kitze / awesome-conference-practices
- понедельник, 23 апреля 2018 г. в 00:19:05
Did you like anything in particular about a conference? Let's make an awesome list 🎉
Did you like anything in particular about a conference? Did you hate anything? Let's make organizing conferences an easier task
The initial document is pretty one-sided, biased, and based on my own experience and perspective. It's probably missing tons of things. That's why it's on GitHub and it's not a Medium article. Please help me cover everything and make this document amazing
If you're lazy to send a PR you can also tweet me things and I'll just add them here.
For God's sake don't send out a huge email the size of the Bible with all the information about the conference because nobody will actually read that. Send information in smaller relevant chunks. Before I arrive you can tell me about the travel and accommodation arrangements. After I arrive you can inform me about the rest of the stuff that I need to know, etc.
Send calendar invites for every event at the conference. Attach locations and descriptions to the events. Speakers dinner, my talk, mic-check, after-party, hiking, that extra tour, etc. Then every speaker can accept the events they want to attend and they don't need to open that huge email 90 times in order to figure out what's going on.
LOL, it's never gonna happen. Most of the speakers finish their presentations on the flight to the conference, or at the actual event, so just don't bother.
Do not, I repeat, DO NOT make a native app. Most of the people won't even bother to install it and those who do will just delete it after the conference is done, so it doesn't make any sense. Make a nice PWA instead, it's the perfect use case for it.
There are 2 options here:
Sadly, the option we always end up with is sending 20 emails back and forth until this is arranged.
This is totally not necessary, but after a full day of travel, it's nice when someone just picks you up from the airport and takes you directly to the hotel.
The talk is only 30 minutes, but in order to give that talk, we need to spend at least 3 days of traveling and weeks of preparation. The minimum you can do is pay for the travel and accommodation costs. It's silly to bullshit your way around it. Some speakers will fall into the trap and pay for themselves but it shouldn't be that way.
There are conferences who are not paying the trainers and that just blows my mind. Maybe it's because right now it's my primary source of income and I wouldn't do it for free, but I'm pretty sure that there is something wrong here. If you're making extra money from a workshop you should pay the trainer at least 50% percent of the profit, period. Otherwise, you should list the speaker or their company as a sponsor.
If you decide to pay one speaker, pay all of them. This kind of information leaks out and it makes you look like a douchebag.
You would think that by now conference organizers finally figured this out, but you would be surprised. Just don't do a conference with 80 male speakers, or 80 female speakers, or any 80 speakers of the same gender/nationality/race/age/etc. Make sure to strike a nice balance and invite people of every geneder, nationality, race, and age. Don't discriminate on any level.
So many conferences got this wrong, and it's so simple. It shouldn't be anything fancy or crazy, just make sure you have the basics:
I cannot stress this enough. Don't have a long conference intro. Yes, I know you have 95 sponsors and you want to thank everyone including the city mayor and Janice in accounting but people are just so anxious to hear the first speaker that they're not even listening to you. The intro should be short and sweet and then you can announce the rest of the information before the breaks or when the next speaker is preparing on stage.
An MC can either make or break a conference. Make sure that you get the right person. Don't fall into the trap of just hiring a random person that's popular in the community, because they might be terrible with audiences.
Do not, I repeat, DO NOT show public unfiltered tweets on a screen. It may look fun but it always goes south. People are dicks. If you want to do this you should have a person that's gonna choose approved tweets.
I don't think that anyone would complain about this, no matter what's the gift (except someone told me that sometimes they cannot transport the gift because they don't have enough space etc.) If you need speaker gift ideas:
Also keep in mind that certain items are not allowed on a plane (wine bottles, certain kinds of meat, etc.) and many speakers will travel with hand luggage only.
I loved this idea! JSHeroes had a booth where everyone can write a small note and put it in an envelope for the speaker to read it. At the end of the conference, we got our envelopes and it felt nice to read the notes and bring them home as a physical memory.
