FOSS4G 2021 Lessons Learned

Previous Years Lessons Learned

2019, 2018, 2017, 2017, 2016 , 2015, 2014, 2013, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007

FOSS4G 2021 Lessons Learned

This is to document things that the local committee learned, for the benefit of future FOSS4Gs!!

Logo

There was a contest to get the logo, both in English and Spanish. This helps people get enthusiastic with the conference from the beginning and allows members of our community to contribute in their best.

It is recommended to have a designer ready to adapt the logo to the rest of the look and feel of the conference. Even if you ask for a theme, colors or topic on the contest, it is doubtful it will completely fit with the rest of the style.

It is good to have a designer coordinating all efforts with social media, marketing, sponsoring, website, and any other public appearances. A styling guide to help generating content is advised.

Marketing

We used Mailing Lists, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Engagement was varied but it was good to have all social networks synchronized.

We encourage to have someone in charge of social media with experience as community manager. It is good if they have a GIS background too. The last couple of months will be busy sending notifications and announcing sponsors. But during time right after the previous FOSS4G finishes until your FOSS4G starts, it is good to have someone generating "noise" and raising interest on the conference.

Discounts

Besides the inclusivity and diversity discounts mentioned on the following section, we offered a wide range of prices for tickets. This formula worked pretty well.

• Corporative for professional tickets, with access to Business to Business and other similar perks. This helps professionals that can't pay for a sponsorship but want to contribute and be involved in the business side of the event.
• International
• Regional
• Local for Argentina residents.
• Students which was also divided in three prices: international, regional and local. We asked for proof of being enrolled on some educational institution as student during the year 2021.

The price of local and students was mostly the cost of having that attendee in the conference. Regional, International, and Corporative tickets were the ones that helped increment the pool of free and discounted tickets of the following section.

There were also three time allocated discounts that were applied to each of the previous categories:

• Tempranillo a very early bird to help boost ticket prices. The idea was to offer special perks (a bottle of tempranillo wine and a free workshop ticket).
• Early Bird which we kind of cancelled because not long after starting it the pandemic started.
• Regular normal price.

We also experimented with "Black Friday" types of discounts, with very cheap prices and strongly contained time frames. They worked very well.

Having several time allocated discounts (Tempranillo, Early Bird, Late Bird, Regular,...) help people get anxious to buy a ticket before the price continues rising.

Travel Grants, Discounts and Inclusivity

There was no travel grants per se in 2021, as it was an online conference. But we allowed a wide range of discounts and free tickets to allow people from all over the world to attend. We targeted both people with low income and people from underrepresented groups and identities.

There are several things to consider if you are going to target low income economies in an online event.

Not everyone has access to proper hardware and bandwidth for the conference. You can arrange with local communities crowd gatherings (health and law permitted) so they meet at some school, university, public library, or similar building to use a computer and watch the talks together. Still, that will not be enough in some communities, so it may be recommendable to save part of the budget to be able to send them some hardware or mobile phone card to be able to connect.

The same way, there will be lots of other issues for people that want to attend the conference but they can't even if you offer them free tickets. You can't foresee all of those issues. Contact as many chapters as possible and try to find common ground. There will be things you can fix and things you can't. Be open and save some budget in case you can.

Code Sprint

We organized most of the codesprint in Workadventu.re. Participation in online codesprints is even harder than face to face ones. Having a platform beyond a simple text chat or a video chat was helpful.

Originally we planned for the codesprint to happen the full week so we could attract new contributors and help them break the ice and learn how they can contribute best. Obviously that didn't work as expected on the online version.