LornaJane

This post is the second in a series of three about organising and hosting events. If you're interested, you could also read the first post about event preparation.

As an organiser you should know exactly where you are going on the day and what you need. Namebadges (sticky labels and pen if nothing else) will be needed at registration, if you have tickets and need to tick people off then rope in lots of volunteers (it sounds like a lot but 3-5% of your total attendee count is ideal) and brief them, and spread out across as much space as you have so you can parallelise as much as possible - registration is always chaos because of course everyone shows up at once and causes a backlog!

I've been to a lot of events, mostly technical, software-related ones, and I've also helped organise a few as well. For people organising events for the first time there are definitely some pitfalls that might not be obvious until you actually, well, until you fall into them! I thought I'd capture my experiences into a series of blog posts, in case they can help any future organisers to avoid some of the traps. First up: what to do before your event starts.

People aren't very good at reading between the lines and doubt could mean they don't buy a ticket for your event. To combat this, put up a website well in advance and make it very easy to find out:

• 
  event location


• event date


• prices of tickets and how to get one


• schedule or structure, basically what to expect and why people should be there


• how to contact you

These are the absolute minimum. My recommendation is that you will also want to include (as early as this information can possibly be available) any extra items such as the dates and times of any social events (so people can include those in their travel plans), travel advice and/or directions, and for bonus points local knowledge such as where to stay, local facilities, etc. One year the PHP London conference did a full set of directions complete with photos - I can't find those now but I loved the idea and did something similar for PHPNW09.

Without this kind of information, people are much less likely to do the work to find it all out themselves, or may not feel confident enough to come along. I've also been bitten by events where the info was sketchy and the event turned out to be just as sketchy! Where the information is easily available, transport links are listed, and contact numbers given, the experience has been much smoother and more pleasant all round - this is especially relevant if you have speakers or attendees travelling internationally who may feel a bit lost when they are trying to make their way to the venue.

Make sure you also pick a hashtag for people to use when they are blogging or tagging tweets or photos, that way your attendees can start to make links with one another (and on a more negative note, you'll see when people are complaining and you can respond!). Already you are building the community that will make your event a success ... and if you've done all of the above then rest assured that you are absolutely on the right lines!

If you have any more tips, share them in the comments, I'm sure there are things I either missed or don't even know I should be doing!

Last month, while in Amsterdam to host the Dutch PHP Conference 2010, I was absolutely stunned (as in, completely speechless - that's pretty rare for me) to have my PHPWomen friends pull me aside and present me with something:



The inscription reads:

Lorna Mitchell
In recognition of your extraordinary efforts
PHPWomen

Although I took the photos of this outside, this item now has pride of place on my mantlepiece, where I can look at it and reflect on what a huge influence the PHPWomen have been, and continue to be, for me and so many others.

2009 was a funny year. I started it with a trip to South America, returning to a job I'd held for a year and was starting to feel settled with. I had grand plans for the year, for myself, my home, and my career. And at the end of the year I can honestly say I achieved absolutely none of these.

Its not necessarily a negative thing - I did some absolutely great things in 2009, its just they weren't the things on my list. I spoke at a number of conferences and other events, and finally started to feel like I had something to say! The highlights were presenting at tek (because I finally started to feel competent at conference speaking), and PHPNW - where its my home conference which I organise and I knew exactly the session I wanted to bring. I wrote it, brought it, and the session was really well-received. I am definitely not finished with speaking nerves, but I know that if I can get up there and be properly prepared - I have something to give to my audience. Already I'm lined up for quite a few speaking events in 2010 and I'm almost more excited than nervous (almost). Everyone told me the nerves would get better with time - they just omitted to tell me how much time.

In 2008 I was surprised to find that I had written 195 blog posts in a year. I did many more interesting things in 2009 and basically worked a lot more, so I knew I'd be blogging less. This is the 119th post of the year though so actually I did pretty well, all things considered. I'm pleased that I've managed to keep writing even through the busy times of the year. I usually post a screenshot of my stats but they're not that interesting this year to be honest, they're holding fairly steady and since I don't track who reads my feeds, it would only be a guess anyway. The blog was mostly a replacement for me remembering things - and it hasn't changed a lot in the 4 years I've had it really!

One thing that I will mention which turned into a bit of a feature this year was that I actually started taking photos of things other than knitting! I think it started with our trip to Peru in January, and also the experience of having my own camera, with nobody else but me to see the results. I'm taking more photos than ever and just replaced my little camera so that's pretty exciting - my photos are on flickr if you're interested.

All in all, 2009 was the year that didn't go to plan - I'm mostly happy about the net result and I think perhaps it was time for me to get a reminder that a master plan isn't always a good thing. So I'm going with the flow for 2010 and wondering what the coming year has in store; at work and in my wider technical activities I know I'm going to be very very busy and this sadly means I'm stepping away from some of the activities and committments that I've enjoyed until now. Above everything else I am hoping that 2010 holds success and good health for us all!

I'm halfway delighted and halfway cringing to announce that the phpwomen calendar is now on sale. This was a project organised by my friend and colleague Johanna Cherry, who saw an opportunity at php|tek 2009 to photograph the majority of the core PHPWomen members all in one place and turn it into a fundraising calendar.

If you're expecting something "Calendar Girls" then you'll be disappointed. We are all clothed in the pictures!

I won't share photos from the calendar itself, if you want to see those you can buy your own, but perhaps to give you a hint I'll share an outtake of myself:



I must confess that I was rather agitated when the photos were taken - as a woman in a male-dominated industry, the risk of being seen as just my physical appearance is ever-present, and I normally try hard at unremarkable, unrevealing clothes with very little makeup and a pair of jeans. Hanging out in the lobby at the hotel during a technical conference in that dress and those shoes was significantly more terrifying than delivering three sessions during my first trip to the US as a speaker (which, considering the problems I have with speaking nerves, is saying something). Even after I saw the photos I was kind of unhappy with the whole experience, although I loved the outtake linked above!

Fast forward 6 months and I had dinner with Derick Rethans, who took the photos in the calendar and arranged the printing, and he showed me the prototype he'd had printed. As I sat and turned the pages, I started to understand why this is so important. The women in these photos are some of the leading lights in the community - respected developers, some of them core developers, key community people, and speakers. Yet I saw them as the women they are ... and suddenly remembered that actually, it's acceptable to be both smart AND beautiful.

So - get your calendar and remember all year that beauties can also be geeks! 10% of every purchase goes to PHPWomen, and we will use those funds to support our women and grow more leading lights like these.

I'm a keen gamer, or I thought I was - but I'm also female and very busy, which apparently is outside the expected criteria. My preferences are typically for platform style games (Zelda) although I'll play pretty much anything that's easy on the eye and doesn't require superhuman powers of hand-eye co-ordination. I lose interest in the games where you walk around shooting people but I can compete with (and sometimes win against) my colleagues at Mario Kart.

This year, there have been a few games come out that I really liked the look of, some of which I even own. However I only actually played one of them for any length of time. This isn't because the games weren't good, but mostly because they can't be played in small enough chunks of time. While I am perfectly well aware that the target market for games is probably single men with long stretches of spare time - that's not me. I love all things nintendo and have both a Wii and a DS, and will happily play on either when I can find the time. BUT "time" for me is 20 minutes, maximum, and not every day (sometimes not even every week).

If your game doesn't allow saving at will, or as a minimum, quit regularly, then its likely that I'll get frustrated and stop playing. Last time a Zelda title came out (my absolute all-time favourite), I had just moved to a new town, had a flat I could clean in an hour, and a job where I clocked in and clocked out. This year, there's a new title, and I don't know when I'll even buy it, or how much I'll actually play of it if I did. The recent Mario DS title required you to *complete* 5 levels before saving, never mind play them. I loved the game, but my lifestyle didn't allow me to get far. The Metroid titles for Wii had exactly the same issues - I like the game but if I can't pick it up and put it down, it just doesn't get a look in. On completely the other end of the spectrum was the Professor Layton game, which was puzzle based and could be saved almost at any point!

So, it turns out I'm not a gamer any more, because the game design doesn't cater for those of us with real lives ... when will the manufacturers learn that actually normal people play games too?