[Wikimania-l] Thanks for all the fish... and lessons learned

[Roan Kattouw]

2011/8/9 Delphine Ménard <notafishz at 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)