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!

This weekend I'm at froscon in Germany, giving two talks. One had no slides (but may have video, if I see it then I will post the link here) and the other was "Working with Web Services" which I gave this morning in the PHP room. My slides are here:



Thanks to the PHP room organisers for accepting me as a speaker and to Sebastian for twisting my arm in the first place - it's a fun event!

I spent the weekend in Bristol so I could attend cicon2010 - a volunteer-organised first-edition conference around the CodeIgniter PHP Framework. It started on Saturday morning with registration at 8:30am and the first talk at 9am. When I arrived (at about ten to nine) there were no organisers there. I took this photo around 9:45 (the camera is on GMT) as they attempted to set up the projector.



I saw two talks, both of which were actually really good, which is pretty impressive when you're going on stage to a rather fed up audience! Kudos to Kevin Prince and Joel Gascoigne for their talks. By this time we did get an announcement about what times the other talks would happen and I snuck out for lunch and cups of tea.

When I popped back (I assume there was a long lunch as I didn't get there until almost 4 and still caught the last two talks) I saw Adam Griffiths and Phil Sturgeon round off the day with their talks, and I must admit that I think the talk content was spot on, although the speakers were mostly pretty inexperienced, they all had some great thoughts to share and I did get some technical content from it (and a list of new friends, thanks Phil!)

I had been looking forward to the conference social but after hanging about in a strange city on my own waiting for a promised tweet of time and location, I bailed. The people I met at cicon were a nice crowd and I'm sure it would have been fun but I got some other stuff done instead which was also useful.

In summary: nice people, useful content. worst event I think I've ever been to (sorry guys).

I tweeted about my disappointment and got a couple of people asking me what my advice is for events organisers. I've now done a few technical events and will wrap up my advice into a post (now I've outlined it, probably more than one post!) so look out for that over the next few weeks.

(as a total aside but kind of for the record, for an event with 40 ish people, I was disappointed to be the only woman there)

I'm slightly surprised but mostly wildly excited to announce that I'll be the keynote speaker at the PHP North West Conference in October. It is held in Manchester in the UK, which is about an hour from where I live in Leeds, so it is definitely my "home" conference, and this makes me even more excited since I know I'll be in such great company!

The talk is Teach A Man To Fish: Coaching Development Teams and really it's about how a little investment of time or effort can build your existing team into something better - and how that team can then sustain its improvements and continue to raise its performance and the game of the individual team members. All in all I am pretty excited about this talk - as with most of my conference talks, it started life as a rant in a bar, and I'm now excited to be preparing it for a more formal setting!

The event itself is a must-see for anyone doing PHP or allied technologies that can get there (Manchester is pretty central and pretty cheap - if you're in the UK, you have no excuses!). It's a Saturday event, 9th October 2010 and tickets are on sale - the Early Bird prices are still available and we've held the prices as low as possible again, we don't need frills, we just want lots of people to be able to join in! I hope to see quite a few of you there, let me know if you're coming :)

In August I'll be attending FrOSCon in Germany for the first time, and speaking there. It's a mixed technology conference, with rooms set aside for separate scheduling for various projects and technologies. I'll be speaking in the PHP room, delivering "Working With Web Services", a talk which covers how to consume all sorts of types of web service from PHP. I'm excited about that and even more excited to hear that I'll also be speaking in the main track, where I'll deliver "Open Source Your Career" - stories and advice about how involvement in open source can positively influence the career path for each of us.

I haven't visited this part of Europe before so I'm also including a couple of days to see the area, and really looking forward to the trip. Since there are technologies other than PHP, and since I'm rarely in Germany, I know I'm going to meet a lot of new people ... and I can't wait :)