Planning a big event sure is lots of work. As some of you may know, I'm involved with planning COSSFEST 2009. This is a technology conference exploring the use of Open Source software in business environments, and the communities that stem from these projects. While I have plenty of experience setting up (and giving) presentations for CLUG, COSSFEST is radically different.
CLUG does a monthly meeting lasting a couple of hours and usually only has a single presentation. Under that criteria, setup is simple - book a room, book the speaker, let people know it's going on.
COSSFEST on the other hand is more than that. Planning any event comes down to getting the place to do the event, getting the content in place for the event, and then advertising the event. For COSSFEST this means multiple speaking rooms, with a planned scale of 400+ people. Splitting that number we need rooms to handle 200 people each. This narrows down where you can do such an event. Now assume an hour presentation for each speaker over two rooms, and you are looking at a need of 10+ presenters. Make it a two day event to accommodate the different audience targets (business crowd and technology enthusiasts), and you have just doubled the need for both the rooms AND the number of speakers.
Hmm.. big task. Ok, let's apply some programming principles here - break it down into manageable sizes. First we need a facility to hold the event at. And that dictates the date. This year, we chose to hold COSSFEST at the Coast Plaza Hotel for the facilities, parking, costs, and accessibility via city transit. The hotel staff has been great and have been on the ball in terms of helping us get things in place.
One issue that came out of dealing with the hotel though was the need for a proper organization for the event, rather than having the hotel deal with individuals. So we put together a non-profit company for this purpose, and immediately saw other benefits and potentials. So now we have the Calgary Open Source Systems Foundation and I have somehow fallen into the President's position. As a proper organization we have bylaws and regular elections, so I know I will not be Prez forever.
Next we needed speakers. Us planners have a number of contacts in the city, but we wanted to bring in some "celebrity" speakers as well. We only have a few contacts in this area, though that circle is gradually growing. This year we'll see Aaron Seigo of KDE, Renderman (aka Brad Haines) who is a well known wireless security expert, and Bruce Byfield a well known and prolific technology journalist. We also ended up reaching out to some speakers who I do not know, but they have some impressive credentials and will be covering numerous topics. And our local contacts fill in the remaining slots. These local contacts are impressive folks in their own rights and have an amazing depth of knowledge and breadth of skills.
With a little juggling to meet each speaker's needs we now have a schedule.
Then comes sponsors. We have some costs. Sponsorship helps cover those costs. We have a few sponsors who have been involved since 2006 when we did the first event. We have some new sponsors this year which brings more potentials down the road. Things are looking good in this sense. Of course, more sponsors are always desired, and we do try to give our sponsors good advertising and promotion in return for their help.
Now comes the not so easy part - marketing. It turns out that while some of us own our own businesses, none of us really do much marketing. I mean marketing in terms of public relations, and getting word out that you exist. Not marketing in terms of securing sales. So, we tackle this with the usual tricks each of us have - website, cross linking from our own sites, posters, business cards, etc. We've had some success here, enough to make it all worthwhile. But we all feel something is missing and we need to look at this area more for next year.
Then comes the fun part, for me at least. Applying what I know to help pull off the event. This includes making use of Inkscape to come up with graphics to writing code for a side project to help eliminate delays when handing out door prizes. The graphics side is enjoyable even though I don't consider myself an "artist" per se. I've come to learn Inkscape rather well - it is amazingly powerful for such a simple interface. It has been a great help for creating the printed materials, t-shirts, and even the web graphics.
Our side project consists of Simon (one of the planners) creating a system to read 2D bar codes with a webcam and a web page (my side of the work) that collects the scanned data and feeds it into a database. If we put a unique bar code onto the event badges each attendee receives, we can now easily track when a badge enters a room. We can then pick a random badge from the pool of badges currently in the room. So we end up with a reasonable degree of certainty that when we select a badge for a door prize, that badge/person is in fact in the room. This avoids the serious problem we've seen in the past of doing something like "Bob! you win, come on down... Bob? Bob? Bob?.... Bob?". AND we get to do it in a fun, techy way while minimizing inconvenience to our guests, AND we get to contribute this block of code to the Open Source community.
The bulk of the work is done. COSSFEST 2009 is just a few days away. The only thing I really have left is to put the final polish on my presentation (yep, I'm speaking too!), and finish up some paperwork for the sponsors and volunteers. Oh, and write some more code. Oh, and pick up the hardware we'll need. Oh, and make sure the signs are in place. And... sighs... I don't think I have time to update my blog or sleep.
Alrighty then, back to the grindstone.