2014 Lessons Learned

Code4Lib 2014 Conference Planning -- Lessons Learned (and Ideas)

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.
When looking at space capacities, make sure you find out how many attendees can REALLY fit in a given space. The advertised numbers seem to be artificially inflated; ask to see a room layout graphic with A/V in place (we lost 15% of stated capacity at least to A/V).
Regardless of how strongly we communicate to the venue the pressures we'll be placing on their wifi, they almost always have trouble keeping up with our connection weight (especially hotels).
Overall, the 2014 group began working on venue negotiation and sponsorships in June 2013 for a conference taking place in March 2014.

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.
Waitlist was well-handled by a Google Form, as the registration system didn't have built-in waitlist functionality.

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 Sponsorship Prospectus was a significant tool in raising money this year.

T-shirts

Getting sizing that works for everyone is hard.
- Nevertheless, there is value in providing as diverse a selection of sizes and cuts as is practicable.
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!)
When putting out a call for any graphics, ensure that the formats submitted are usable in production.

Food and Beverage

Coffee in unlimited quantities is valued more highly than food at breaks.
Using negotiation to buy "off menu" will save money.
Make sure that you ask about dietary requirements during registration so that you can accommodate vegan / vegetarian / gluten-free, etc.

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. (Adam Constabaris [first dot last, lowercased at gmail] from the 2014 committee has a working database schema and a vague idea about incorporating voting on preconferences into the Debold-o-Tron)

Ask ahead of time to find out if pre-conf organizers are planning to open their pre-confs to non-conference attendees.
Some preconferences work a lot better with special seating arrangements, enrollment caps, etc. Some support for allowing preconf presenters to request/implement such arrangements would be worth considering.
Pre-conference organizers will likely want to know before registration opens whether or not their pre-conference is actually going to happen (relevant if there are two many proposed for the space to support).

Communicate early and often with organizers and have a plan for *having a solid plan* as early as possible (this can help some organizers provide the needed justification to their instituitions for travel support).

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).
While you're at that, find out as much as possible about the rooms at the venue, including the layout and suitability to different session styles, *and* wifi and power availability up front.

Organizing Volunteers

It's helpful to have a local representative on all volunteer committees to help grease the wheels.
A Google Calendar worked well this year in establishing all deadlines across all committees.
A regularly occurring meeting of some planning group helps keep things moving.
See and timelines for 2014 volunteer committees.

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!
Announce channel logging a month or more ahead of time

Scholarships

Keynotes

It's useful to ask nominees about their availability and willingness to attend before voting so that the community is only voting on real candidates (as opposed to wishful thinking).

Ideas

Lanyards for whether it is OK to take photographs
Add chairs to the front of the room so that lightning talk presenters can sit before they talk
Do not place a conference goer near the hospitality suite! Maybe make the hang out place a different area in the hotel or conference.
- Another possibility could be to have the room next to the hospitality room be reserved for a "suite steward" or "host" volunteer - aka a person that can look after the room in terms of cleanliness, drink/food stock, etc.
Make the podium laptop desktop background a plain color with good contrast. After every group of presenters clean off the desktop to keep it quicker and easier for presenters to find their slides.
Put someone at the front of the room who is responsible for helping presenters with the presenter computer.
Consider precombining lightning talks into a single slide deck to keep the flow going.
Consider live closed captioning software for talks and streaming
IRC channel shown on screens when no presenter is up
Consider switches at the tables
Add a Code4Lib logo to the podium
Have someone whose job it is to collect questions during a presentation and that can then ask them. Allowing for anonymous questions may lead to more folks asking.