Organizing and dealing with booking
Booking
Booking is probably best handled via EventBrite or similar unless the hosting organization has a well tried and tested mechanism of its own. Remember to account for any booking service fees in the conference registration cost. The booking system's mailing list needs to be available as the standard mailing list to delegates. A much appreciated feature of more recent Connect conferences has been the daily email highlighting the day's information. EventBrite provides this facility, if another system is used, a mechanism will need to be found to create a mailing list of delegates (for conference use only) under a single group email address. The Program Committee will also hope for regular updates on bookings in order that they can check registrations for speakers and session leaders. Ideally the system chosen will make it easy for one of them to access this information or to have weekly 'dumps' made for them.
The booking process should ideally include a questionnaire to gather some information essential to future actions, including:
preferred name for badge (so, for example, we get Tom not Thomas), affiliation, and personal pronouns
preferred email address
whether the email address can be shared on the delegate list
T-shirt size and gender (to inform the order and to check against when handing them out at registration)
Any dietary preferences/needs
Any special physical needs (ADA)
It will be useful to have more than one person on the organizing group with access to the (eg) EventBrite booking information. Having only one person able to extract the current booking data is a bottleneck.
For several years now, we have tried to have registration open at the time of the annual Open Repositories conference which many Samverans attend. It is good to be able to tell them that registration is open.
Hotel(s)
Hotel arrangements will ideally be in place when registration opens.
Normally hotels will require that a block booking guarantee a minimum number of rooms and these will be charged for even if unoccupied. There needs to be early agreement on who is organizing the block booking(s) and underwriting the potential cost. The hotel's cancellation policy for the block booking should be clearly understood and agreed to. The ideal (though not a common offer) is that the conference guarantee only a small number of room nights and the hotel then extends the block (with no further guarantees needed) as it fills. Conference publicity can urge people to use the 'conference hotel(s)' but a significant proportion will choose Airbnb or similar.
An alternative approach is to use one or more hotels close to the venue which offer some form of institutional discount and which are prepared to offer this to delegates.
If the conference follows the established pattern, negotiated rates should cover the period from the Saturday night prior to the Saturday night after the event (inclusive) so that travellers can get the benefit of "Saturday night included" cheaper fares where these apply (eg transatlantic).
Web and wiki pages
Delegates and potential delegates will expect to find a gateway to the conference information at connect20xx.samvera.org. However, a website is not a convenient way to handle evolving and somewhat fluid information. The solution employed has been to make the web page(s) very simple with links pointing into the Samvera wiki which is more easily maintained.
The wiki information should be free standing, which is to say that people should be able to access the conference information without necessarily entering through the web presence: to that extent, the wiki will need its own conference 'home' page with links to the same inner pages referenced from the web. Booking information and program information should be clearly separated. In 2019 we broke pages into five sections:
Calls for proposals
Sponsorship information
Location
Booking, and
Program
Additionally, the web page offered a 'contact us' link which generated an email sent to connect@samvera.org