[group-organizers] tools for volunteer conferences

[Brad Allen]

For PyTexas last year, we relied on a MoinMoin wiki for nearly
everything which worked well for many things we needed to do. This
year for PyTexas, I plan to continue to use the wiki, but find more
suitable alternatives for particular use cases.

* Registration: that was awkward for registration and didn't join
easily to survey data. Jeremy Kelley and Josh Marshall built the
conTroll web app during the PyCon 2011 sprints to create a more useful
registration system.

* To-do lists: I've found the GTD system to be useful for my own to-do
lists, but haven't yet evaluated tools that support GTD for groups.
Any suggestions? I'm planning to dig through some GTD resource lists
(such as http://mashable.com/2009/01/29/getting-things-done/).

* Event scheduling software: the wiki was somewhat tedious. PyCon
scheduling used a custom web app, as well as a mobile conference
scheduling app called The Conventionist (now renamed to GuideBook).
Since GuideBook is now free (thanks to Jeremy Kelley for discovering
that), I plan to use that.

* Publicity: We'll continue with blogging, email, and twitter. However
I suspect I'll need to explore creating some kind of advertisement on
Facebook; several people have told me we can expand the audience that
way. We'll also want to post our event date on http://techvenue.com/.

* Attendee live discussion/note-taking: IRC is the old standby, and
Convore was fun to use during the last PyCon. I imagine we'll do both
for PyTexas this year.

* Tracking sponsor relationships: This list is semi-private and shared
in a Google docs spreadsheet, accessible only to our sponsor
coordinators.


Any thoughts on these ideas?