Notes from the past

Over the years, some new ideas have worked well and some have not.

Food

Typically we serve the local cuisine, prepared by local caterers.

What works well:

  • Very simple food, with good variety and quantity.

  • Food tickets, if they are printed professionally.

  • Buffet service, with clear instructions on limits.

  • Labels on everything including ingredients.

  • Multiple food lines (or serve from both sides of a table).

  • Reusable cups. Either hired or as part of swag.

What fails:

  • Printing, cutting and bundling individual food tickets is very labour-intensive.

  • Using multiple caterers is possible, and sometimes inevitable. But much more work for the organizers, and each caterer has to learn the same lessons from DebConf.

  • A single queue for hundreds of people waiting to eat.

Vegan Catering

Providing balanced vegan diets is always hard. Caterers can typically manage to provide vegan food for a one-off event, but it may not be very interesting or nourishing food. Providing a nutritious diet for two weeks is even harder.

What works well:

  • Hire a caterer that specializes in vegan food, for the vegans.

  • Have a vegan organizer coordinate the vegan menus.

  • A separate vegan serving table.

  • Label everything.

Volunteering

We have a community that is used to stepping up and helping where needed. But the need needs to be coordinated, and many tasks will always go unfilled.

What works well:

  • Announcing the need for volunteers daily. Call out specific tasks.

  • Align the volunteer schedule with the conference schedule.

  • Limit the length of time that volunteers need to commit to.

  • Ask on IRC / in public spaces, when volunteers are needed for a task.

  • Volunteers training other volunteers to do a task. Even better, provide a checklist for the training / job.

What fails:

  • Relying on volunteers to do cleanup chores, without supervision.

  • Unsupervised volunteer jobs, where the volunteer has nobody to ask for advice.

Communication

What works well:

  • Daily emails to debconf-announce with the notices for the day.

  • Forwarding the daily announcement emails to the unofficial chat channels.

  • Describing the venue and surrounds on the website before the event.

  • Describing special events in the conference schedule, so people can plan around them. Especially for events at the end of the conference that some may want to skip.

  • Providing public transit passes for the city we’re in.

  • Announce the unofficial social channels to everyone.

What fails:

  • Unannounced unofficial social channels get cliquey.

  • debconf-announce subscription requires explicit action. Many attendees don’t end up subscribed.

  • Daily emails aren’t read by everybody.

Front Desk

What works well:

  • Core front desk and orga team arrives 2-3 days early to prepare for the start of DebCamp, including days with shops open.

  • A lockable space to use for the front desk, so it can close during meals and overnight.

  • Separating out the “badge station” from the rest of the front desk, when it is necessary because of specific regulations.

  • Double-sided name-tags with the name in a sufficiently large and easy-to-read font.

  • A contact phone that an on-shift FD person monitors.

  • A ticket system for queries, and a team that’s empowered to answer them.

What fails:

  • Requiring the FD to issue accommodation keys and nametags, on DebCamp day 1, without setup.

  • The FD phone being muted / ignored.

Video

The video team needs time to prepare hardware and setup rooms.

What works well:

  • Design a room layout in advance, including cable run lengths.

  • Do development work in a sprint long before DebConf.

  • Hire generic equipment (tripods, audio gear)

  • Use known self-owned cameras and computers.

  • Access to the venue to set up from the start of DebCamp.

  • A lockable video-room to stage equipment in.

  • Lockable talk rooms that we can leave cameras in, overnight.

  • Streaming and encoding in the cloud.

What fails:

  • Getting only 1 or two setup days in talk rooms leads to untested setups. It can be done, when absolutely necessary, but it inevitably leads to video problems in the first days of the conference.

COVID-19

Bringing hundreds of people from around the world together for two weeks will always incubate infectious disease.

What works well:

  • Ventilate shared spaces.

  • Use outdoor spaces where possible.

  • Remind attendees to get vaccinated, where possible, before the event.

  • A clear policy describing:

    • What we can offer.

    • What we expect from attendees.

  • Space for the infectious to socialize and eat together, while keeping the rest of the conference safe.

  • Food delivery to attendees in self-isolation.

  • Keep track of rooms and diets for the COVID-positive attendees in a shared pad.

What fails:

  • Complete self-isolation is tough on attendees.

  • Food delivery without communication to know when it is / isn’t happening.

  • A single person being responsible for food delivery, without any fallback if they oversleep.