Am 14.04.2013 16:48, schrieb Jeremy Baron:
Maybe there was some public planning or discussion (or even something on the -team list) that I missed or somehow wasn't subscribed to. But maybe this is one more an example of how I wish Wikimania were more like DebConf (debconf.org). Typically I've wanted to apply the DebConf model to organization in general and video recording/streaming/etc. but I imagine this applies just as well to setting up a registration server. Not saying we should copy everything exactly nor are they perfect as is but I think they have a good model to learn from.
I don't know how debconf works or what the model is like. I have never been to any debconf, and I guess a lot of otheres here neither, because teh debconf was mentioned several times by you and so far I haven't seem someone picking it up. It would be interesting what they do better.
In our case we do what you mentioned with "With DebConf, more work is typically done in house by volunteers that are interested in what they're working on.". After Gdanks I managed to get the source code of registration and scholarship websites which has long been maintained by one or two people only. Putting it on my webserver I made it available to every Wikimania team since 2010. Harel in 2011 made a lot of improvements to the system, with him and the upcoming chapter scholarships we added multilingual support. In 2012 Aude improved the coding style of the scholarship tool (I think it was basically a re-write at least of the PHP framework, the database seem to be the same). The 2013 team also did some changes, even though I don't know exactly because I didn't track it.
Anyway, the tools will be available for the 2014 team again, whoever it will be. If we keep working on these tools and not start reinventing the wheel again (which happens sometimes) every team can benefit from the improvements done over time. Another problem we solved by that is that the teams now have access to the tools by themselves, via SSH to the server and to the code and also via PHPMyAdmin in a convenient way to access their data. And if everything breaks and nobody feels responsible for it or the local team disappears, I am still their as a neutral host to have a look, export data or do whatever is needed.
For video archiving, streaming (not recommended) and wifi we also have plans in the Wikimania team wiki, available to every team and to be improved (theoretically) over the years. Here, I don't know why, we haven't managed yet to get into a gradually reusing and improving process. Most of the suggestions and plans there are still mine from 2010 and revised in 2011 but with no further use or improvement.
/Manuel