Code Camp Montreal 2009 - Organization Retrospective

Code Camp Montreal 2009 was held last May 30th and I thought I’d do a quick organization retrospective.

Website
I didn’t want to receive the session proposals by email, because that would mean to take some time to merge everything in a Word or Excel document and sent that to the committee so instead, I used a Wiki so people could enter their proposals directly. I found a nice open source Wiki called ScrewTurn Wiki that runs on ASP.NET and doesn’t require a database.  It works very well however there’s a small problem with this Wiki. It’s not the functionality; it’s the name! Some people reported that their Web filtering software at work would block it because of the term “screw”.

http://www.screwturn.eu

Registration
Registration is always a big problem. How do you get people to register? How do you collect the registration info? How do you send email reminders? How do you print the registration list? A quick search lead me to EventBrite.com. It’s a SAAS registration site that doesn’t charge a dime for free events. It worked like a charm and the only downside I found was that It does not support multi languages.

http://www.eventbrite.com

Location
Finding the ideal location is always hard. Downtown hotels are great because they are located well, downtown. Renting the conference rooms is not very expensive, it’s the food and drinks that are because you can’t bring your own drinks; the hotels are making their money on the drinks they sell you. You can buy 24 cans of Coke for $7-8 at the grocery store but the hotel will charge you $4.25 a small bottle of Coke. Yikes! So it’s a matter of compromise: great location + expensive food or less ideal location + the hassle of bringing your own cheap food. We went for the downtown hotel + drinks only (coffee + juice in the morning and sodas + chips in the afternoon) concept.

Lunch
The restaurants around the hotel weren’t ready to receive around 300 people. Subway went out of bread and there was only one waiter at St-Hubert. Next year, we’ll try to get a deal with St-Hubert.

Sponsors
In these tough times, I thought it would be hard to get sponsors but it wasn’t that bad. I think that the trick is to go with small sponsorship fees so it’s a no brainer for sponsors. For payment, I set the whole thing so that sponsors could pay via PayPal. Everyone except one paid that way.  Why do we need sponsors?  Well, we needed to cover for the location of 3 conference rooms, 3 giant screens + 3 projector podiums, coffee + juice in the morning, sodas + chips in the afternoon, photocopies and 100 T-Shirts.  The whole thing ended up costing around $5,200, drinks representing half of that.

Sessions length
This year, I wanted more sessions and more new blood presenting. My first thought was to have 30 minutes sessions but after much deliberation, I settled for 40 minutes. The goal was to have speakers presenting a problem and the best practice to solve that problem. Easy concept but not easy to execute; the speakers being more familiar with 60-75 minutes sessions hated it. It’s also very hard for speakers to cut the fat because we have a tendency to always have too much material. The attendees’ reaction was mixed. I’d say that it was 50%-50%. Next year, we’ll do 50 minutes sessions ;-)

Non technical content
I wanted to try something different: having a non technical session. One speaker presented on how to speed up your reading. A great skill for anyone in our industry since we have to read so much books and documentation. Well, attendees liked it a lot!

First time speakers
Code Camps are ideal for first time speakers but I think it is very important to tell the attendees that some speakers will be speaking in front of an audience for the first time and that they should write constructive comments in their evals.

That’s it!  Hope this helps.