Below is the rough outline of what was discussed during the Twin Cites Drupal Camp planning committee wrap up phone call on June 13th, 2012. We are putting this up as a wiki for two reasons. 1) so that we as transparent as possible and 2) so others may become interested in helping out with planning for next years camp.
Attendees
- Keri
- Dan
- Drew
- Matt
- Ray
- Jeremiah
Recap
- (Drew) reimbursing Earl Miles for Views in Core sprint at camp , $500 batted around. Still think it's a good idea.
-
- - Group says "Yes"
- Contact Earl (Drew will do)
Talking about this (plz claim one of these by putting your name after it)-
- Twitter:
- Drupal Planet post:
- Post on gdo/twin-cities (maybe along with larger recap):
- Post on tcdrupal website:
Dates
- Confusing that we had two days of camp - but four days of camp
- Friday / Saturday were publicized. Thursday, Sunday were (sorta) absent from communications
- Set our dates to include training and sprints
- Venue
- Offer maps to evening events
- printed maps? also an map for the inside of the building and better direct people to the rooms
- Coder lounge was too distant - underused
- When another conference is happening - who gets to eat our snacks...
- volunteers had to be hawkish - not fun for volunteers
- Have signage on food
Food
- Returned 5 cases of pop, yogurt
- is a spreadsheet w/ all info (Keri has it)
- People told Keri how much they loved having healthy food :)
- Bakers Wife doughnuts were popular
- People drank coffee heavily until around 1PM; very little thereafter
- It would be nice to change the "menu" each day. Difficult to do this without a kitchen or refridgeration options
- Getting ice and coolers shuffled around was painful.
Attendance
- Chad asked Deb to do head counts - Chad may have that info
- Were we happy with the numbers? Didn't it seem like a deadzone on Saturday?
- Saturday was beautiful weather - maybe contributed to drop in attendance
- Numbers on individual sessions, tracking what drew the biggest numbers?
- Length of camp? Perfect? 4 days long, from training to sprint day. Could it be 3 days?
- Let's ask this of attendees (next year?)
- Jer: I like 2 days of sessions, and I do like the stuff we're doing pre-camp and post camp.
Sessions
- Have a list of sessions we "want" to cover areas we know people will want and recruit people to present the content.
- Better cover both beginning topics and advanced topics
- Set the session submission deadline much earlier and define the session schedule at least a month ahead of time
- We were low on sessions - had to ask for more at the end - Emma Jane and Joe S and Jen L all stepped up and filled in empty spots as we were finalizing schedule
- Some sessions (esp on Saturday) had very low numbers (anectdote from Dan)
Registration
- have a computer and printer at registration
- print wi-fi code on back of badges
- Designate a point person for registration who will be there both days to oversee volunteers during this
- Will need training to know how to answer questions
- List of phone nums to call
- Write up a registration process for to handle people who show up later in the day
- Plan for handling money (cash, checks) from onsite registration
- Printing up schedules not necessary?
- Escalate the oversight of Registration to top-priority role for someone (like signs, sponsors, etc.)
- Maybe hire someone to be at desk (temp, teenage relative?)
Food
- Having lunch away from camp was nice, but having it at camp kept people around, and talking. Felt like the energy left the building during the 90 minutes around lunch.
Marketing
- come up with tshirts or some other swag
- pint glasses (everyone loves beer!)
- sticker with rounded corners instead of square, which is so lame
- Make sure we ask for t-shirt size next year - just in case
- Better job promoting the camp around town, in the media, etc.
- Hire out an illustrator (e.g. Adam Turnman) to design a shirt for us
Camp Organizers
- who will be involved next year, who will lead, how can we get new peeps
- avoiding burnout
- Start talking about camp planning sooner, more publicly? (be clear about roles, responsibilities, what's involved, rewards...)
- Make sure we post meeting notes on gdo
- Post these notes (recap notes) on gdo - and make it clear people are welcome & wanted to help with next year
Website
- signup confusion - adding to cart, etc.
- occassionally clunky for users
- who's got the time? (the site we have does work)
- Archiving old site and domain, pointing to new year's site
- Moving to Drupal 7
- Work on better user experience +
- Some confusing stuff when registering
- More testing of site
- Handling users - 2011 users got a delete message in 2012
- Someone needs to OWN site. Needs to be only responsibility - it's too much to share with other things
- Top level role - delegates to others as possible
- Copying 2011 site caused problems
- Workflows -
- Users
- Ubercart dependencies had issues (because they were sponsors, or used other coupon or weren't logged in)
- Volunteering should be part of the main nav permanently
- Managing communications - needs to be owned by someone
- Contact form responses
- Delegated as needed, shared by others
- Write posts for sit
Volunteer
- Hiring out temps to work the desk at camp
- Also, hire someone to refill food table during the day
- need more people to help in the mornings with set up, unloading cars, general set up
- designate one or more people to be a head counter for sessions
- Sponsors
- Better process for reaching out to new sponsors?
- designate someone to meet/greet/direct sponsors to their tables
- Camp Feedback from webform.com - https://tcdrupal.webform.com/ -
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao4E-QJNt0IRdFZYdHNFMndUeEF...
NEXT
- Dates
- Can't do it late may as DrupalCon Portland conflicts
- NTEN?
- Maybe not so hot when things are stacked.
- How much overlap is there?
- Quarters
-
- Q1: Jan, Feb, March
- Q2: April, May, June
-
- DrupalCon NA
- Q3: July, Aug, Sep
-
- DrupalCon Europe
- Q4: Oct, Nov, Dec
-
- BadCamp
Video
- plan for recording sessions next year?
