DebConf5WhatToImprove

What could have been improved in organising DebConf5?

What Sucked?

• Core Team
  • There was hardly any core team this year; people dropped out or did not live up to the responsibility they had been allocated
  • Many core team members where not active at all during planning, and got frustrated when they came to debconf to realize that the people who had done all the planning had not done the details in the ways they expected.
    • Lack of clarity on assigned responsibilities
    • Too little or too late reporting on progress
    • Expecting people to carry out a big task on their own, while such person might not be able to see and clarify all the nasty little details
    • Some people took more responsibility on their shoulders than they could handle
  • The team evolved in at least two stages, with a notable difference:
    • The early planning, which secured the general framework -- the location in general, selecting the type of housing, where to hold talks, etc.
    • The securing of deals -- actually signing contracts. This second stage was done almost completely by persons not closely involved in the early planning. Too many details had been left open and needed to be decided in the last minute, just before signing the contracts.
    • Lack of knowledge or experience, or differences in personal approach, meant that the things that the early planning had prepared needed to be revisited by the people signing the contracts. This resulted in duplication of work and often the assumptions or goals of the early planning were not carried through to the contract level.
  • No general coordination of finding volunteers and assigning them to specific teams or tasks
    • Too much last minute arrangement of volunteers
  • Unclear and no written agreements with third parties (e.g. restaurant, boat-trips, etc.)

• Website
  • Timely updates
  • Information about Finnish local things is/was missing or took long to show up:
    • Travel page was unspecific
    • The electricity page has no picture
    • Housing was unclear for a long time and people got confused and wandered off to hotels
  • International content took long to show up
    • Sponsorship page was created in a complete and timely manner
    • Contact page took long
    • Reimbursement page does not contain all information, even though it was provided to the responsible person (procedure for Americans is missing)
    • Logos got dropped/forgotten
  • Separate uri's/username/password for Comas and Drupal site was confusing

• Conference Management System
  • Only one person who could run advanced SQL queries
  • This person was unavailable at events like beginning and end of reconfirmation time
  • Registration, but not confirmation closed
  • Registration closed a day late (minor issue)
  • Bugs, which meant some information was missing or inconsistent (e.g. food-preference)
  • Comas would have been useless without one of the core-developers present
    • If that developer would not have been present, we would have had to switch to a pure paper-based administration

• Food
  • Distributing Food-tickets to attendees was very cumbersome and time-consuming
  • No contract was signed, so the whole food-deal was unclear for both the restaurant and the core-team during the conference
  • The core team complained that the original food amount projection done from comas was too low, but in fact less food was consumed than what was requested.
  • Too much of the food planning was done purely on what the restaurant suggested, rather than to demand more from them.
    • This was completely due to lack of planning from the DC5 organizer team and cannot be blamed on the restaurant. In order to be able to demand more from a supplier, you must do your part, which is to consider and communicate your needs in advance and not try to alter the deal when your own lack of planning turns against you. If you cannot provide all the details in advance, you must tell the supplier that this is the case so that they can either help or prepare for a more dynamic solution. Also, you must understand the limits of your supplier and switch to another supplier if the first is not able to provide what you need.

• Daytrip
  • No written agreement so no clarity for all those involved in the organization
  • Lunch was not really planned and had too many last minute arrangements
    • Worries about butter and other stuff spoiling due to hot weather

• Housing
  • General observation: almost everything about the housing was based on assumptions:
    • Each registrant having their own key (not true).
    • The state of the rooms and furniture, curtains (unspecified).
    • Being able to use the fridge (true) and the stove (generally not true).
    • Permission to use the sauna (not true, although it was used anyway).
    • Cleaning performed by the cleaning company in all rooms (not true).
    • Final cleaning covering all rooms (not true).
  • Key situation unclear until we got the keys
    • No master key
    • Too few keys for each registrant
    • These details were tied to the type of buildings we rented: the student village is administered as a whole, and the key setup is not made to support full control over a single building without control over the other buildings. A requirements analysis would have revealed this difference in our needs and the state of the key setup -- and had it been done early enough, there would have been time to adjust the locks to suit us.
  • Uncertainty about furniture in the rooms (beds, curtains, etc.)
    • There was actually no uncertainty about this at all on the contractual level: the rooms were empty, no furniture and no curtains. However, we agreed to let the Athletes' Village organization equip the rooms if they chose to do so. So we very clearly agreed that the rooms might or might not be equipped. We should have taken that into account and should have planned for a solution where we were not relying on the rooms being equipped or not.
    • On a communication level, we certainly failed to explain to our guests what kind of equipment the rooms will have.

• Talks
  • The responsible person for the talks dropped out without saying so, clearly and timely.
    • No one checked, if speakers checked in (we could have known sooner about missing speakers)
    • Moderators were informed to late about missing speakers
  • the license was confusing and was not fixed in a timely manner
  • the CFP was not sent out in time.
  • the talk review team was partly not responsive
  • the specifications for the papers were not communicated in time.
  • Building rental unconfirmed so the security guards and opening times were cleared up to the csd-people at the last minute
  • Some speakers overslept or underestimated how long it takes to get to the CSD so we should check:
    • if the speakers know where to go and how long it takes
    • (especially for the morning sessions) wake the speakers up soon enough
  • Some speakers did their first talk (to a bigger audience) here; we should have had a "Speaker preparation program" / replacement for Jeff Bailey's talk
  • Dynamic schedule and late release of schedule was terrible for speakers
  • There was no practical difference between Bofs, talks and workshops
    • Thus people who expected to gather a small group to talk about a specific topic found themself preparing slides for a 300 people auditorium

• Debian Day
  • Pay more attention to promotion; promote earlier.

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