Great Tips on Organizing a Community Technology Conference

Each year, I help to organize Northern Voice. I’ve done a lot of event planning, we’ve got XML.com veteran Lauren Wood onboard, and there are plenty of organizers, so it’s never been particularly difficult.

That said, I think a lot of people find event planning really challenging. Consider, for example, all of the drama, trauma and infrastructure that surrounds planning something pretty straightforward and often rote–a wedding.

So, I was pleased to discover this exhaustive article on organizing a community technology conference by Jon Stahl. He apparently was involved with planning a Plone (an open source content management system) conference.

It’s essential to have a good, bright LCD projector for each room — at least 2000 lumens (preferably 2500 or more). Have at least one spare too.

An ideal venue will have LOTS of electrical outlets in the floor. If it doesn’t (and Seattle Center didn’t), you will want to buy LOTS of extension cords, power strips and high-quality gaffer’s tape (not duct tape!) to tape it all down. This will take several hours, and you’ll need a crew of volunteers.

Some of it is Plone-specific, but there’s lots of valuable general advice mixed in.

Judging from the photo, it was something of a sausage fest. I do like the idea of a huge group photo like that. Maybe we should do one for Northern Voice?

We did that with my Theatre Department–the Phoenix Theatres–back at UVic, and it was always fun. There was a tradition of yelling “one Phoenix photo, ha, ha, ha!” in the voice of Count Von Count. I wonder if they still do that.

While wondering about that, I happened upon this nice piece about my classmate Charles Ross–the One Man Star Wars Jedi master–returning to UVic for a few shows.