conference organizing distribution

I was on the "Ecosystem" track session selection team for Drupalcon London, which motivated me to finally do some more analysis on the traditional pre-selection session voting. Specifically, I wanted to compare the votes a session receives against the evaluations submitted after the conference.

By the way, if you have the opportunity, I highly suggest going to a Drupalcon; they are always great events.

Here are some conclusions based on analysis of the evaluation and voting data from DrupalCon Chicago:

• Voting was not a useful predictor of high quality sessions!
• The pre-selected sessions did not fare better in terms of evaluation than the other sessions (though they may have served a secondary goal of getting attendees to sign up earlier).
• We should re-evaluate how we do panels. They tend to get lower scores in the evaluation.
• The number of evaluations submitted increased 10% compared to San Francisco, which seems great (Larry Garfield theorizes it is related to the mobile app, I think there are a lot of factors involved)

Is voting a good way to judge conference session submissions?

Drupalcon has historically used a voting and committee system for session selection that is pretty common. This is also the default workflow for sites based on the Conference Organizing Distribution.

Typical system:

1. Users register on the site
2. They propose sessions (and usually there is a session submission cutoff date before voting)
3. Voting begins: people (sometimes registered users, sometimes limited to attendees) can vote on their favorite sessions
4. During steps 2 and 3, a session selection committee is encouraging submissions and contacting the session proposers to improve their session descriptions

We're excited to announce that COD Beta1 has been released and is loaded with great new features, including:

• Enhanced conference administration menu
• Automated sponsorship sales
• Birds of a Feather scheduling tool
• Automated speaker confirmation and contact
• More granular control over the event registration workflow
• Ability to collect profile information for free events
• Session editing for multiple speakers
• Improved attendee check-in
• Better Ubercart reporting for purchased registrations
• Integration with RegOnline and Etouches

You can read more about these features on UseCOD.com.

In May, I had the pleasure of attending the IXDA NYC's "redUX", showcasing some of the talks from Interaction 11 conference earlier this year (where possible, I've linked to the video from the Interaction 11 session).

Ray DeLaPena (@rayraydel) did an excellent writeup of the talks in Big Apple Redux Recap, so I'm going to focus on the talks that I could relate to the most (and they were the ones where I captured the most notes).

Marketing is not a 4 Letter Word by Megan Grocki

[video]

Many folks, particularly designers and developers, have a negative reaction to the word "marketing".

Megan says, "Marketing is like matchmaking". You want people to know about your work, your portfolio, your company or your product. It's a nice little ecosystem where something that is well designed gets promoted, and then you're more likely to get more work like it.

Who is doing marketing right? The Disney experience is immersive and enchanting and when you get home, they remind you to book your next trip! Netflix has great branding and also immersive. It's pretty easy to spend ages in their site rating, reviewing and being shown suggestions for things you might like. I agree with both those examples. Megan also cited Zipcar as a product with excellent user experience.

A routine branding exercise went awry early Friday in Brooklyn when Growing Venture Solutions performed a "mind map" exercise to aid in the creation of logos for two of their flagship products, the Scout hosted sercurity review service and COD, the Conference Organizing Distribution for Drupal.

"Connecting to the unintellectualized, visceral, gut responses we get from each logo helps us maximize branding potential so that we can produce marketing collateral that's sure to engage members of our target market segments, helping them to connect to each brand at an emotional level, which results in increased conversions" said social media expert Robert H. McJellyPants. He added, "Tachyon converter beam subspace electron resonance tuning."

Unfortunately, while exercise participants were discussing their friendly, communal associations with schools of smiling fish in the COD logo, as well as some of the more stern, defensive associations evoked by the Scout owl logo, the owl took flight and picked up the fish, instantly crushing the fish's vital internal organs with its beak.

Illustration by Carl Wiedemann.

Needless to say, participants were horrified at the sudden attack by the owl but impressed by its swift, decisive action in the face of what the owl saw as a potential security risk to its personal website, SupercuteCatsWearingWigsandSmallDressesTailoredEspciallyforCatsNoThisisnotajoke.com/website.

This year's European Drupal conference has sadly come and gone. Ezra Gildesgame, Ben Jeavons, Lisa Rex and Carl Weidemann were in Copenhagen representing Growing Venture Solutions. Here are a few of our highlights. Links to the videos will be added when they are available.

Theme Preprocess Functions

Carl presented Theme Preprocess Functions: an Introduction, where he showed a packed room how to bring and flexibility into the hands of the themer. Preprocess functions are a key component of Drupal theming and when first learned, open up a whole new world of possibility. Carl received some positive feedback on the session and hopes to continue to give it at future conferences, adapting it to stay current with future versions of Drupal.

COD (Conference Organizing Distribution)

Ezra (our COD ringleader) and Ben co-presented Building Conference & Event Websites in Drupal with COD, with Lisa there to lend support. COD is a Drupal distrubution for building event websites.

Drupalcamp Atlanta recently launched their new site for the 2010 Camp. I reviewed some of their features and found it to be a solid site. As the GVS team increases our focus on selling events with Drupal, I wanted to hear more about the backend of the site. So, I got in touch with Brent Ratliff who was the lead developer on the site, to find out how the site was built.

Adding Signups and Payment to an Event Site: UC Signup

In 2009, the site was a standard build relying mostly on Views and content types. For 2010 they needed all of the features from the previous year but also needed to charge an entry fee for the event, for individual sponsorships, as well as the ability to submit and vote on sessions. The Atlanta Drupal Users Group decided to base their 2010 site on the acclaimed 2009 Drupalcamp LA site that was released as a zip file. The LA code, updated with new module releases, handled the voting, some nice Views, helpful theme functions, context, and some of the "attendee logic," but not the e-commerce portion. Brent was familiar with using the UC Node Checkout module for building an event site, but ultimately decided to go with the Ubercart Signup integration module along with Rules and custom hooks to handle workflow. UC_Signup allows them to collect profile information from users during checkout and helps keep track of attendees using the Signup module. They also grant roles to users based on which products they have purchased.