Another OSDC is over and I'm exhausted. We did well this year. I believe registrations were about 185 when we closed them, but we got another 10 or so "walk-ins". Considering that we didn't advertise "walk-ins" (we only decided upon them late Tuesday afternoon) I think that that's pretty amazing. My job was publicity, so I can feel confident that I did it well. (For reference, previous years counts were: 153 for 2004 and 141 for 2005).
From an administrative point of view, there were a number of obvious (in retrospect) mistakes, but nothing we couldn't recover from. Examples include small things such as difficulties with printing name tags and not giving ourselves enough time to bump in.
Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. It seems that everyone was happy with the mix of talks and speakers. There were some (valid) complaints about the catering, but most people understood that we were unhappy about it too and that we did our best to fix it.
The committee members did a fantastic job in making it all happen, and I'm hoping that my colleagues get a good chance this weekend to recover. Particular thanks go to:
- Amanda Penrose for her beautiful artwork and for keeping the website up to date. Amanda also took the meeting minutes, organised and ran the tutorials, designed and arranged printing for the postcards, likewise for the t-shirts and bags, chaired rooms and did a fair bit of the registration desk management. In her free time she also helped out in the other roles as necessary.
- Richard Jones for his excellent management of proposals, papers and the proceedings. Richard worked with the speakers to keep them informed of what was going on, found replacement talks at short notice when speakers pulled out, created the programme and made it all happen. In addition Richard also provided technical assistance with the CGPublisher software, managed registrations and organised the room helpers each day as well as the lightning talks. Furthermore, Richard also helped with the publicity by reaching out to Australia's python users.
- Debbie Picket for her superb handling of all things facility. Despite all sorts of obstacles coming up with unfortunate timing, Debbie got us our conference rooms, arranged the catering, yelled at the caterers when they got things wrong, organised the registration desk helpers, procured a coffee machine so attendees had "real coffee" (or hot chocolate) and provided technical assistance in the lecture theaters. Debbie also helped with the publicity by using her university contacts.
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Zoran Radicic did a fine job as sponsorship manager. He created by far the best sponsorship materials we've ever had. Unfortunately for us, he had to head overseas for the middle of the year and didn't end up with as good an internet connection as he'd hoped. Nevertheless, on his return he worked hard to put it all to rights. For someone who is both new to the area of sponsorship and conference management, I think he did well. Zoran spent most of the conference helping out on the registration desk and running small errands.
- Ben Balbo did a great job as treasurer and was always prompt to answer questions regarding budget or whether registrants had paid. He helped with publicity by contacting the Australian and international PHP communities. Unfortunately Ben did his work and then headed overseas in November thus missing the conference.
- Scott Penrose was the committee president. He has presided over yet another (his third) fantastic conference. This year Scott managed all the keynotes (and even found time to contribute one). He also arranged the monthly meetings, moderated the committee mailing list, managed the mail and web servers, kept an eye on tasks progress, helped with sponsorship while Zoran was overseas, co-managed the bank account with Ben, took on many of the small tasks (like contact person X about Y), purchased most of the sundries, collected and transported all of the materials, created and printed the signs, name badges and feedback forms. Scott also helped the publicity by sending through messages to the OSDC announce list, OSDClub announce list, LUV programmers' SIG and the Perl groups list. During the conference Scott was in all places at once doing all things which needed it.
It was great to work with such a group of talented and dedicated professionals.
What a group!
mr_bean on 2006-12-10T07:29:16
It sounds like you didn't have to do anything.
Re:What a group!
jarich on 2006-12-10T12:22:57
*laugh* There were still a few tasks left for me. But I certainly didn't have to work too hard!
Most of my jobs centered around creating and distributing content. So I helped create the sponsorship document, wrote the FAQ, some other website text, and announcements for the CFP, registrations and sponsorships. Then I sent the content off to where it had to go (including to a list of about 20 users' groups). I also fielded a few enquiries from time to time, but nothing that stressed me too much.
It was definately a great group though.
