From bradallen137 at gmail.com Sat Apr 30 16:41:45 2011 From: bradallen137 at gmail.com (Brad Allen) Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011 09:41:45 -0500 Subject: [group-organizers] tools for volunteer conferences Message-ID: For PyTexas last year, we relied on a MoinMoin wiki for nearly everything which worked well for many things we needed to do. This year for PyTexas, I plan to continue to use the wiki, but find more suitable alternatives for particular use cases. * Registration: that was awkward for registration and didn't join easily to survey data. Jeremy Kelley and Josh Marshall built the conTroll web app during the PyCon 2011 sprints to create a more useful registration system. * To-do lists: I've found the GTD system to be useful for my own to-do lists, but haven't yet evaluated tools that support GTD for groups. Any suggestions? I'm planning to dig through some GTD resource lists (such as http://mashable.com/2009/01/29/getting-things-done/). * Event scheduling software: the wiki was somewhat tedious. PyCon scheduling used a custom web app, as well as a mobile conference scheduling app called The Conventionist (now renamed to GuideBook). Since GuideBook is now free (thanks to Jeremy Kelley for discovering that), I plan to use that. * Publicity: We'll continue with blogging, email, and twitter. However I suspect I'll need to explore creating some kind of advertisement on Facebook; several people have told me we can expand the audience that way. We'll also want to post our event date on http://techvenue.com/. * Attendee live discussion/note-taking: IRC is the old standby, and Convore was fun to use during the last PyCon. I imagine we'll do both for PyTexas this year. * Tracking sponsor relationships: This list is semi-private and shared in a Google docs spreadsheet, accessible only to our sponsor coordinators. Any thoughts on these ideas?