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

[Lodewijk]

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 at gmail.com>

> 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)
>
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