[OSGeo-Conf] Boston Cookbook Contributions & Lessons Learned

[Michael Terner]

The Boston Team would like to let people know that we are actively engaged
in rounding out our final documentation on lessons learned and presenting
our data in ways that will hopefully be useful to future planning teams.
There are two areas where we have focused our efforts:

   1. As per an earlier thread with *Cameron*, I have forked and updated
   the historic registration tracking spreadsheet that has been contributed to
   since 2006. I have renamed the sheet "*FOSS4G Registration Tracking New
   2018*
   <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UzMhTia60QvWDtnZ9maGBfnaRCdj0r__Li07lG4WgIg/edit?usp=sharing>".
   More information on the changes to this sheet, and recommendations for
   further improvement are found below (as many of you are likely to find
   this additional info TL;DR).
   2. As per encouragement from *Jeff*, our team has also begun to fill out
   the* FOSS4G 2017 Lessons Learned page on the Wiki
   <https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2017_Lessons_Learned>*. We're not
   done, but it's taking shape and one of our goals is to use this page as
   place to provide linkages to other materials that remain on our website, or
   to Google docs that contain our data.

And of course, we welcome direct outreach from the Dar es Salaam and
Bucharest teams if there is anything we can do to help in a more direct
way. Indeed, that's how all other teams we reached out to treated us.

All the best, and most sincerely,

MT & The BLOC
-- 
Michael Terner
​FOSS4G Boston 2017 Conference Chair
EVP AppGeo <http://www.appgeo.com>​
​~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

​*Further Info on the New Registration Tracking Sheet*​

​As per that sidebar with Cameron, that sheet was quite old and while
chalk-full of good info it also contains a variety of approaches to
presenting the info and some information that had not been maintained. In
short, there's a fair amount of detritus in there too. As such, I have
refactor​ed the sheet in a way that I think encourages consistent
information gathering and is is also a bit more scalable for collecting
this information for the long term. Here's what it looks like and what was
done:

   - The new sheet opens to a new *summary table* which presents the core
   data from every conference since 2006. The data for this summary table
   originates from individual spreadsheet tabs, one for each conference.
   - There *are some holes in the data* in this table based on the data
   collected by each conference team (as presented in the original
   spreadsheet). These include:
      - *Lausanne*, not reporting on Early Bird
      - *Nottingham *and *Portland*, not reporting on "host country" or
      "international"
      - *Bonn*, not yet reporting out their numbers
   - Hopefully, some of those missing numbers can be added into those tabs,
   and then made available through this summary sheet. If not, now the bar is
   set for future conference teams on the information that has been most
   consistently gathered over time.
   - I have created a couple of *"example" charts* from the summary table
   showing the potential benefits of gathering our data in a summary fashion.
      - I will also note that there aren't clear trends (e.g., in terms of
      the conference growing every year) due to the rotating nature of
the venue
      (i.e., the "other regions" conferences might be better measured
next to one
      another, rather than next to all conferences).
   - As you look at the individual tabs, you will see conference teams
   tracked their data in different ways, which is fine and appropriate. The
   goals is to get the same raw numbers for the summary table to track over
   time, i.e., these 4 columns:
      - *Total* registrations
      - *Early bird *registrations
      - *Host country* registrations
      - *International *registrations
   - The tab titled *RegDate* represents what was shared with our team via
   the last formulation of the older sheet. My hope was that I could remove
   that tab, as well as the other *18 tabs *to the right of it. This proved
   harder than I thought as the data in RegDate was linked to those 18 tabs;
   and the charts in RegDate were linked to those data.
   - In copying the data from RegDate to the individual tabs, I did break
   the linkage to the older tabs by using "Paste Special" for the
*numbers.* But
   the charts found in those tabs are still linked to RegDate data so those
   older 18 tabs still remain. Those charts could be rebuilt from the new,
   "pasted special" data, but we have not done that yet.
   - Indeed, *we wanted to get others' impressions* on whether the approach
   we're taking makes sense and should be continued. If so, we can break the
   linkage to RegDate, recreate the charts in each tab, and move forward in
   this direction. And, of course, we'll have, and keep a copy of the RegDate
   sheet for posterity.
   - Last, those 18 tabs also contain valuable information on things like
   sponsorship. Those data weren't collected for every conference so full
   historic tracking is still quite difficult. We would argue/propose that
   other key things like *workshops *and* sponsorship *should* have their
   own tracking sheets* and that future conference teams share their data
   to those sheets.
   - Toward that end, and as you will find on the OSGeo Wiki under our
   Lessons Learned in the Sponsors section
   <https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2017_Lessons_Learned#Sponsorship>,
   we have compiled a *Sponsor Tracking sheet
   <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o7_J3Tmq70mgsdxrfsiL0rAi1EEojaCF1HrcWmUiydw/edit#gid=0>*
   that dates back to Barcelona, 2010 and includes any sponsor that supported
   either a Global FOSS4G, or a FOSS4G North America. These data were
   assembled by reviewing the archived web-sites from past conferences and
   simply counting logos. If others are interested in helping to maintain this
   sheet, we would be pleased to modify the current "View Only" sharing
   settings with interested parties.
   - As appropriate, we have our* workshop data* and would be willing to
   work with other previous conference teams *to create a shared, workshop
   summary spreadsheet of key data*. Indeed, in our planning, uncovering
   past information on workshops was surprisingly difficult. For workshops,
   key data might include:
      - Number of workshops
      - Number of workshop attendees
      - Costs for attending workshops
      - Costs for compensating workshop instructors (whether via cash; or
      free registration)

Let us know if you have any questions; and also what you all think about
the new formatting and data.

MT

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