2016/Colophon

A en:Colophon is a "a brief statement containing information about the publication of a book ," but is also used by some to describe the process of how things got done. That's what this is, as Wikiconference NA 2016 has become larger and larger, to the point where various technical methods and tools really became necessary to pull it off. This page attempts to document many of these, in case it's useful for future planners.

Introduction

• Most of our work was done on Google Docs and Spreadsheets
• Submissions for sessions were solicited on the wikiconference.org wiki.
  • Pros:
  • Cons:
• A scheduling grid was laid out in Google Docs, and was converted using Mediawiki Table Utility. That didn't work out so well. So because Wikiconference wiki does not have Visual Editor, it was laid out in en.wikipedia.org in a Sandbox and copy/pasted over.
  • We added colored tags to each session to help highlight major themes of each session.

Meetings

• We scheduled a standing meeting twice a week:
  • Tuesday at 9pm for the whole team, which would up being 12-15 people each week
  • Thursday at 9pm for programming committee, which was around 3-5 people each week
  • We used Google Hangouts, which has a limit of 10, but Google Apps for Work via Wikimedia DC allowed for more (25?)

Communications

• Facebook group, private - Wikiconference North America Planning
• Facebook Messenger
• Slack group for wikiconference.slack.com introduced on September 15 to be more inclusive
  • We created a Google apps script to update a Slack channel everytime we received an Accept/Decline response from the folks we emailed about submissions
• Zello for PTT at the conference

Lessons

Fails

• Need to double check