Hi<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 10:14 PM, Cameron Shorter <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:cameron.shorter@gmail.com" target="_blank">cameron.shorter@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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FYI:<br>
Please send responses to the conference_dev email list (or to me to
forward to the list).<br>
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<h3> <span>Website
out of date</span></h3>
<p>A conference's website is the primary form of communication
with potential delegates. For FOSS4G 2012, the website took an
excessively long time to be developed and brought online, and
then when it was brought online, it contained <a href="http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/foss4g2012/2012-February/000016.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">incorrect information and
broken links</a> (mainly <a href="http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/foss4g2012/2012-March/000018.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">cut and paste from the
prior FOSS4G website</a>). People were having significant
issues with submitting papers and <a href="http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/conference_dev/2012-June/001843.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">registering to attend</a>.
</p>
<p>The FOSS4G LOC had hired an external web developer to create
the website, who had done a poor job of development. It seemed
that there was a lack of quality control from both the web
developer, and LOC. In the past, development of the website has
either been managed by technically experienced developers (as
was the case in 2009), or by the PCO. </p>
<p>The lesson here is that the website needs to be made a priority
and suitably resourced. There is the potential for website
management software to be passed on from one conference to the
next. (We considered this option in 2009 but found the Open
Source conference management software used by FOSS4G 2008 was
not going to integrate easily with the software our PCO was
using). It would be worth future FOSS4G conferences revisiting
this question. </p>
<h3><br></h3></div></div></blockquote><div>One thing that struck me as an obvious place for improvement when we were organising the CT FOSS4G in 2010 was the absence of any usable 'out of the box' web infrastructure from OSGEO for running the conference in particular:</div>
<div><br></div><div>- abstract submission</div><div>- conference pre-registration and at event registration</div><div>- sharing of talk presentation materials</div><div>- event planning (e.g. tools like <a href="http://www.jboss.org/drools/drools-planner/">http://www.jboss.org/drools/drools-planner/</a> coould be used to optimise the event schedule)</div>
<div>- project management within the loc</div><div><br></div><div>It seems that in most case the LOC contracts local people to provide this - in our case IIRC the professional event organisers we used provided the registration service for example which I believe contributed to a substantial part of their fee (Gav correct me if I am wrong here). It strikes me that the same problem is solved (probably suboptimally) over again for each conference and it would make conference hosting substantially easier if these things were in place already when the LOC convenes. Wouldn't this be a good place for OSGEO to invest revenue from conferences? Then with each conference it would be simply a matter of deploying a new 'instance' of the software suite for the purposes of the conference, theming the site and being on your way.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Many of the things needed can be provided by open source software but having them pre-configured (e.g. issue categories in trac or a conference theme for wordpress with page stubs and suitable plugins set up etc) by experienced conference organisers would be an excellent way of batton passing to the next LOC team.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I think some targetted investement in getting web presence and conference organisation tools re-usable would substantially help to ensure the success, and reduce the overheads of, future events.</div>
<div>
<br></div><div>Regards</div><div><br></div><div>Tim</div><div><br></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<div><h3></h3><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
<pre cols="72">--
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
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Mob: <a href="tel:%2B61%20%280%29419%20142%20254" value="+61419142254" target="_blank">+61 (0)419 142 254</a>
Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
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