Ideas on improving G.D.O. as a platform for arranging Drupal Camps

In the midst of organizing NYC's drupal camp, I thought I should start making some notes on the challenges I've found in using G.D.O. as a platform for arranging the event. In the past we've used barcamp.org and had long soul-searching discussions about the possibility of using an external website, but for the last couple of camps we've kept it at G.D.O.

The largest challenge was managing signups. It's possible to set a numeric limit on attendees, which causes signups to close when the limit is reached. At this point I created a new event to act as a waiting list.

The first problem was that if someone cancelled their signup to the main event (which we encouraged people to do so that people on the waiting list could come) this automatically set the signups for the event to be open again. At this point anyone could sign up to the event.

This is where the second problem kicked in - there's no way for the creator of an event to remove someone who's signed up. This was a problem both on the main event (if someone sneaked in a signup, preventing me from moving someone over from the waiting list). This was also a problem on the waiting list (our waiting list now has about 80 people, even though I've added the first 40 to the event list).

This is just an initial brain dump - litwol encouraged me to do this so that I'd have something to come back to after the event when I have more time. I'll add some links and further detail then.

I'd love other people's experiences and thoughts here. We're planning to put up a survey on the NYC Group during/after the camp to gather further feedback.

[Peter]
I'll add my feedback as the person chasing people for their real name. The inability to provide any way to collect additional information at time of signup and make it required led to having to chase people for their name. Mails go to spam folders sometimes, sometimes people are away, sometimes they signed up with an email account they don't use very frequently, etc. Bottom line, PITA.
Even something as simple as three generic text fields that the person creating the sign up could...
+ put a label on
+ make required
...would have allow us to force the fill in of two fields which we could have named "first name" and "last name". Problem solved, and 5 hours of my life back ;)
[/Peter]