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Things to bear in mind for next year

General

Sketch and disseminate a 'business process' style flow of information, so we are all clear on what documents go where, and who is responsible for each bit. For example, plan on letting speakers upload their own talks to the wiki, rather than emailing them to us.

Roles

Travel co-ordinator: This is basically just replying to email queries about travel arrangements and getting to the venue. There seem to have been a lot of last-minute questions about this by email. I guesstimate they are mostly from speakers rather than delegates. Much of this information was already available on the website. It might be worth appointing a volunteer to handle this relatively simple task, so that John and other overworked major contributors don't have to deal with it.

Submissions

The submissions form should label each input field with specific instructions about about what we need in it. Effort getting this right up front seems a good investment.

The form should have an unlimited length 'title' field, plus a short (35 char?) 'snappy title' field for use on the timetable. There is then no need for the 'description' field. (ie the description field is renamed the title field, the title becomes the 'snappy title')

The abstract contains all background and description of talk sections, timings, etc.

Have a tags field which can contain multiple tags. New tags should be easy to create. The submitters do not create tags, talk schedulers do. This is in addition to a category field, which I understand from Mr Pinner already has other uses. (for delegates to see what a talk is about?)

Make very clear to submitters what is required, especially we need to improve what we tell them about the picture we need:

We should ask submitters to mention if they intend to propose a sprint in the talk, so that we can tag such talks, and avoid scheduling them simultaneously.

I've (tartley) been maintaining a separate spreadsheet of talks, to keep track of the following boolean fields, which perhaps should be on the talks django database:

'is ready' overlaps a little with the multi-value 'status' field that is already on talks, but maybe having it as separate boolean is more useful. 'has photo' should really be a field of the speaker, and perhaps is implied by the simple presence of a photo file.

Reviewing submissions

Guideline: Try to do everything in one pass. Even a minor subsequent change or check, when applied to every talk, can take ages.

Is it possible to allow submittors to see (and update) their own submissions, since passing them through us by email forms a bottleneck and generates work.

When reviewing each talk:

Feedback to submitters

After accepting talks, send a very short email to let the submitter know, which only asks them to acknowledge receipt. That way a dialog is opened as quickly as possible, letting everyone know the most important info (ie. 'you have been accepted' and 'I confirm I saw that') as fast as possible. Then afterwards follow up on that to negotiate details.

Consider the idea of the follow-up negotiation being a series of small quick requests, rather than a single monolithic email, which people seem not to read, but simply to file for later.

Updates from speakers

When receiving updates from speakers:

Provide some way for them to update their own directly. Passing them via us (via email) makes us a bottleneck and wastes our time,

In particular, prerequisites from tutors should be (are!) already in the tutorial submission - these should be fed into the wiki or somesuch, so they can be used verbatim going forward.

Scheduling

Schedulers should plan a weekend to physically get together and create the schedule (unless someone creates a brilliant collaborative online scheduling app sometime between now and next year)

See wiki page http://wiki2010.europython.eu/TalkSchedulingConstraints for example things to consider.

Registration

Adding a "willing to share room" tickbox into the registration form, and auto-generate room-sharing wiki page. Put a link to room-sharing wiki page on the registration form, so people can check and arrange a room before they register.

Guidelines and Policies

The recent diversity initiatives have highlighted a few areas where policies and guidelines could be beneficial. We should make a few things explicit:

Feedforward (last edited 2011-01-26 00:46:59 by localhost)