On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 12:49 PM, Jos Poortvliet
On Thursday 07 February 2013 13:06:55 Stella Rouzi wrote:
On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 12:08 PM, Jos Poortvliet
wrote: On Wednesday, February 06, 2013 21:59:48 Robert Schweikert wrote:
Hi all,
Shortly after we got the program committee for oSC13 going a couple of months ago Matt started to work on a new web application for registration and proposal submission.
No one was really happy with Indico and other projects appeared not well maintained or would have required major surgery to get the look and feel as well as functionality we were striving for.
The hard work Matt has put into the project is starting to pay off and I am honored to be able to announce the beta testing period of OSEM. OSEM is up and running at https://conference.opensuse.org/osem , please check out the application and take it for a spin.
Note, that any data you enter will be cleared once we go live with the application. The goal is to open registration and proposal submission no later than next week Wednesday. Thus, please test the application and report bugs/issues directly to Matt at matt@incoherent.de
If the calendar selection for the arrival date is not working for you, that is a known issue.
For those that have time, knowledge and interest, you can submit patches to: https://github.com/mbarringer/osem
Some feedback: * Make registering central instead of login. Move login to a corner or something...
I am not sure I understand what you mean but hopefully Matt does.
* Public name - do you mean "nick name"? If so, please just name it that :D Public Name is supposed to be how the person's info is show to the world, not necessarily the actual first/last name.
Also it would make sense to show how the person's info will be shown on the badge, for example I would like my badge to say: Stella Rouzi differentreality (Here maybe affiliation or "Attendee" or "Oraganizer" etc)
Other than that, I guess we should add a nickname box too.
* where is all the other information? Is that yet discussed? We need to have that ready before we let people register... Kostas, Stella and other local people need to tell us some of these (food for example - do we provide that? Then people need to sign up. etc). ** food preference
We still have not decided on the food options, but we have a couple.
There is already a drop down list for that in the registration page, and an input box. INMHO maybe we should just use the input box and the person can write whatever food preference/restriction he/she has.
(These options are in the registration-to-event page. So that the choices are conference-specific. I am clarifying this because I think you only saw the sign-up fields?)
** joining party or not
Isn't that the "social events"? Even though I kind of take this for granted, that attendees will join us in the partys/social events and if they come with their partner, their partner will probably join too.
So, you're going to plan a party where there will be between 50 and 500 people? Good luck finding a location that will give you an estimate of the costs.
Having no idea how many people will come makes it really hard to plan things. Your budget depends on it too, but also things like how much stuff you have at the registration table (bags with goodies and such). At oSC we had hundreds of people register the last week - and bags had to be printed at latest 2 weeks before, we didn't have enough geeko's etcetera. If you want to prevent being stuck with a waste of 200 conference bags+content too many you can't over-stock so you need people to register in time.
I am sorry if people got the wrong idea about this. Noone ever said or implied that we don't want to know in advance how many people will be attending osc13. It's one of the very obviously necessary things we need and one of the main reasons we have registration after all, is it not? In fact, I recently noticed that even though from admin panel we are able to see who is registered, we don't have a count (not an automatic one at least) and I have already added that task on trello. What I said in my previous email is that this year, that we won't have so many conferences in one like osc12, it will be more like an 'us' conference, sth like Nuremberg is what I have in mind. And our goal is to keep people together and do stuff together and get things done all together. So what I really meant is that probably all, or really most, of attendees will also attend all our social events as well. However we already have one check box asking about that (that's in the registration page and reads "Attending Social Events"). The checkbox is in fact pre-selected, maybe we don't want that. Obviously there are some strong disagreements with my point of view about attendance in social events in osc13 and the need to add special boxes for every social event is requested.
I really recommend to close registration 2 weeks in advance and make very clear that yes, you can register after that, but that means NO food, NO bag and NO party. We'll be a little nicer on the spot but that's what we should communicate.
That's reasonable I believe. So I'll add it as a task "Close Registration" in the Program board at 4 July (?), so that we keep in mind :)
Really, if people can't even be bothered to register, why would WE bother doing so much work for them?
So we will count registered attendees + partners (there is a check box for that "attending with partner").
** what days will you be there
Yes, makes sense to have sth like that to check if all people are interested in attending all days.
Very useful to know for the opening party - again, will there be 30 or 300 people?
As I wrote before, we already have a box asking about arrival and departure date. We could extract that information from there already too. But if I understand correctly, your point is that we add 2-3 different checkboxes according to the number of specific social events that we will have. Is that right?
** do you use conference hotel or not
that's the affiliated lodging. Again in registration form (not sign up).
ok....
** join mailing list or not
That's for the visitors ML right? Like the option we had last year?
Yes. I understand we legally have to ask them, at least in some countries you have to ask this. So do so.
Say something like "we very strongly urge you to register for the visitors mailing list" or so. I advocated last year to have two mailing lists: one for announcements (mandatory sign-up) and one for visitors, but I believe this was considered 'too complicated' so I send mails to individual people via a (very complicated) setup in a special mail client on my laptop. I'd like to suggest having two ml's again...
Task added (card is named Registration Page additions) for a checkbox asking if people want to get subscribed to conference ML. Feel free to take a look at the relevant task in case you want to propose alternative phrasing for the sub-tasks or sth. Also about those who do not want to be subscribed in the ML, can't we just extract their email addresses from the registrations and bcc them in a new email? I can only assume this was what you were doing last year, but probably I am missing the key point there that made things so difficult. For the future, would we need to add an option in admin panel where you can put the text of the email and by hitting send button, for this text to be sent via email to all people registered to this conference (regardless of ML or not)?
** etc etc
Looks good, btw, I like the style.
But if these other things we need in registration are not yet discussed we should delay at least until next week Wednesday.
Any other ideas? :)
Pfff, I would have a look at what we had last year if that is still up. This is really worth some thinking. We asked last year why people where coming (what event are you for - LD, SL, oSC, Gentoo). Not relevant now, I think.
We could ask country of origin, but that's mostly because I'm curious about that. (where are you from? Greece, Germany, blablabla) I'd also love to hear if they're openSUSE people, users, contributors, or from other distro's and projects by the way ;-)
Yes I had a bunch of such statistic things I would like to ask people, affiliation included. In the end they seemed to be too statistic and would be probably better served in a survey, at least that's the conclusion we came at within the Program Committee. BTW, Alberto Planas is already working on the survey task, going through past surveys and coming up with osc13 survey. So we can put all those statistic thingies in there, I put a comment in the task already.
But you really need to sit down and think about the things you're going to organize for the visitors: - how do we do lunch? If we organize something, we MUST know how many people will be there, so we have to ask that. - how do we do dinner? same! - be sure to ask about BOTH parties (registration party and the 'big' party)
There is already a card for the Food task on trello. Feel free to add your ideas about it. We haven't picked that up yet, as there are more pressing issued to be dealt with on the local side, but our options are pretty much the following (I am pretty sure Kostas has mentioned these things somewhere, probably January's conf irc meeting): 1. Have cafeteria working through conference (to offer coffee/soft drinks and probably some snacks/sandwiches). This is to be paid by attendees obviously. 2. Have catering (paid by conference) to cover coffee/soft drinks, maybe cake/biscuits, cold sandwiches. 3. Have catering (paid by conference) to offer hot meals for lunch (this will be quite expensive though and if I had to choose I would go for the following option). But we will get a quote from catering company anyway. 4. Arrange for barbecue after conference (as in dinner I guess, can be paid by conference, or we can do Jos system of Nuremberg, which is have everybody pay 5 euro and eat whatever they want). It would be nice to have this one day - I estimate this to cost around 3000 euro (having plenty of food available for everybody). On a sidenote: at least once people have to try greek giros for dinner. So that's one dinner off, one day we could do the barbecue which I think is awesome, one day we have the party (not sure what will happen in terms of food there yet). One day we can easily let people just explore greek cuisine and just make suggestions of places and food they should try and smaller groups can navigate around the city and try things.
- ask for disabilities and such we have to make provisions for (don't know how it is in Greece but in many countries the conference is responsible for providing facilities for disabled people. In the US, we'd have to get sign language people for deaf people, for example. That is EXTREMELY expensive so you need to know this).
Ok, that's important. First of all, the venue has provisions for access to people in a wheelchair (there is a special ramp to enter the venue and elevator for the 1rst floor, everything else is flat - ok except for the amfitheater, but that's obvious) and also special toilet as well. Now I am pretty sure there is no law making us have sign language interpreters but if needed I think it would be sth awesome to have. It is indeed quite expensive, however, I have recently learned that they are obliged by law, like lawyers, to do pro-bono work too. In addition to that, we need to get sign language for english - not greek (because I only have contacts, from past communication I had with them, for the greek association of deaf people and I am not sure they can do the english thing). How would you like to approach this? If we openly ask in registration if there is need for sign language, then it's like we are saying we will have it, I guess. On the other hand, how can we even know if we need to have it. And we might in fact find someone to do this pro-bono - obviously not for the entire conference but for some specific presentations. Also this is something we can add post-conference to our videos. Besides deaf people cannot really attend many talks, since it is very tiring to watch the sign language for so long. But if we add on a video, they can watch the video anytime they want later on. In any case, how should we ask this politely in the registration page? "Do you have any special needs (using a wheelchair, ... ) ?"
I'm sure there is more, just not things I can think off from here...
/J
/Jos
With this, let the testing begin.
Matt, thanks for your hard work it is much appreciated.
Later, Robert -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-conference+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-conference+owner@opensuse.org