arbcamp planning non-summary: lunch, Kai Garden, Nov 21 2008

Ten of us met for lunch at Kai Garden on Friday, Nov 21 to help plan Arbcamp, which is coming up the evening of December 18, 2008 in Ann Arbor.  I had the Mongolian beef and egg drop soup; Dug ordered a round of scallion pancakes.

Here's a summary (or not).

Dug Song summed up the discussion at the end including:

Schedule: how the event will be structured, how much time we have, how many parallel tracks can happen, how to accomodate both short "lightning" style talks and longer sessions, how to wrap up at the end.  Conflicts and issues with UM end of term and students leaving town.

Resources: space, projectors, white boards, sticky notes, flip charts, markers, and other kinds of writing materials; name badges; food, a venue for an afterparty, give aways, etc.

Sponsorship: event budget, who is the fiduciary (if any), what actually costs money to get done, what kind of money would help, how to acknowledge non-money sponsors, etc.

Public relations: continuity with previous Arbcamp event, getting the word out among personal networks, media relations, blog relations, mailing lists for outreach, connections outside the immediate area.

Contingency planning; with 40 registered attendees already for an event in a venue that houses 100, what are reasonable ways to deal with the case where more people want to come than there's space for them?

Goals, explicit and implicit: number of attendees, whatever happens is the only thing that could have happened, looking ahead to future events (an a2b3 conference, a publishing focused event, another arbcamp, Library Camp, Ignite!, etc), community organizing.

Who was there, clockwise:

Dug Song - founder of a2geeks, vp engineering at Zattoo
Jonathan Duty - SW engineer, Zattoo
Marshall Weir - UM student, intern at Zattoo
Matt Pizzimenti - Coffee House Coders
Zach Steindler - Coffee House Coders
Edward Vielmetti - "I organize lunch", a2b3, organizer of first Library Camp
Jonathan Cohen - research scientist, NVIDIA; computer graphics Academy Award winner
Kevin Dangoor - python developer
Mark Ramm - python developer

Other resources mentioned w/links to Arborwiki or direct as appropriate:

Zattoo
Mark Maynard interview of Dug Song
Hathaway's Hideaway
Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation
a2geeks
Coffee House Coders
a2b3
Library Camp

Next planning lunch in two weeks: Friday, December 5, 2008, Kai Garden.

Comments

[l.m.orchard]

Thanks for the update - I was hoping to make it to this, but alas didn't. Maybe I'll make the next one

[TeacherPatti]

Oh, I'm glad you are working on this, Ed! I am planning to go.

I want my husband to work at Zattoo--they sound awesome.