[PS] programming meeting Mon 11/27

[Jack Dietz]

On Nov 22, 2006, at 4:05 PM, Rachel Silber wrote:

> The programming meeting Monday 11/27 will be at my house, in  
> Melrose.  Tem won't be there, but Jack and I will.
>
> We'll start at 7:30, and I plan to end no later than 10 pm.  If  
> there's additional discussion to be held, we'll try to continue on  
> the lists.
>
> The purpose of the meeting is to be ready to go for scheduling  
> sessions at the 12/2 meeting the following Sunday.
> Specific things that I think are on the agenda are:
>
> 1 What's the overall process for getting a rough draft of the  
> schedule done?  What ways can we spread the work around in parallel?
> What Zambia reports do we have, and what do we need?  Do we  
> understand what they are telling us?

The general process is to assign people to program items and program  
items to times and rooms, and continue to modify it until the rooms  
are full and there are no conflicts.

I think that the only way we can do this is by ranking the people and  
the panels, starting with big, fixed-time things and the GoHes and  
gradually populating downward in priority from there.  This will  
involve looking repeatedly at the reports that show people and  
panels, people and times, panels and times, rooms and times, etc; I  
can't see a good 4-d representation of all of this at once without  
going to a huge stickynote fest, and having a laptop party should let  
us trade state verbally.

Last year we tried associating the best people with the panels and  
then the panels with the rooms/times and ended up with overscheduled  
people and lots of conflicts.  With the shrink in programming we  
should have fewer conflicts and less of an urge to put people on 16  
panels.  One problem with a preference ranking for panels is the  
tendency for some participants to assign a 5 (highest) to 20 panels  
because it All Sounds So Cool and thus not give us real feedback;  
this is Not Evident just from looking at the list of people who  
signed up for a given panel.

One way to parallelize this process is to assign different people  
different tracks, with the presumption that we'll have about the same  
number of panels from each track at a given time.  Then we can work  
on optimizing each track, and then worry about the people who cross  
tracks too heavily.

>
> 2. Where are we with participant responses?  What has to be done to  
> get critical mass of responses so we can do scheduling?
> Are there particular people MIA to whom we need to reach out to  
> individually?  What's the process for getting that done?

I think this ties in with 5 directly, plus some inspection of the  
reports to see how many responses we actually have.

>
> 3. How are we handling requests for "special", one-off sessions  
> that are not panels?   What programming items need someone to
> facilitate the details?  Do we need more volunteers to deal with  
> these things?

I think we need to touch base with each of these people right now,  
and first we should make a list of them all because I can remember a  
number of them but I'm not sure I have a handle on all of them.  I'll  
plan on doing that tomorrow.

>
> 4. Do we want to constrain A/V to specific locations in advance of  
> beginning the scheduling process?  Or are we prepared to be
> flexible about where and when A/V can happen?  How many A/V  
> requests can we handle in one programming timeslot,
> both from the points of view of equipment and of people power?
>

Last year restricting A/V to a couple of specific rooms seemed to  
work OK, but instead of having everything permanently set up we were  
still moving the projector and screen around, and our A/V volunteer  
was overworked and fell over.  I think we can be flexible here, since  
we know we have power everywhere, but having back-to-back panels with  
projectors would be a win.

I think 2 panels at a time with projectors is a good limit; I think  
we have 4 MCFI projectors and leaving one for Small Tent and one for  
Video/Anime would be reasonable.  That's something we should bring up  
with Events just so we're all clear on this.


> 5. How can program-staff people help handle the (ever-increasing as  
> the convention gets closer) influx of mail to program at arisia.org?
>

I don't know for sure.  A ticket system would have been nice.  I can  
switch to using 07programs at gmail for responses if that'll make it all  
smoother, but that doesn't scale to having more people answering mail.

> Last but not least, there is a hotel resume deadline approaching at  
> a rapid rate.  A SWAG for hotel, with final information to
> go to hotel based on our our draft schedule on Dec 10 or  
> thereabouts, would be a desireable outcome from this meeting.
>

Sounds good.  I know every time I've felt like I had a picture of  
what rooms we have, somebody promised another couple of rooms to  
someone else.  Getting it all out on paper would be helpful.

Thanks, and see you Monday,

Jack

> Rachel Silber
> _______________________________________________
> program-staff mailing list
> program-staff at arisia.org
> http://arisia.org/mailman/listinfo/program-staff

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