2014 Lessons Learned

Code4Lib 2014 Conference Planning -- Lessons Learned

Venue planning and negotiation

A conference services planning organization, like CONCENTRA, has significant experience in contract details that volunteer planners would unlikely have.
Venue negotiation takes a significant amount of time. Total of nearly four (5) months of visits, informational calls, and negotiations.
Hotel block negotiations are valuable, especially in the fine print of cancellation clauses, re-selling of unsold rooms, penalties of underselling, and scheduled kickbacks at certain increments.

Registration

The venue of C4L2014 could hold 350 people
To ensure registration Presenters, Preconference Organizers, and Sponsors (Platinum, Gold, and Table), initial registration was capped at 325. This filled in approximately 48 hours.
Demand for Code4Lib 2014 was 420 based on registrations and wait list.
Local registrations by the hosting libraries (Duke, NCSU, UNC) was 41 registrations.
CONCENTRA's registration system had some technical limitations as to data input and flow, but CONCENTRA handled all processing with little assistance by volunteers.

Sponsorships

46.8% of the estimated cost of C4L2014 was provided by sponsorships. The registration cost of $165 per person covered another 46.8%. The remaining balance of C4L2013 covered the remaining 6-7%.
To keep registration costs low, it is critical the Sponsorship Committee raise a minimum of $50,000 per year.
The Code4Lib2014 Sponsorship Prospectus was a significant tool in raising money this year.

T-shirts

Getting sizing that works for everyone is hard.
There may be some design fatigue in the community.
Consider some other type of swag that doesn't involve sizing difficulties -- like re-usable coffee mugs (then attendees could use them all conference!)

Food and Beverage

Pre-Conferences

Consider a winnowing process for pre-conferences to limit them in advance of registration to the number of rooms that you have. Could either do advance voting like with talks, or say that you have x number of rooms and take the top x pre-conferences, etc. We set a 5-person registration minimum for A/V support this year, and found that all the pre-conferences met that limit (all 19 of them!) so it was not particularly useful.
Ask ahead of time to find out if pre-conf organizers are planning to open their pre-confs to non-conference attendees.

A/V

When talking to sales folks, get the REAL numbers on how many attendees will fit in a space (this means WITH A/V included, which could be 15% less or more than advertised capacities).

Organizing Volunteers

It's helpful to have a local representative on all volunteer committees to help grease the wheels.

IRC

Pay attention to the IPs you are assigned, make sure they are not PRIVATE (eg. 10,172.4-31,192.168)
Start the process to get the freenode limit raised a month before to plan for any kinks!