BookRaffle
Lessons Learned
If you have too much stuff to give away, let winners select more than one prize.
It's useful to break up the giveaways into groups of three. This takes about 5-7 minutes, and still leaves time for other announcements at the podium.
At least two people should handle the raffle so that one person can call the names and the other person can handle prize distribution. Also, someone needs to note the names of the winners so they can be removed from the next raffle.
Timing is critical. Giveaways immediately after lunch go faster because most attendees come back to the room for the next session. Slots after a poster session or between lightning talks and breakout sessions are much slower, as many people choose to take a break and not return to the room. It is therefore necessary to call lots of names before selecting someone present in the room. Giveaways on the final day are avoided since attendance is lower that day.
For fun, have a sound tech add a drum roll.
In 2020, several publishers gave an ebook license or discount code for all attendees. It might be better to request more of those kinds of rewards from publishers and do fewer individuals prizes.
Book Raffle
It would be nice to hit up some publishers for books to raffle off at the conference. If you've got ideas add them below under the name of the publisher. Most tech publishers have user group coordinators that are more than happy to make donations available.
Addison-Wesley
APress
Manning
Morgan & Claypool Publishers
- Reading and Writing the Electronic Book
- Publishing Cultural Heritage on the Semantic Web (maybe not out yet)
- Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space
- Human Computation
- Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction
- Maybe other books from the Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services
- ...
Morgan Kaufmann
No Starch Press
O'Reilly
- ...
Oxygen XML
- Licenses
Packt Publishing
- ...
Pragmatic Programmers
- Desktop GIS: Mapping the Planet with Open Source Tools
- Learn to Program
- Practices of an Agile Developer
- Pragmatic Ajax
- Pragmatic Version Control Using Git
- Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion
- Programming Erlang
- Programming Ruby
- Programming Scala
- The Pragmatic Programmer
- Practices of an Agile Developer