I know this is somewhat belated, but I got busy. I'm always busy, but this was the "every-one wants training now or in January, and all my projects are due now or in a week and it's almost Christmas and I've neglected the business for a few months ('cause of OSDC)!" kind of busy.
So anyway... the conference.
Sunday 28th November was spent at Scott and Amanda's packing bags. Our 1 inch high proceedings (we succeeded in having *all* (bar 3 keynote) papers included), flyers from sponsors, squishy balls, pens, postcards all had to fit in. The bags looked great. Amanda did a great job with the bags and t-shirts and as we got good calico bags, I'll be using mine at the supermarket for a while to come.
Monday and some of Tuesday was filled with all the stuff needed to allow the business to coast along for another few days on its own. The biggest conference thing I did on Monday was the hard task of allocating lecture theaters to the talks. I think I did a reasonably good job.
Tuesday evening/night (30th November) we gathered at Monash University in Caulfield and begun setup. Arrows and posters and information went up, stuff got sorted into lecture theaters, desks and chairs in the smaller room were reorganised.
After getting home Paul and I stayed up late with last minute tasks such as printing enough timetables out to hang up (with room allocations clearly marked), and creating extra signs we'd discovered we needed. Paul also had to finish his slides for the Wednesday afternoon.
Wednesday morning came along with not enough sleep. Somehow along the way we'd made the silly suggestion that registration would open at 7:30 am, so we all had to be at Monash (on the other side of the city from some of us) at 6:30. People turned up at 7:30am too!
We had a few minor problems getting registration and catering setup due to the Monash staff not wanting to be awake at 7:30am either, but these were quickly overcome.
Amanda's suggestion that "helpers" (including committee members) have different coloured sleeves on their shirts worked really well. The pre-conference announcements all contained information about this and thus when people arrived they knew how to recognise us. No wandering around wondering who they could ask for directions.
Wednesday went incredibly smoothly. There were occasional problems with machines and it would seem that our careful organisation of room helpers occasionally failed in the PHP stream, but nothing major.
Wednesday night dinner. Note for next year: get people to RSVP for the dinner. We had something like 170 people register for the conference (free dinner ticket included) and maybe an additional 10-15 extra dinner tickets purchased. Thus we organised dinner for 185 (or whatever it was). We ended up with a couple of empty tables though, because not everyone was able to make it to dinner. This didn't look as good as having no empty tables, and means we spent more money than necessary.
Thursday and Friday went much the same as Wednesday. Everyone was happy, our catering generally was appreciated (although not the tea or coffee - (plentiful) instant coffee and cheap tea bags). Friday's BBQ seemed especially well appreciated.
There were no disasters. No big complaints. No language wars. Noone complaining about being left out. For a first time conference, run entirely by volunteers only one of whom had helped run any kind of conference, and not on this scale, most of whom hadn't even been to a conference on this scale... it went perfectly. Yay us!
Overall
The conference committee did a great job. Everything came together even though a few things were dropped at times along the way. We managed our 60 talks from 45 speakers + 5 keynotes. We had 3 lanugages (plus some general talks) filling 3 streams over 3 days.
Most people found that there was more they wished to attend than they could fit in. The lightning talks were popular (with Damian singing 2 of his) and everyone appreciated having such a big book of proceedings.
Originally I had concerns that we wouldn't fill all the slots for lightning talks that I had left. I needed not be so worried though as the lightning talks instead threatened to run overtime!
Feedback
We got varied feedback along the way, almost entirely positive. Some of the slightly less positive feedback was:
That's about it. Which means that there wasn't anything too serious.
It should be a great conference next year!
