Hi! Since the whole discussion is spread over approximately 5 different threads, I just picked one and will note down my thoughts on questions I don't remember exactly where they came from. Sorry if that confuses anyone. :P
REGISTRATION PROCESS First, I asked people to request an invitation by blogging on Labs and sending emails to a bunch of suitable mailing-lists. At the same time I also asked internally about people we should invite because they would be good to have present during discussions. Externals could fill in a very basic form I had set up on qt.nokia.com that basically filled a spreadsheet. After closing the form, I went through the list together with (mainly) Thiago and marked the ones that would get an invitation. I only had to decline a handful of people who were clearly not fulfilling the attendee criteria. Then I picked out the email addresses from said spreadsheet, combined them with the ones I had collected internally and sent out invitations via a survey tool we had available for general marketing purposes. The only upside of this was that I could send nagging reminders to the people who didn't react to the first email requesting their info for sign-up. Both steps can be easily accomplished by setting up a survey on top of a Google spreadsheet. And trust me, a spreadsheet is what you will need in the end anyway, and one that is manually maintainable. I'm sure Claudia can confirm. :P CAPTURING ATTENDEE DATA Speaking of spreadsheets, I agree with Claudia that you want to restrict access to private data such as emails etc. Some people use email addresses they are sure they will properly monitor and which are not necessarily the ones that they want to be displayed in public. Besides, you will have to capture things like passport details for visa invitations as well. This is also the reason why I can't just hand over last year's attendee list to everybody. If you think it being beneficial, I can give it to Quim but I don't really see what you would gain from that. I'd expect the relevant people to be monitoring the appropriate channels anyway. ACCOMMODATION It's difficult to reserve room blocks, especially in budget hotels. One of the reasons why I picked the Park Inn was their flexibility, however they are expensive. I don't have a good recommendation to solve this problem, maybe Claudia has after organizing the Desktop Summit last summer. SCHEDULE I asked for session proposals and pretty much nothing happened until we were ready to start. It didn't cause any trouble apart from a bit of chaos around synchronizing wiki etc with the master schedule on paper and the impossibility to plan rooms based on popularity of the session. It's a fair approach to try better this time but I wouldn't hold my breath. I hope that helps. Alex _______________________________________________ Marketing mailing list [email protected] http://lists.qt-project.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing
