The workshop is closing in fast. I am revising my TODO lists to see what I need to do, what I never got done and of course I attempt to clear my mind of the mistakes I made.
- I inserted a logicLAB ad instead of the general ad for NPW in the The Perl Review we got printed - logicLAB is the sponsor of the issue, but this still bothers me I should have replaced one of the other ads - I ran out of time and panicked.
- I never got posters created for promotion on our local educational institutions DIKU and ITU and perhaps even DTU should have been on the list - again time was against me and budget
- We should have set up an official mailing list for all attendees for news, important announcements etc. we do have the nordic-workshop list, but it is primarily for organizers and then again we keep nothing secret (apart from sponsor amounts), but I do not think that regular attendees are interested in how many napkins we need or similar.
- The t-shirt print should have been done much earlier as for the Perl Review print, again time was working against me - and working with graphics is not my strong side
- I should have been more aggressive towards the sponsors and I should have followed up more on the sponsors that never called back, then again we raised a lot of funds and as it looks right now, we are covered, eventhough I am not clear on the final venue cost.
- Which brings me to, that I should have been more persistant towards the venue contact so we would have had these things cleared first, currently we have a big X in the budget, which will probably eat our surplus, crap.
- We got a marvellous hotel discount, something I have never done before, however they took the promotion code 'logicLAB' because I ordered some hotel rooms via a sponsors, should have been npw2007 or something.
- I did not do a particularly good job of promoting this and the promoting which was done was done way to late so - again a mailing list should have been set up for communicating with attendees
There are probably more stuff I have forgotten and I mean really forgotten, but that is the way it goes apparently.
I am thinking much about whether we should apply for hosting the YAPC::Europe 2008 and right now I guess it could be done. But I am scared of the workload, I am self-employed and I have two kids and a wife. I have a hard time balancing all of this NPW takes focus from work and work take time away from my family and I want to do everything. I think I succeeded somewhat in delegating a lot of work compared to the previous workshops we organized in Copenhagen, but still I would really really like for more Perl Mongers out of cph.pm to chip in, we are still only a handfull of people doing all the work and a lot of the tasks can be done out of office hours.
We are one talk short so I will prepare a talk on the CPAN module Workflow of which I am the current maintainer.
However I am looking very much forward to the weekend and the workshop even though I will not be attending fulltime.
Re: YAPC::Europe 2008
domm on 2007-04-24T10:36:51
With enought preparation and enough people working on it, a YAPC is doable even if you have kids and a job (I've got both...) - but you maybe want to ask me again the week before YAPC::Europe 2007...
Anyway, thanks to YEF and the previous organisers, there's lot of stuff already settled. You can use ACT for the website, registration etc (and you already know how it works from NPW). The Birmingham guys sent us some very helpfull documents, which we amended and will definitly hand over to next years orgas. So there's lots of knowledge around, and it should be easy to tap.
IMO the most important thing for an easy to organise YAPC (or a workhshop) is a free/cheap venue. If you have this settled, there is no stress to get sponsors, because you should be able to pay all the needed things (catering etc) from the attendees payments. And less stress means more time for your family and/or job!
So discuss it with fellow Nordic Perl Hackers, and submit a venue proposal!
