[Party] State of the map

[Nick Black]

I'm in almost total agreance with you, Jochen.  I was considering
creating a Rails app to do the management - but Pentabarf looks like
it will do it for us - fantastic.

As far as thd DVDs, I see your point.  We could just stick the final,
edited DVD on our bit-torrent tracker and let people download it as
needed.  I think live feeds is a good way to go as well.

I wasnt at all involvd with the organisation of FOSS4G - I just turned
up and enjoyed the hard work, but those guys had an organising
committee wich met on IRC every week for a year.  These things take
*loads* of organisation.

So then, I think we should send a one off mail to all the OSM lists
asking people to add their names to the wiki if they want to be on an
organising committee.  I'll start to look at Pentabarf (prob not for a
couple of days) and try and get it sorted.  We'll need Mongrel
installed on one of our boxes - which should be happening when the
rails port kicks in anyway.

Nick


On 1/22/07, Jochen Topf <jochen at remote.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 21, 2007 at 08:23:58PM +0000, Nick Black wrote:
> > First, we'll need some way to decide which papers go into which track,
> > and perhaps which papers we dont accept at all - it could be that we
> > have 100s of submissions.  The community should certainly decide, and
> > I would propose that this is done through IRC meetings - once we have
> > abstracts we should meet and decide which ones go where etc.  Someone
> > is going to have be responsible for collecting abstracts - I'll
> > volunteer for this task. (Unless we just get people to post them to
> > the wiki?)
>
> I suggest using some kind of software for handling that. I have been
> involved in organizing several conferences (including Linux-Kongress,
> LinuxTag, FOSTEL, ...) and without any kind of software, managing the
> submissions gets very confusing and more work than really necessary.
>
> Have a look at Pentabarf (http://pentabarf.org/Main_Page), the software
> the Chaos Communications Club developed for its conferences. I have
> never used it, but it seems to be the only working Open Source software
> of that kind. (I have used several other homegrown systems and also
> developed on them, but they are all very incomplete and hard to use.)
>
> Also I am note sure it is a good idea to let the community as a whole
> decide on the presentations. Putting together a good program is a lot of
> work, you'll have to read all abstracts and discuss what combination
> would be best etc. All the conferences I know of have a programm
> committee, which decides things. But we could certainly put everybody
> who volunteers into that committee. :-) Did you use the community
> approach for FOSS4G? How did it work out?
>
> > Secondly, do we think that the wiki will suffice as the main website
> > for the conference or do we need a static site that allows people to
> > sign up, pay, register their T-shirt size, dietery requiremens, and
> > submit abstracts from.  Are there any volunteers for making the site?
>
> If the conference is free, the Wiki is enough. But if people have to pay
> and you have to keep track of that you'll need some kind of software.
> Last time I looked Pentabarf was good at that paper submission stuff,
> but didn't do registration. I am not sure about the status there, so
> have a look at it.
>
> Jochen
> --
> Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298
>
>


-- 
Nick Black
--------------------------------
http://www.blacksworld.net