How To Plan A Code4LibCon

• Apply to be a host

- Identify your venues for both the conference and the hotel (if different). This is critical, as you'll want to get some cost estimates from each. When we hosted in Corvallis, the campus provided the conference space at a low cost, and this made running the conference much more affordable. When we hosted the conference in Portland, and held everything in a single hotel, we had to acquire 2x the amount of sponsorship than what appears to be normal.

- Speaking of sponsorship, I believe we average around 20k per year in sponsorships to help run the conference and keep the registration low. Factor this into your budget.

- Also, when you get cost estimates, don't forget to include food costs.

- WIRELESS: Always an issue it seems. If you are proposing to host the conference on a campus, check with your IT folks about any additional costs. If you are looking at a hotel or other venue, make sure you talk to them about bandwidth and costs. IMHO, the two things that really need to be addressed each year are connectivity and food - everything else generally manages itself in terms of facilities.

- See if your institution has a conference planning services group or something similar - if it does, then I highly recommend using them. They'll handle registration, budgeting, contracts, etc, and really make life easy.

- Regarding conference hotel, you'll want to make sure that there are blocks of rooms available - not usually too bad an issue in larger towns, but in some college or smaller towns, hotel rooms may be limited.

- Remember, your institution is taking the risk of covering any costs not covered by registrations and sponsorships. To this point, I believe the conference has always ended up in the black, but there is always a chance it won't in a given year. Drafting a rough budget before submitting a proposal is critical.

• Get approved by the community
• Find a hotel, negotiate and sign a contract with them
• Invite the community to help with
• Have a timeline

• Past calls for host sites: 2010 -
• Code4Lib listserv
• Code4LibCon listserv
• Sponsorship info (public)
• Logos

• Code4LibCon-hostsite listserv
• Budgets from previous years
• Sponsorship info (private)

Keynotes

1. Contact speakers in advance to ask if they need anything, arrange airport pickup, etc

Freenode IRC connection

Historically, conference attendees have had trouble maintaining persistent connections to the #code4lib IRC channel. We'd always assumed we were overwhelming the conference facility's Internet connection, but we were actually running into Freenode's IP-based connection limits. Freenode is supportive of the IRC-as-backchannel model, however, and they're happy to work with organizers to raise the connection limit.

Contact the conference facility in advance and see if you can find out what your public IP address range will be during the conference. (If it starts with 10.*, 192.168.*, or 172.16.*, ask again -- those are "private" IP ranges used for connection sharing.)

Once you have the IP address or range, send an email to ilines@freenode.net containing a request to raise the connection limit. Include conference info, IP range(s), and the expected number of connections. For example:

To: ilines@freenode.net

Hello,

I'm helping plan the code4lib 2010 conference, taking place in Asheville, NC next week. 
Since our backchannel runs through #code4lib on Freenode, we're trying to plan ahead 
to avoid running up against the connection limit. Would it be possible to raise the cap 
for us during the conference? Details follow.

Conference: code4lib 2010 < http://code4lib.org/conference/2010/ >
Dates: February 22-26, 2010
Attendees: 250
Location: Renaissance Asheville Hotel, Asheville, NC
IP Ranges: 12.21.216.106 and the entire 12.21.217.0/24 block

We encourage in-channel participation, so we expect a high percentage of attendees to 
be connected at once. We'll also have two or three channel bots connected from the 
conference for the lobby monitors.

Please let me know if you need any further information, and thanks very much for 
your help!

Michael

I received an automated reply with a ticket number almost instantly, but didn't hear back after that. I sent a quick followup early on the morning of the 22nd, and received a response (from a human) letting me know that it had been taken care of.

Additional support is available from the helpful volunteer Freenode staff in the #freenode channel.

Keynotes

1. Water at the podium
2. Speaker gifts
3. Dinner plans

Timers

• Sit in the front of the room
• Have several people
• You may want to use an extra machine
• Here's what some of the software looks like: http://www.flickr.com/photos/schwartzray/4393891356/ (ask Ed Corrado for details)
• Dan Chudnov says the best free timer app for OSX is http://www.apimac.com/timer/

Lightning Talks

• Everybody lines up ahead of time (image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/schwartzray/4393881044/ )

Ask Anything

• Need mics for people to line up at (image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/schwartzray/4393838640/ )

Book Raffle

• (image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/schwartzray/4393619144/ with people for context: http://www.flickr.com/photos/schwartzray/4393623802/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/schwartzray/4384550127/ ), better if there's a table

Flipcharts

Flipcharts can be useful, but it's important to decide what to put on the wiki/website and what to put on a flipchart: images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/schwartzray/4392998501/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/47860563@N05/4388430079/

• See C4L2010planning for an example