I'm not sure if this is covered by Delphine's suggestion, but the ability to recognize staffers is helpful - I knew quite some of them so had little trouble, but I saw others looking harder for them. Giving staffers a special symbol/color on their badge or giving them a different color T-shirt might be helpful. I never realized how many there were until they finally were all on stage.
Lodewijk
2011/8/9 Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com
2011/8/9 Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com:
- Badges: badges should be recognizable at a glance. Especially for
press. But also for organizers, speakers etc.. By the time I arrived, everyone had a different lanyard, some had written badges, other printed... complicated. Make more badges than you will ever need (a safe assumption is to print about at least twice the number of badges you think you'll need). Choose colors that people can recognize at a glance. Especially for the press (I'll never stress that enough).
+1. Also:
- make the badges double-sided. I asked at least 5 people to flip
their badges so I could read them, and about half the people I know had come up with some way to clip the badge to their lanyard or clothes to prevent it from flipping over to the blank back side
- for some reason, the role/occupation/whatever field (e.g.
'developer', 'designer', 'WMF employee', ...) was not printed on any of the WMF employees' badges, which led to people using magic markers to write "WMF" on their badges. I think it's a good idea to make WMF staff clearly visible (badge colors, per Delphine); in Buenos Aires, WMF staff had "Staff" badges, but they were the same badges worn by the conference staff (i.e. organization), so that wasn't necessarily too useful either
Badge-related praise that I read on a private mailing list and totally agree with: putting the small schedule booklet inside the badges was genius and extremely useful. It's one of those little things that I never missed before I realized how great it was, and that I will now be expecting at every conference I ever attend :)
Another, relatively minor, point of criticism: the shuttle schedules as communicated were incomplete. The most important bits (morning shuttle times, i.e. what time do I have to wake up to catch the shuttle) were there, but the schedules for shuttles leaving in the afternoon and evening (shuttles back to the hotels/dorms from the venue, and shuttles to/from the parties) were missing from the booklet and the web site more often than not. Personally, I think that ideally, shuttles shouldn't be necessary (if you need them, that means the host city is more spread out than I like it to be (Gdansk was perfect in terms of everything being close together); a party at a good location that's a bit far away is a good exception, but hotels/dorms shouldn't be >1km away), but if you're hosting a future Wikimania and do need them, please make sure to document their schedules very well.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
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