[OSGeo-Conf] Boston Cookbook Contributions & Lessons Learned

[Cameron Shorter]

Hi Michael,

Sorry for the delayed response. You have done some really good work 
cleaning up these metrics. I haven't got any suggestions of improvement 
to note. The old metrics page has been showing its age and you have made 
it easier to maintain long term. Well done!

I have to confess that I haven't been giving the metrics page the love 
it deserves over the last few years, and with a my change of job that is 
not likely to change. So it is great to see you pick up the ball and 
take these metrics to the next level.

I think that your metrics should become the point of truth from now on, 
and move the original one I started into a archive status. I'd be 
interested to hear your thoughts on how we do this. Maybe:

1. Trawl the web for references to the old metrics page and update to 
point at your new page?

2. Or, keep the URL of the old page, move your content into the old URL, 
and copy out the old content into an archived page.

Warm regards, Cameron


On 22/1/18 4:53 am, Michael Terner wrote:
> 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:
>       o *Lausanne*, not reporting on Early Bird
>       o *Nottingham *and *Portland*, not reporting on "host country"
>         or "international"
>       o *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.
>       o 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:
>       o *Total* registrations
>       o *Early bird *registrations
>       o *Host country* registrations
>       o *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:
>       o Number of workshops
>       o Number of workshop attendees
>       o Costs for attending workshops
>       o 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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-- 
Cameron Shorter
Technology Demystifier, Learnosity
Open Technologies Consultant

M +61 (0) 419 142 254

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