Ideas for a events site. This page is currently a draft.

1. Problem

Currently we more or less have to invent the infrastructure when doing events such as GUADEC, GNOME.Asia etc from scratch. Initial focus should be on serving GUADEC, GNOME.Asia and Boston Summit

2. Must haves

• Support for several conferences at different stages at the same time.
• Call for speakers/Submission system
  • Just a form with speaker's name, email, abstract title and description. Could be similar for lightning talks.
    • Kat says: It would be helpful to be able to restrict the length of the abstract title.
  • The speaker's name be kept anonymous until he/she gets selected.
    • Kat says: Normally, all rejected talks, including all the information from the above point is kept private.
  • Have a system for sending emails automatically to the selected speakers, probably a mail list, mail merge.
    • Kat says: …and rejection emails too.
• Sponsors
• Accomodation info (hostel/hotel)
• Accomodation booking (optional)
  • Start/end date selection, possibly allow organisors to specify a range

  • Accommodatiohn preferences (shared/single, same sex/don't care, with <person>, sponsored/not)

• Registration
  • For both Student, Hobbyist, Professional and Speaker - allow freeform options
  • Payment
    • Bank transfer to a per-event bank account
    • Paypal/Google Checkout
      • Kat says: some people have a problem with Paypal
    • VISA/Mastercard (probably not possibly unless through Paypal)
  • Discount codes
• Base theme
• Schedule
• Editable BoF schedule?
• News
• Travel sponsorship integration
  • Should be private and secure
  • Access to information allowed to limited number of people
    • Travel Committee to all events
    • Organisers per event
  • Replacement of the ODT/text form with some extras such as starting from/returning to airports (not always the same)
  • Spreadsheet type list of all applications with private comments and lowest cost fetched from Kayak
  • Form filling, addition of comments enabled, similar to GSoC Melange
  • Comments both private to travel committee and shared.
    • Kat says: I would expect all comments to be shared with Travel Committee and organisers only.
  • Able to handle status of application. Automatic email notification with option to add info/edit the automatic email. Integrate with the messaging/comments.
  • Should be able to submit receipts after the event and add other relevant information.
  • a view with the information aggregated by event
  • Should handle a deadline, but still be able to receive (or re-open) it after the deadline

3. nice-to-haves

• Schedule of all GNOME events
• Hackfest support
• Usergroup meetup support
• Sharing of users across conferences, allowing for reuse of info.
• Mobile version
• Create your own schedule
• Accounts (maybe accounts for foundation members and keys for non-foundation members?)
• Automatically verify who is a foundation member for the travel sponsorship

4. Conference stages

A conference goes through different stages in it's life cycle. We should have support for this.

1. Initial announcement with date and place
2. Call for speakers and closing
3. Registration period, sponsors start to appear, travel sponsorship application
4. Actual conference happening
5. Post-conference: feedback form, archive of talks etc.

5. Base theme

• Logo
• Skyline in the footer

6. Possible technology

After looking at several conference systems such as Openconference and COD (Drupal based) we settled on http://central.wordcamp.org/ Wordcamp (Wordpress based) for GUADEC 2013. Wordcamp seems nice and seems worth expanding upon.

7. Relevant urls

Current GNOME conferences:

• http://2013.gnome.asia/

• https://www.guadec.org/

• https://live.gnome.org/BostonSummit

other conference websites worth drawing inspiration from

• https://fosdem.org/2013/

• http://central.wordcamp.org

8. Comments

• Please leave any feedback here