Talks & Scheduling

In 2011 we used sched.org and were more or less happy with it. It has some serious shortcomings but rolling your own won't get any better. It is worth poking around at other tools but for the love of *** just pay and be done with it. Some things that sucked as of Nov 2011 with sched.org:

• You can't edit a talk once it's submitted. We didn't use this for submitting talks because we jumped on the bandwagon too late but I would use it in the future and save time. The ploneconf product has this built in but it still involves transferring text all over. I d
• The mobile version isn't worth the upgrade at this point in time.
• The initial view of the schedule is weird for some people, but you can link to the grid view from your home page.

Those are really the biggies and all things considered that's not so bad. One other thing to note on the talk process. We set up a google moderator account to collect talk ideas and see what people wanted to hear about. This got misconstrued as "submit your talk here" and then people voted on them there like it was a talk. Then there was the real submission and real vote which confused people more. I would carefully consider how you get feedback on which talks people want to see. To see what people were planning on attending in 2011, please see http://2011ploneconference.sched.org/popular

Getting the votes on who likes talks actually helps in planning room space a lot. However, this will be pretty fluid and changing so plan on moving time slots around.

Also, printed schedules were very popular. Don't count them out just because it's 2012.