[advocacy-discuss] Postconference meditations

[Martin Man]

Hi Damian,

don't let the mistakes discourage you from doing further events.

Few notes from organizing OSDevCon 2008 in Prague.

- We had a partner in GUUG which are conference organization experts,  
so we were not starting from scratch but rather extending their  
experience. Having an older mentor always helps...

- We had an agency that did most of the "boring organizational and  
accounting work for us", it was part of the budget and it helped a  
lot. You don't want to waste your time deciding what coffee to order  
for a coffee break...

- Despite the fact that it's a community event, it's a business  
project (albeit non-profit) per se. You have to have the contracts,  
money, goals, responsibilities, etc., otherwise it will not fly. It's  
not quite like putting my-super-duper-application-0.1 on  
sourceforge.net :)

my .2 cents,
Martin

P.S. and as Wolfgang noted, we can move discuss this further to  
osdevcon-discuss@

On Oct 28, 2008, at 16:01, Damian Wojslaw wrote:

> Three days later, it is time to have some critical thoughts on our
> event. I sum what went wrong, so that anyone doing their conference  
> from
> scratch, won't make the same mistakes.
>
> The biggest one, from my point of view:
> - I have never had a written agreement with my sponsors about the  
> money.
> They backed out and I it was only thanx to few fantastic people that  
> the
> thing happened.
> - For the reason above,  I  lost a projector at Thursday night and  up
> until Friday 8:10 AM I didn't know if I had one. Again, thanx go to
> fantastic friends.
> - I took too much on myself. I should have known, that with health
> problems at home, I wouldn't able to bring an order to this event. It
> was nice, but it was a chaos.
> - I had no written plan and milestons. It's just the must. If you have
> plan, you have objectives and dates, by which you know that all is  
> going
> as planned, or it's a march to disaster.
> - I have lost my nerver and did my talk in Polish, as all my Polish
> friends. We agreed previously to have all talks in English and that  
> was
> my sin against abroad guests.
> - I never thought of it and have should - I did announcement in  
> Polish,
> while for the sake of our guests, I should have done so in English.
> - I have made a mistake of giving out a conference web page to people
> that did not keep it up to date, even though I have contacted them  
> many
> times. Thus the online agenda in Polish was not in sync with one in
> English and both were not synchronized with reality. I should have
> reclaimed it and hand out to someone I could trust.
> - It was a deliberate omission, but I should have sent maps to people
> regarding near hotels and a route from train to conference site.
> - As with the web page, I made a bad choice about a person that would
> send and Invoice to Sun Czech, which covers most of my expenses. They
> almost missed the mark and I almost lost all the money that I paid for
> the conference with. It was my personal earning.
> - Watch your words. I have made a few remarks that, given the Sun
> sponsoring the vent, made people think that Sun is an evil entity. I
> have never though of this and it was pointed out to me after the  
> conference.
> - There were omissions in e-mail communication. Most of this two days
> before the conference, and I am guilty for this.
>
> Given the above, I agree with Roman Strobl, that a guide for  
> conference
> organiser should be made. I volunteer to give my experiences. Anoyne
> there to help?
>
> Regards
>
> -- 
> Damian Wojslaw
> http://pl.opensolaris.org/ | SCA OS0073
> http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/on/
> http://opensolaris.org/os/project/szc-osug/
> http://www.linkedin.com/in/trochej
>
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