[Inpycon] Minutes & Action items of the Volunteer meetup.

[Haris Ibrahim K. V.]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

About 15 of the volunteers met at the Red Hat office today to sort out
the volunteer tasks and action items. After having an excellent lunch,
thanks to Rejy for getting us the Red Hat space and organizing it,
here is a list of what all were discussed and what all needs to be
done.

1. Leave permission for volunteers from Companies - Vijay.

Those among the volunteers who require an official mail from PyCon to
apply for leave, please contact Vijay and he should be able to provide
you with one.

2. Choose about 8 or so of the volunteers who are going to be there
full time and switch between them to go around the venue and keep an
eye on proceedings.

3. Volunteer Coordinator - Chandan Kumar.

 - There will be 3 volunteers for each session
 - 1 session means from morning till noon or from noon till evening.
 - Hence, there will be two parallel sessions at any given time.
 - Hence, there will be 6 volunteers active for sessions at any point in time.
 - The 3 volunteers will consist of 3 session runners and 1 session chair.
 - The roles and responsibilities of these volunteers shall be
explained by Chandan.

4. Networking - We have 5 volunteers

Chandan will be briefing these volunteers when they have to be at the
venue and help Kingsly out with the setup.

5. Workshops

 - There should be 1 volunteer hanging around each workshop to make
sure things are fine in terms of Internet, Power, tables, chairs, etc.
 - Power backup should be given due consideration. It should be
communicated to the concerned authority on 25th itself.

6. Internet

 - Make sure sponsors and speakers (some of them especially) have
dedicated Internet.
 - Further decision required so as to finalize the placement of
routers and dedicated cables.

7. Certain volunteers have expressed interest in attending certain
talks. While Chandan will try his best to assign volunteers according
to their interests, he might not be able to completely satisfy
everyone.

8. Speaker Bio & Brief talk description - Chandan

The session chair should introduce the speaker and what his talk is
going to be. For this, each session will have a printout with the list
of speakers, their bio and a brief description of their talk. Session
chairs should use this for the introduction.

9. Making sure speaker is there on time - Session chairs.

 - The session chairs are responsible for making sure the next speaker
is there on time for his talk. Once the volunteer assignments are
done, the session chairs will be introduced personally to the speakers
so that things can be coordinated between them.
 - The registration desk will have a list of speakers for that day.
This will indicate which all speakers for that day have reached the
venue.

10. Testing food quality.

 - Volunteers (foodies who know their business) to be assigned in
order to test the quality. Vijay seems to be keen on leading this
team. ;)

11. Registration - Haris & Sayan.

 - QR codes.

 Each participant will have a badge with a QR code and name on it. The
QR code will contain his name & DoAttend order id.

 The QR code is only for facilitating the sharing of contact
information with sponsors. The sponsors will have a dedicated
tablet/phone with the QR code app Arindam developed specially for
PyCon India (Thanks a lot Arindam!). The app will scan the QR code and
store the data in a CSV file within the device. This will be shared
with us after the conference and we will map it to the corresponding
participant's contact details and share it back with the sponsors.

 - Name + QR code sticker.

 We currently have the API to get all the QR codes generated. However,
that would mean printing out just the QR codes as stickers. If we can
get the name and QR code as one sticker, then we can just stick it
onto the badge and that will be that.

 Bibhas and Sayan to coordinate and see how this can be done.

 - Badge printing - Haris & Sayan.

 - All badges will be prepared before the day of the conference and
sorted in alphabetical order based on the participant's first name.

 - The registration desk will have volunteers with a laptop and excel
sheet containing the DoAttend order ID + the participant name. They
just mark the row as and when the participant shows up and direct them
for badge collection.

 - Badges will be spread out on 4 or 5 tables (needs more thought
regarding the size of the table) and each table will be for certain
alphabets. The participants collect their badges from there.

 - Badges have to be printed with two different colors. The standard
white background one for the conference. A different color exclusively
for workshop attendees.

 - Printing schedule behind the badge - Bibhas/Uncommon.

12. Conference schedule on Lanyrd.com - Krace

13. Collecting feedback

 - The way we have collected feedback until now is to distribute
feedback forms at the end of each day. Even though people fill it out,
the amount of time and effort that goes into post-processing it is
sinful. Also, from previous PyCons, the clarity of feedback of certain
talks seems to be not too well indicated in these forms since they are
filled at the end of the day.

 - Is there anyway to get the participants to give feedback for each
session? Is there a way that we can reduce the post-processing time? A
few suggestions were put forward.

 a) Using funnel: Clear up the current votes & comments in funnel. Let
participants vote and comment there for the talks.
   - The problem is that participants cannot leave anonymous comments.
No one wants their name to be seen on screen why they say a talk
sucks.

 b) Google doc: Use funnel for votes and a google doc for comments if
the participants want to leave any.

 c) Or do we just have to accept that more people tend to be
comfortable filling offline feedback forms than going online to do it?

 d) Can we build an app which is on a tablet outside the audi having a
+1 -1 button as well as a space for comments for each session?

 e) Does the Lanyard schedule thing have an option of collecting feedback?

 14. Maybe not for this year, but whether to have a coding sprint or
not as a part of the conference.

 15. Giving PSSI publicity for people to know what more the PSSI is
capable of in terms of  promoting Python than just being the official
financial body of running PyCon India. This will be discussed on
another thread as soon as Krace starts one.

Well, that sort of sums it up. Phew.

Chandan will soon share the task list and the volunteers assigned to
each task on this mailing list.

It was nice meeting everyone. :) There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm
around first timers as well as old timers this time.

On 25th, all the volunteers would be meeting at the Nimhans convention
centre around 5:30PM for ground work as well as to get things sorted
out.

Cheers everyone!

-- 
Haris Ibrahim K. V.
http://sosaysharis.wordpress.com
@harisibrahimkv