FOSS4G2007 Lessons Learned

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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.

Bidding

If you approach your local conference center, or tourist bureau, you may find a wealth of support for your bid. Local governments often fund promotion to bring in conferences, and will get behind you with free assistance in preparing your bid. A conference of only 500 people can represent a couple million dollars for a local economy, so it is worth their time to help you win the conference.

Victoria 2007 engaged with both the local conference center and a local organizing company, who helped on the bid preparation pro bono in return for the opportunity to work the conference in the event we won. The conference centre provided lots of pre-made content about the facility, accommodations, and so on, and the organizer helped prepare material for the bid web site.

Take advantage of your local government to assist your bid. FOSS4G is a large enough event now that localities receive a significant financial benefit when we locate in their city.

Timetable

The most important piece of timetable information is that you can not make any predictions about response/attendance until deadlines. The number of workshop submissions in 2007 doubled on the deadline day; the number of presentation submissions doubled in the last two days. The 2004 organizers reported having registration go from 100 to 200 in the last month. The 2006 organizers reported having registration go from 150 to over 500 in the last six weeks.

2007 attempted to force the registration timetable backwards somewhat by having an early-bird rate ($395CAD) substantially lower than the regular rate ($565CAD) with the early-bird deadline two months in advance.

Anything related to the timetable of the conference, from the initial RFP response through to post-conference 'wrap up' should be added here. Some items may also be repeated in the relevant sections below, to provide context...

Sponsorships

Starting sponsorship solicitation as early as possible is very important. People will register at the last moment, so it is very difficult to predict registration revenues, but sponsorship revenues can be locked up very early through aggressive work on getting commitments from sponsors. First write out a list of potential sponsors, then assign each one to a committee member to pursue. We used the Google Spreadsheet to keep a shared page of information about who had been contacted, who had committed, how many contacts had been made, who at the sponsoring company had responded, etc.

Support For Some Attendees

You will get lots and lots of requests for support. Travel subsidies, free registration, free lodging, you name it. Establish your policy early, and work within that policy. Because we had no policy and no budget item for this, our policy was "no". However, if you think ahead, you can probably ensure that a couple worthy attendees who would otherwise be unable to come can make the conference. Establish your budget number, and how you will decide who gets support, and go from there.

Marketing

Lists are Important

You will be able to easily mail all the active community members by putting together a list-of-lists and getting the list owners to help propagate the FOSS4G message.

However.

Since 80% of your attendance will be local and regional people, not necessarily the international community you communicate with on the lists, you must compile lists of local people who may have an interest in the conference. You must compile these lists early in the process so that the marketing message can be put out early for people who need lead-time to get approvals for conference attendance.

Here are some ways to get lists:

• Regional technology magazines sell their subscription lists
  • Get the physical addresses and mail postcards
  • Get the e-mail addresses for your mass-email list
• Screen-scrape the phone directories of government agencies
  • Mail everyone you can, particular people in the 1-2 hour travel radius of your event
• Get contact lists from sponsors if they will provide them
• Professional groups have lists of potentially interested parties
  • Surveyors, geologists, ecologists, biologists, foresters
• Academics are often interested and also connected
  • Computer science, geography, ecology, forestry

Remember that if people do not know the event is coming, they'll never purchase a registration, and you cannot count on the international community for your attendance, you need local attendees.

2007 purchased lists from magazines and did a 10,000 card mail-out. Also compiled addresses from local organization web sites that might be interested, and added them to the main physical/email distribution lists. We compiled the secondary lists manually, just surfing to county and city site and gathering the names of GIS coordinators.

Conference Venue

The biggest single expense category for 2007 was the food (it was actually broken into several categories in the budget, but if you put them together it was the easy winner). That was because the Conference Centre had an exclusive catering arrangement with the associated hotel, and the food was expensive. $5 cokes, $4 coffees, that sort of thing. This will be very common for most conference venues. Be prepared, be unsurprised.

One pleasant surprise at the 2007 venue was the price of wireless internet. Conference centres and hotels traditionally charge a huge amount for internet access, but the quotation we received from the in-house provider was 30% of our expected budget number. However, be prepared to pay a lot for internet.

On the exhibition floor, the conference centre might expect you to leave your exhibitors to "fend for themselves", paying extra fees for internet, power, and so on. 2007 opted to pay those charges directly, so they were included in the overall sponsor/exhibition fees and everyone had access. It seems silly to consider power or internet an "optional" expense at a technology trade show -- it is not like we are running a home-and-garden exhibition, where an exhibitor might reasonably run a booth without them.

Accommodations

Getting a hotel room block reserved ahead of time was wise. The kind of contract you have to agree to will vary, depending on the demand for rooms from ordinary customers. We got a very good contract, with no penalties for not filling the block.

Providing a very complete list of local accomodation options on the web site will save your attendees the trouble of Googling it all up themselves. Plus you'll know and be able to find some that are very hard to find independently. List every reasonable hotel you can think of, with a web link directly to the hotel site, so that folks don't have to hunt them down.

Workshops

In 2007, there were 12 slots for 3 hour workshops (for the workshop day), and 16 slots for 1.5 hour labs (for the remainder of the conference). All the computers were rented, 120 in all, and broken into 6 labs of 20 computers, with 2 attendees per computer, for a total of 240 attendees on workshop day.

Workshop submissions were accepted by email, in a standard document template, and the information was entered into a summary spreadsheet (for title, name, short abstract) and document (for all information). Submitters were asked to indicate what kind of physical infrastructure they required, and whether their submission was a 3 hour or 1.5 hour submission. Some submitters indicated they could do both formats, others only indicated one. It was not made clear to submitters that "both" was an acceptable answer, which led a bad selectivity situation later on.

52 workshop submissions were received. 33 submissions indicated they could do 3 hour formats, which made almost 3-to-1 demand versus supply (12 slots). 22 submissions indicated they could do 1.5 hour formats, which was much closer to the 16 slots available in the lab format.

The committee first selected the 12 3-hour workshops, via a ranking process (more below). Submissions that were accepted as 3-hour workshops were removed from the 1.5 hour list, and then the 1.5 hour workshops were selected using the same ranking process.

The submissions that were only in the 3-hour list had a much harder time making the cut than the ones that were dual-listed. Some submitters would probably be "OK" with that, since their content would not fit into a 1.5 hour format. Others would have been happy to present in either format, if they knew they had the option when submitting.

Lesson: Having two formats is handy, for using infrastructure more effectively, and submitters need to be properly instructed on their options for submitting, so that they have the best chance to compete for slots.

Timing

Workshop selection forms part of the registration process, so workshops must be selected prior to the opening of registration. Workshops are also a good piece of "web site content" that help convey what the conference is "about" for potential attendees. As with every other piece of conference content, the sooner these things are selected and published, the easier you will find it to attract non-traditional attendees, who form their opinions based on the content you provide on the web site.

In 2007, the Call for Workshops went out in early February (8 months prior to conference) and closed in early March (7 months prior to conference). Workshops were selected by the end of March (6 months prior to conference).

Ranking

Workshop submissions were ranked using a multi-criteria system, scored from 1-5, and each workshop was supposed to be given scores for all criteria by all committee members. In the end, some members found the process too onerous and only gave one score for each workshop, based on a holistic understanding of all the criteria. Some members ranked in a range of 3-5, others used the entire range of 1-5. In general, because of the different methodologies, the amount of "information" pulled from the ranking process was not as high as it could have been. Ideally, each committee member would provide equal "information" to the decision, but in 2007, those members who used the whole range of their scores, and only provided one score, had higher influence than members who ranked more judiciously and provided all the criteria separately.

Lesson #1: Before publishing the Call for Workshops, agree on the decision criteria, and publish them along with the Call.

Lesson #2: Do not attempt to gather individual scores for each criterion. Have members score the submissions holistically, keeping all the criteria in mind as they do so.

Lesson #3: Do not use a 1-X scoring system, but instead use an ordered sorting system, where each member returns a sorted list of submissions, from most to least desirable. This approach maximizes the amount of information gathered about each submission, and sidesteps "plumping" strategies (where a member gives all the submissions a "0" except for the two he really likes which he gives a "5", thereby accentuating his affect on the overall average).

Lesson #4: Potentially, remove the workshop committee process entirely and move to a community scoring model. However, given the limited number of slots, and the benefits for workshop presenters (free admission), a community model might be a tempting target for vote pooling and other forms of influence. Also, because workshops must be selected far far in advance of the date, it will not be possible to bring in the opinions of conference registrants who are not members of the "usual" OSS community of interest.

Presentations

213 presentation abstracts were received before the submission deadline. Of those 73 were received on the closing day, 39 the day before, and 13 the day before that. Basically a slow dribble until the last days, then a rushing torrent.