Organizing oSC13 - 65 days before

Feedback is very important while organizing a conference or when organizing or creating anything. Right feedback when it comes it can give you everything. I mean really everything. It can show you what you are doing right or wrong. It can guide you in avoiding dificult situations. It can give you new ideas. It can save you a lot of time. So it is really important to seek and take feedback.

The most important and immediate source of feedback is yourself and the experience you have. The other is your team's experience. That is why when making a team try find people with experience, not neceserally conference or specific to whatever you do experience but life experience. Almost everything you do has to do with people so having people who know how people work is pretty important.

Another important source is feedback from past events. I read tons of blogs from people that attented past openSUSE Conferences. Finding what people liked and what they didn't is one of the best roadmaps you can get. I have to say here that before deciding to take over a conference is of high importance to make a research to see if you can actually do it.

Other than that feel free to bother people who organized great conferences you attended or you heard of. Never hesitate to ask anything, it is afterall the only way to get answers and feedback :D

Above all things try to stop what you are doing regularly and spend some time by asking people what do they think about what you are doing. I know perfectly well that time is really valuable but this is not at all wasted time. Have in mind that many times you will get feedback that you don't really like, meaning bad feedback that say that you are mistaken, accept it and value it. It can be a life saver if it comes from good source.

The feedback is something that is practically imposible to be finished in one(readable) post so I will continue with this at some other post. Afterall how the hll I will manage to fill 64 more posts? 

Organizing oSC13 - 66 days before

This is the first monday since I started writing about the upcomming openSUSE conference. Also I must warn you that I am in a good mood and I don't feel like being modest today, if you get uppset with arrogant people please stop reading this here.
 I will take advantage of every humans hate for that day to write about things I and you might hate but when when you cannot avoid them maybe you should try to take advantage of them.
People who met me at least once might not believe the following but people who really know me know the truth. I don't really like to talk to people, when I was a little I had that problem and this was a big deal when I realize I like girls but in order to flirt you have to do some talking(at least most of the times). As time past by I had too so I started talking, I did that great ( I told you I am not feeling modest today...). In fact I did so great that most of the times I do talk now is because I like what it's happenning when I talk, than because I like talking. Where I am getting with this is that while organizing a conference one thing is for sure, you will do things that you don't really like and in some occasions you might even hate it. Doing those things have in mind that this does not mean that you are doing them wrong. It is very important to be concentrated to it no matter how you despise it so that you will do this thing right, since you have to do it then do it right. This is important also because if you are concentrated you will have to do it once. Also because you don't like on doing something that does not mean that you are not a natural talent. I mean look at me, I am a firefighter and I do not really like to organize conferenses, but I am doing it and trust me it will be one hell of a conference.
One question not answered clearly here is how you can take advantage of it? Well doing anything for the conference you organize, especially when you have to.
Now it is Monday so I am really bored in writting more for today

Organizing oSC13 - 67 days before

So you got your wish and you manage to 'win' that conference. You are in charge now, you personally and a small team(did I mention my team mates Stella and Henne? :D ). A great mistake I always do is thinking that people will do things on their own but the sad and bitter truth is that people expect from you and your team to tell them what to do. But you know what? They are right and I am wrong, it is just a mistake I do all the time because I am feeling that people have some kind of sixth sense and will do things that I want them to do before or without me or the team ask them to. People want to make things happen, especially in FOSS that we are all volunteers and we want things to be done. People also respect the 'hierarchy' that exists and wait for you to ask them, at least most of the times some times they just do stuff and ask you to approve it or not. When you don't ask they think that you somehow have this covered and respect your time and don't ask you about it.

 It is very important to know that you are in charge and what comes with the whole 'you are in charge' thing. A thing to be careful here is that being in charge does make you the one who lead but not the boss of anyone so under no circumstance you have the right to act like a boss. Acting like a boss is one of the things that can ruin your conference and make people leave and that is probably the less possible consequences that such an action will have.

 You have to realise that being nice to people can open many doors and can make things happen. The thing here is to be actually nice and honest and not slimy. If you come to a point that you will become slimy people will eventually abominate you and it will probably have the same consequences as being bossy.
What I learned so far as a member of FOSS communities being and acting as politician is never the right thing to do since people are not stupid and it is impossible to fool a lot of people for a long time.

Now if you come to a point that acting like a polititian or acting honestly but being hard to someone are the only two choices you have my advise is to act hard. So far I believe I won more acting honestly but hard and most of all I gain respect from people for that. There are cases that I lost but if you put well your case then anyone with common sence will understand your possition, for all the others personally I just didn't care and this is not by choise but by nature.

Returning back to the 'you are in charge' thing I must say that it is very important to have some structure planned with your team of how you want things to be done and seperate fields of responsibilities for each part of the team and keep inside your part of responsibilities.
Having a structure will save you from doing unnecessary things and will give you a route of what you want to be done. In certain points this will even show you how to do things. If you have some 'talended' volunteers noticing Trello or whatever tool you will use for organizing your conference, it will show them too how to do things and this will make your life even better and it will save you a lot of time.
Seperate responsibilities with your team mates or giving responsibilities to other people outside your closed team that you trust and believe that will have the job done(Yes Stathis and Thanassis I am talking about    you) is also a great thing to do. Most people in FOSS(and not only) love to be trusted and to be given responsibilities, although I wouldn't count that as a rule so make a conversation with them and be ABSOLUTELY SURE before hand them over such a great burden. If it turns out that you gave someone to do something that he/she was not sure or did not want it will be a great backfire to what you organise and can easily be the dynamite that will explode the whole organisation you do if you won't be careful.
Finishing for today I must say that a real important thing here is to always have an eye to those people, as said in 'The italian job' be carefull because "I trust everyone. It's the devil inside them I don't trust" and by that I mean that there are several cases were people drop something without telling you or any other just because for some reason they cannot tell you or any other. My opinion is that is human nature and I have done it at least once and heard about it like a million happenning. It is not really a trust issue but more of a safety issue in order to prevent bad things from happening. Last but not least, if you trust some pople enough to give them responsibilities, give them freedom to do it their way.

Organizing oSC13 - 68 days before

Cron Job in Google Blogger failed to publish the post I wrote yesterday morning in yesterday afternoon, so many of you saw it comming out some hours ago. I hope I did not confused anyone with that and I will take advantage of this 'failure' of Google Blogger (or with what I did wrong in there and missed it) and write today about situations like that, that can happen while organizing a conference.

So yesterday I wrote about alternatives and the importance of those while working on making a conference come to life. Today I will write some things about things that go wrong and you cannot or at the moment don't have the ability to think or predict. 

I will start with a Murphy's law "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong" that usually happens through the procedure, no matter how hard you try and how many alternatives you have. Good news is that this can be predicted to some point, the bad thing is that this prediction is not always easy and some times you just have to do a lot of double checking in order not to avoid it but to fix it before someone notices it. The quicker you accept that things can and will go wrong the faster you will be relaxed and concentrated enough to fix it quick(again: before someone notices it :D ). Let's start by how you can predict things from going wrong, although as said before that does not come with a 100% guarantee that won't happen but still...

The easiest way to do it is to find someone who is actually a professional in the task you need to be done and that is why selecting and sometimes rejecting some volunteers from doing something is equally important. What I mean by all that? Ok so let's say that you have a task that need to be done and that task is about writing a press article until the X deadline. Now what you need is someone who is actually qualified in finishing the task, in our case writing article, so if you have a professional journalist that is volunteering then you are a happy person and this gives you the best safety that this task will be successfully and on time. The thing is that if you are doing this like we do, meaning voluntarily there is a great possibility not to be able to find as I mention in my example a journalist or even if you do, he/she may not have the time to do this in the time you want. This gives you two actual choices both of which I will write at some point later. Either you adapt the time of your article either you select another volunteer based on some facts. Now let's say that you have the right guy for the right work, if you do this is how you can prevent that things will go the right way and nothing will go wrong. It sounds really simple but it is very common for people to give tasks to the first who asked it and don't look to the abilities of each person just because we want to get rid off one of the 10.000 tasks that we have in our head. I knew that from before but I still did that a couple of times on the heat of the moment and that exactly where the "prediction is not always easy and some times" is hidden. 

Now you have the right person for the task and this person is doing his/her job perfectly, unfortunatelly this is not the complete task. The task is completed when this task once it is finished it is out there for all to see, meaning in this example the press release to reach the press you want to. No matter how perfectly the task is done it must reach its goal, otherwise it is a task not done. So you have to double check everything just to be sure. Recently I fell into something like just because for some reason the person did a task thought wrongly that he had finished. This of course was communication error but still the task was not completed and if you ever thing that you will start organizing a conference without communication errors happening then my opinion and my so far experience says that you are dreaming.

Last but not least for today is that if you use a tool like Trello that we use have the person that took the task assign himself/herself to it so that other people will know it.It will save your volunteers and yourself a lot of time and nerves.