Vietnam (1)

← Older revision		Revision as of 19:40, 31 December 2007
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	'''Lesson:''' We had a 'room monitor' (one of the volunteers) assigned to each room used for Workshops, Labs, and Presentations. For Workshops, one of their roles was to use a registration list to ensure that only people who had paid for the Workshop attended the Workshop. Labs and Presentations were 'first come first served', so there was no such list. It would have been easy to have had a system to have 'room monitors' keep track of attendance.		'''Lesson:''' We had a 'room monitor' (one of the volunteers) assigned to each room used for Workshops, Labs, and Presentations. For Workshops, one of their roles was to use a registration list to ensure that only people who had paid for the Workshop attended the Workshop. Labs and Presentations were 'first come first served', so there was no such list. It would have been easy to have had a system to have 'room monitors' keep track of attendance.
		+
		+	=== Within the Code Sprint ===
		+
		+	50 people showed up at the peak. It was a sort of conference room with maybe 15 round tables - most were used and worked like a good focal point for groups of 10 or less working together.
		+
		+	We supplied some power cords, but not nearly enough, so the tables around the edge of the room were sought after.
		+
		+	Wireless internet was provided. The AV wasn't good, would have been better if we'd stayed at the conference center, since we had them trained by that point.
		+
		+	Paper flip charts were available.
		+
		+	Coffee and snacks were provided in the morning, along with lunch.
		+
		+	Cost about $1500, room+food+AV.
		+
		+	The section is a summary of emails from Paul Ramsey and Tyler Mitchell http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/aust-nz/2007-December/thread.html

	= Marketing =		= Marketing =

← Older revision		Revision as of 01:01, 12 December 2007
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	As it says at the top of this page, "This is not a forum for conference attendees to comment on the conference.". Conference attendees had the opportunity to fill out a conference evaluation form, and the results of the tabulation of those forms will be in the FOSSG2007 final report. What this doesn't capture is feedback from people who didn't attend the conference. To capture that information, future conference organizers may wish to ask for feedback from such people, such as asking "if you attended prior FOSS4G conferences, why did you not attend the FOSS4G2007 conference".		As it says at the top of this page, "This is not a forum for conference attendees to comment on the conference.". Conference attendees had the opportunity to fill out a conference evaluation form, and the results of the tabulation of those forms will be in the FOSSG2007 final report. What this doesn't capture is feedback from people who didn't attend the conference. To capture that information, future conference organizers may wish to ask for feedback from such people, such as asking "if you attended prior FOSS4G conferences, why did you not attend the FOSS4G2007 conference".
		+
		+	== Workshop Evaluations ==
		+
		+	Are all here: [[FOSS4G2007_Workshop/Lab_Evaluations]]

	= Onsite Staff =		= Onsite Staff =

@@ Line 351: / Line 351: @@
 * If the conference organizing committee is going to provide a service to Instructors to print their handouts, tell the Instructors the requirements (e.g. formats, deadlines) in the acceptance notification. Many Instructors will wait until very close to, or past, whatever deadline you provide.
 * Print all handouts using both sides of the page, to conserve paper, and mandate the same for handouts that Instructors provide themselves.
 = Presentations =

@@ Line 222: / Line 222: @@
 * FOSS4G attendees have an unusual willingness to [http://www.flickr.com/photos/16041363@N00/1437755493/ sit on the floor] during lunch (or really, any time at all). This surprised the venue managers quite a bit. They provided more stand-up tables by day two.
-* FOSS4G attendees pack laptops. Almost all of them. That means (a) lots of demand for places to use laptops, like chairs (b) huge wireless load. VCC had good physical infrastructure in terms of access points and outgoing bandwidth (dual 100Mbit fibre) but had not sufficiently tested their log-in system prior to the conference. The result was a melt-down on day two, as they ran out of logins in their security box, then ongoing issues afterwards from machines with "bad logins" from the melt-down the day prior.  This will be hard to avoid -- the conference centre will always be sure they can handle anything right up until you prove them wrong.
+* FOSS4G attendees pack laptops. Almost all of them. That means (a) lots of demand for places to use laptops, like chairs and (b) huge wireless load. VCC had good physical infrastructure in terms of access points and outgoing bandwidth (dual 100Mbit fibre) but had not sufficiently tested their log-in system prior to the conference. The result was a melt-down on day two, as they ran out of logins in their security box, then ongoing issues afterwards from machines with "bad logins" from the melt-down the day prior.  This will be hard to avoid -- the conference centre will always be sure they can handle anything right up until you prove them wrong.
-* FOSS4G attendees tend to be predominantly male. That means that standardized food orders, that expect more gender balance, will tend to under-budget for how much each attendee eats. This was especially noticeable on "pizza day", when, despite the food services accidentally over-providing 20 pizzas, we still consumed every single piece.
+* FOSS4G attendees are predominantly male. That means that standardized food orders, that expect more gender balance, will tend to under-budget for how much each attendee eats. This was especially noticeable on "pizza day", when, despite the food services accidentally over-providing 20 pizzas, we still consumed every single piece.
 = Accommodations =

@@ Line 35: / Line 35: @@
 We had approximately 80 complimentary registrations. (The exact number should show up in the final report.)  That was slightly over 10% of the total attendance.
-We used volunteers for room monitors, security, basically everything that required a body, about 7 people at any one time.  In return for 8 hours of labor (two 4-hour shifts) they got complimentary registration for the rest of the conference (and a cool orange shirt).  The cost of every budget item that had to be scaled on a "per person" basis (food, shifts, bags, etc) was about $230, so those 8 hours of volunteer labour cost us dearly.  In 2006, the conference was at a university and they were having a reading break at the time of the conference, so the organizers just hired 8 students to work the conference full time. Even if they paid them $20 per hour, they probably came out far ahead of us, financially.  Simply hiring staff for things like room monitoring, manning the registration desk, security, may be more fiscally effective than using volunteers as we did.
+We used volunteers for room monitors, security, basically everything that required a body, about 7 people at any one time.  In return for 8 hours of labor (two 4-hour shifts) they got complimentary registration for the rest of the conference (and a cool orange shirt).  The cost of every budget item that had to be scaled on a "per person" basis (food, shirts, bags, etc) was about $230, so those 8 hours of volunteer labour cost us dearly.  In 2006, the conference was at a university and they were having a reading break at the time of the conference, so the organizers just hired 8 students to work the conference full time. Even if they paid them $20 per hour, they probably came out far ahead of us, financially.  Simply hiring staff for things like room monitoring, manning the registration desk, security, may be more fiscally effective than using volunteers as we did.
 == Workshop Pricing ==