[advocacy-discuss] Postconference meditations

[Damian Wojslaw]

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