Plone Conference 2010 - An Organisers View
This year's annual Plone conference was a fantastic success, judging by the reaction and feedback from attendees. The success of the conference has been attributed to the team taking the best parts from each of the previous conferences and incorporating them into this year's event. Such as using the same wifi genius as last year's hosts in Budapest - Wyn Williams.
We figured that the key to making sure our delegates fell in love with the conference host city - Bristol, was by ensuring that they were in the thick of the bustling, vibrant city life. Surrounded by an array of accommodation types to suit all budgets, restaurants, pubs and bars. After all a Plone conference wouldn't be a success without good quality beer or whisky, food and conversation. I was made aware early on that as long as there was easy access to these three things we couldn't go too far wrong!
There are not many places in Bristol large enough to host an event like the Plone conference, so when we came across the Thistle Grand in the centre of town we knew we had struck gold! And not just because they were going to supply unlimited tea and coffee throughout the 3 days - something I have also discovered is paramount in keeping delegates happy and functional throughout the event. The hotel was one of only three venues in Bristol that had enough rooms to host all of the scheduled talks, as well as having a room large enough to accommodate up to 400 people seated for the keynote talks.
We were basically given the run of the place over the three days, so sitting in corridors working on laptops in between talks, or catching up on a quick 5 minute power nap on one of the comfortable sofas was never a problem, in fact it just added to the fantastic laid back vibe that ran throughout the event. The Thistle Hotel offered us discounted rates for attendees staying at the hotel, this allowed us the luxury of being able to stay in the venue as late as we liked after the main scheduled talks had ended. This period of time in the day was really important for many delegates that needed to catch up on e-mails and work, it also meant that people could get together in groups for discussions on the days events over a beer in one of the hotel bars, or again in the corridors in one of the seating areas. Hosting the event in a Hotel meant that we had everything we needed under one roof for the whole event.
After we had found our venue the next task was managing the promotion of the event. It was Iain our company designer who made it clear from the start that the conference should have a strong 'brand identity'. We enlisted the services of Ben Newman a freelance illustrator from Bristol to come up with the design work, and with guide lines from Iain, Ben set to work incorporating as much of Bristol & it's significant landmarks as possible into the design. The end result was fantastic and exactly what we had hoped for.
Once the artwork was sorted we set to work building and developing the Ploneconf website. As it was going to be our main form of conference advertising we made sure that we dedicated significant time and effort into building a great site. We have received a huge amount of praise for both the conference website and the illustration, which was due in the main part down to hours of hard work especially by Matt, Iain and Adrian.
The website was a work in progress in the run up to the conference, regularly updated with news and developments of how the event was coming together. Mini biography's of key Plone community members attending and speaking at the conference were put up early onto the site to try to entice as many people as possible to attend. The website was also used to advertise our sponsorship packages, and even though we didn't manage to secure a platinum sponsor the quantity of gold, silver, bronze and supporting sponsors made up for the lack of a main event sponsor.
With such a well designed conference identity we were keen to come up with some quality promotional gifts to give away to show off the illustrations by Ben. We decided to stick with the tradition of Plone conference t-shirts, after all you can never have enough of Plone branded clothing! Having modelled the design of the shirts earlier in the year in Sorrento at the European Plone symposium we knew that they would go down a treat.
Local printers Shirt Tales were commissioned to produce 400 t-shirts in an array of sizes and some specifically for women. We decided to get them done in two batches, so when our first 250 attendees were signed up we placed our first order and placed the second order two weeks prior to the event. By ordering in two batches we made sure that we got our order as close to the number of attendees as possible. Despite getting the Plone logo printed in black rather than blue as requested, the design and quality worked really well, with delegates even asking for extra t-shirts to take home to family and friends as souvenirs from the event.
It seemed that bags had also been a popular freebie at previous conferences, and as we were planning on giving out lanyards, pint glasses and the annual Plone conference report we figured the best way of ensuring everyone kept their bits and pieces together was by having a bag to put it all in. Plus, it was a great way to showcase our sponsors by having their logos alongside the conference branding.
Matrix office supplies were our supplier of choice for the bags, pint glasses and badge pouches. Having never used them before we made sure that we were in contact with them 6 months prior to the event to ensure they knew exactly what we wanted and could deliver on time. Everything seemed to be organised and on schedule, until the week before the conference... The wrong size badge pouches were delivered, the company doing the pint glasses hadn't ordered enough transfers so they could not deliver the glasses on time and they sent too few bags. In a mild panic and after many a frustrating phone conversation we managed to sort everything out and kept the minor hiccup under our belts.
All of the promotional material was a success. And like with the t-shirts we found delegates keen to get their hands on more glasses and bags to take home as souvenirs.
Probably one of the most important elements of the Plone conference is the speakers and their topics for discussion. After all, the main focus of the 3 day event is based around these talks. We took a different approach from previous years in organising the schedule in that we allowed delegates to vote on which talks and speakers they wanted to see. This appeared to be a success at first, but we have since learnt that organising a more balanced schedule before the talks went out to the public vote would have eliminated duplicated topics. In general the talks were a success, we simply should have screened them more closely first to ensure no one topic was covered twice. Having said that, we did encounter a number of speakers dropping out up to two weeks before the event, which meant that we were not left with such a broad spectrum of choice.
Feedback from attendees at Europython where we tried to promote the event earlier in the year made us realise that in order to get people signed up to attend we needed to advertise the talks and the speakers as soon as possible. However, with a hundred and one other elements to sort out and a business to run, we found ourselves a little behind schedule with getting these published on the website in time. This was not a major issue nevertheless it is certainly something we would have liked to have done sooner.
One speaker that we did have lined up well in advance of the conference was our guest key note speaker Richard Noble from the Bloodhound SSC project and former land speed record holder. Richard was an obvious choice of speaker for us. Having watched previous talks he had given on youtube and meeting with him, we realised that he would have the audience captivated by his accomplishments so far and also his plans for the future to break the land speed record again.
Whereas past guest speakers of previous conferences tended to broach the subjects of intellectual property rights and software freedom, we felt Richard's previous experiences in dealing with the 'old British establishment' and convincing them to look at things with fresh eyes drew certain parallels with Open Source projects like Plone. We recognised that Plone is in a similar battle trying to get established organisations to consider new business models and ways of developing software. The fact he built a racing car powered by a jet engine and a huge rocket also sounded pretty cool!
As we predicted Richard went down really well, at the end of his talk he attracted a large gathering of delegates wanting to find out more and wishing him all the best for his new challenge.
In the run up to the conference we received a few requests for live streaming the talks from people that could not make it to the actual event. It was felt that this might actually deter people from attending, so instead we decided to ensure quality recordings of each of the talks were posted online as soon as possible. Originally we envisaged this happening about a week or so after the conference, in actual fact we managed to get most of them uploaded with slides by the end of each day. An accomplishment we didn't think possible at the start.
Aurora AV the audio visual company did a great job in managing the recording of all of the talks as well as building the stage in the main room. In fact the staging set up was so impressive that delegates were trying to take pieces home during the breakdown!
Once we had sorted out the fundamental elements of the conference we could then move on to the fun part, arranging the party! With the reputation of the community loving a good party we knew we had to pull out all of the stops to impress in this area.
Our long list of criteria for the party venue included: somewhere close to the conference hotel in town, somewhere large enough to host 400 people, a place we would be allowed to serve Pie Minister pies - a true representation of some of the best food Bristol has to offer, somewhere we could bring in our own west country ales and somewhere we could party until the early hours. It might sound like we were asking a lot, and maybe we were, but having enlisted the help of Glow - a local events company, nothing seemed like it was too much trouble and they managed to find us the perfect venue that fulfilled all our prerequisites.
The party turned out to be a massive success, and a highlight of the week for most attendees. Free beer tokens for cider and ale were flowing, the pie's were tasty and so popular that the extra's disappeared in a matter of minutes, and the band 'Fellow stranger' simply rocked!
Organising the Plone conference was great fun. It was a very time consuming task, however all of the planning and stresses were made worth while after the amazing feedback we received at the end of the event. The key to hosting a successful conference is most certainly in the planning and well co-ordinated team work. For me it was a great opportunity to meet many of community members, after all without them there would be no event.
