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PLANNING.md

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How to conference

This is a readme, mentioning most of the things that should be in place for KDS to be a happy conference for all participants and organizers.

Dates

Conference date:

In general it is best to hold the conference mid-January. This is for practical reasons: Winter break, Easter break, conference season, company trips and so on. Lots of companies/conferences/holidays to take into account.

Hotel booking

Should be finally booked before summer the year before, for several reasons:

  • Better price.
  • Less work after this has been finalized.
  • We have more control over the economy.
  • Reserve between 50-70 rooms then we should be fine for the conference. As well as being able to use the regular rules for reservations set by the hotel.

Call for presentations

Should be sent out some time in August optimally, but as late as September is possible though it gives less time for planning Call for presentations should be closed 1.November at the latest.

Participant registration:

Open after closing Call for presentations, and keep open until a couple of days before the final date for un-booking the hotel. Which is usually 1 month before the event.

T-shirts

Should be ordered some time after Participant registration closes

Name Tags

Should be ordered as close to the conference as possible in case of any stragglers

Budget

Create a budget. If possible use last years as a starting point and adjust as needed during planning.

Remember that we aim to hit 0 as a result.

For the budget to go towards 0 all participants of the conference should pay the same amount, regardless of whether they are a speaker or not, or whether their from a different country or the hosting city.

The budget should contain all spendings, but a startingpoint if you've lost last years budget is:

  • the cost of the hotel/conference venue
  • the cost of t-shirts
  • the cost of dinner/drinks
  • the cost of nametags and other swag
  • the income from singlerooms
  • the income from all participants.

All prices should be given excl. mva

In general as long as we have about 100 participants total, and dont overspend on anything everything will work out financially. But look out for the posts that could make the cost grow exponentially.

Hotel

Should be booked before summer.

Hotel stay is included in the conference ticket. Note that only the night friday - saturday is included. As a courtesy we often help participants extend their stay if needed/wanted, but it also depends on the hotel being flexible in helping out with this.

There have been cases where we have decided, based on where participants come from that KDS has also covered an extra night but we should stribe to arrange the conference places where this will not be necessary.

Single vs Double room:

When staying at the conference the default is that everybody should stay with a colleague in a double room. This is both to promote social interaction with colleagues and for the conference to be cheaper.

At an extra cost the participants can arrange to have a single room. This cost is billed extra to their company when paying the participant fee.

The cost of a singleroom is calculated as following:
(costOfSingle) - (costOfDouble/2)

Conference Venue

In general we stribe to get all speakers accepted for the conference. Currently we manage this with 4 parallell tracks. As such we need a venue where we can run 4 parallell tracks. One of the rooms should be large enough to hold all participants of the conference. For Keynotes/Intros and such.

Filming/Streaming the conference

Previous years we have streamed some/all talks. Before committing to this, check that there is a budget for doing this. Possibly we should not film all tracks, but only some tracks.

SoMe

KDS is a great event for Knowit. It looks really nice on SoMe, so somebody should be posting something somewhere.

Swag

It is awesome to have swag at the conference. If possible it would be great with stickers, and misc decorations. But there are som non-optional decorations/items that are needed.

  • T-shirt: Every year we have a new t-shirt. Currently we have MoosIt as a mascot, so consider using that for the design.

  • Name tag: No conference is complete without them. These generally have to be printed every year as there are new participants every year. If possible print as follows:

    • Paper: Nevertear plastpapir 270 MY
    • Size: A6
    • Print: Color on both sides
    • Punch a hole in the top.

  • Name tag - Lanyards: We try to reuse, only order new ones when actually needed. At the end of the conference, we should collect these for reuse next year.

  • Drink tickets: Everybody usually get one drink ticket

  • T-shirt signs: We print signs showing size for when the participants arrive and pick their t-shirt.

Optional swag:

  • KDS boxes: Large square boxes, very decorative. Best is to get them printed on cardboard, for easy transport.
  • Stickers
  • ++

Billing

Generally done by Knowit AB, though some locations have been known to fix this themselves. If for some reason any of the services we use do not want to bill Knowit AB, try to get all of them to bill the same company for more control of costs.

Design

Having some nice looking design is awesome, but remember that we do not really have the economy to create stuff. Could we use some visuals from last year? Great! No? Try to use resources that are available for non-billable hours.

Information emails:

Before the conference we like to give some information to the participant, so that they won't think we've forgotten them. So we periodically send them emails containing different information.

  • Call for presentation email - Should be sent to all of Knowit (not just a single company/specific list). This is the first email we send. As we want to send this to interested parties in all of Knowits companies it should be done from Knowit AB as they have this list.
  • Call for presentations reminder - About 2 weeks before the final date of submission we should send a reminder email
  • Acceptance/Rejection emails - We should send Accptances/Rejections as soon as the program has been set. Note that we stribe to accept 1 talk from all speakers that have submitted something.
  • Call for participants - Should be sent out after Call for Presentations have been closed.
  • Information mail - Should be sent to all participants after Call for participation has ended
  • Hotel Room matching mail - We should send an email to confirm that people do not have objections to their roomies
  • Just-In-Time info for speakers - Should be sent about a week before the conference
  • Just-In-Time info for participants - Should be sent about a week before the conference

Conference Dinner.

We've arranged the conference dinner in different ways. Some ups and downs with both arrangements. One model is to have a conference dinner where all participants have a table seat in a big restaurant. A different is to spread all the participants out to different restaurants.

Where to find stuff

We have documents/assets all over. Some is in Sharepoint, some is in Drive, some live in Trello and some lives in this repo. Something you don't have access to? Talk with somebody in slack and it should be fixed AS