FOSS4G'13: Program Booklet

Program Booklet

Posted by Steven Feldman on June 3, 2013

I have been talking with Barry Hall (who does some design work for Astun) about the program booklet.

He has quoted us between £990 and £1270 to produce some design ideas and take it through to print ready files. The difference is dependent on whether he can scrape the content from our HTML pages and capture styling or whether he has to pull from an excel or similar.

This is the brief I gave him:

"General brief

FOSS4G runs over 5 days (2 days of workshops, relatively small program and 3 full on days of presentations with 8  or 9 parallel streams)

Most info at http://2013.foss4g.org/

Program at http://2013.foss4g.org/
 but not yet timetabled into streams

Workshops athttp://2013.foss4g.org/provisional/workshops.html

Logo guides at http://2013.foss4g.org/Style/

Program booklet

With over 200 workshops and presentations to present we have a challenge in getting all of the info into a format that is useful to the delegates but does not just duplicate the web content. Ideally the program book should help people to choose what sessions they want to attend and navigate around the venue.

Some ideas that we had:

Keep entries very short - title, presenter and organisation and some tags (icon things maybe) plus include a QR code that links to the full abstract on the web site (we will generate the qr codes)

Double page spread of timetable for each of 3 main days

Single page of time table for each workshop day

```
Map of the venue
```

Intro section with 2 short letters of welcome from me and President

Approx 6-7 pages of sponsor adverts

What I need from you

A rough estimate of the cost to:

Produce a couple of design concepts/outlines/mockups/sketches whatever you think is best to get over your ideas

Work up selected concept to fuller detail

rework as necessary on receipt of feedback (only 1 iteration hopefully)

Insert content (will be provided digitally) and complete layout ready for print

conference team to check

Possibly update content approx 4 weeks before event to account for last minute changes

Provide print files"

I recommend that we use Barry to do the work on program booklet, do you all agree?
If so what will be the definitive source of the program text? http://2013.foss4g.org/timetable/ ?
Do we want to use QR codes as discussed?
I have attached 2 layouts (uses workshop content rather than presentations but the principle would be the same). The 2 column layout would allow 8-10 presentations per page including tags and a small QR. What would help would be to get presenters to submit a very short sales/marketing blurb for the presentation limited to 40 or 50 words, is there a smart way to do this online? If not we would need to take the 1st 50 words of their abstract and cut back to full sentences but that is far from ideal. thoughts?

Comments

Rollo Home on June 3, 2013:

Steven

I'd like to think that the programme could be a little bit more than simply a list of when/where's, but could be a souvenir of the event - something nice to keep. Print/paper quality are important aspects of this (but add cost).

Having been to a few conferences recently where the organisation was perhaps 'below par' I've noted most of the failings could have been solved with a more comprehensive programme. Simple things like good mapping of the venue and local geography (a must have *surely* for us?) goes a long way to answering delegates potential questions (being told "it's all on the website" is not helpful, and was generally not true) especially for those who are in foreign country.
Some local information (pubs etc., taxi numbers, how to use the transit system, etc.) as well as conference specific stuff (where is breakfast served? When do I need to check out? etc..) would also be appreciated I'm sure.

One thing that I found very useful at the FIA was that the lanyard had a sub-set of the information (map, main event times, programme overview) included (just bits of punched A6 card clipped on). Very neat. I've tried to find out where this was done, but appears to have been just a printing exercise (as opposed to anything 'lanyard' specific).

This is an important document....

Steven Feldman on June 3, 2013:

Rollo

I agree that the program booklet is important and should act as a takeaway. We can easily add some more general content (beyond welcomes and site maps already covered above) if we wish, it should not make any difference to the design and layout costs (Barry Hall has asked for a word doc of the "other content" we will just make it a bit longer.

I don't want to burden Rollo with another task, is there someone(s) else on the team who will help on the content for the program booklet?

Barry Rowlingson on June 3, 2013:

The 2011 and 2010 booklets are very stylish. Has Barry Hall seen those?

Barend Köbben on June 3, 2013:

The booklet should of course also have maps of Nottingham and the venue. I'm supposed to be a cartographer, so I should be able to make a setup for those. For Nottingham I'd use OSM data to start with, would the local guys have data for the campus and especially the EMCC (floors/rooms)...?

Jo Cook on June 11, 2013:

Barend, that's a good question about the internal plans for EMCC- I floated an idea about doing an indoor-OSM mapping party for the EMCC (to include useful things like power sockets, coffee machines etc) but it never got off the ground. I assume EMCC have some plans we could use- hopefully that we could adapt to fit our style.

Barend Köbben on June 11, 2013:

Again, I'll volunteer to make the maps if I get the data. When we organised the SVGOpen conference in 2005, I made maps of in- and outdoors, and we even had a small pilot with an indoor positioning system using the Wifi APs (http://barendkobben.com/publications/LNGC_WirelessCampusLBS_2006.pdf). Really neat, but setting it up required measuring the absolute location of all the APs and access to the WiFi admin, so I think it's a bridge too far (or rather too late) for Foss4G...

Jeremy Morley on June 11, 2013:

I'll check on internal plans for the venue with Shelley. Note that we have a Logistics meeting with EMCC at EMCC on 5th July so there's some possibility to reify their plans then. But of course we won't exactly know the layout of the marquee till the time, possibly.

Our internal campus mapping is hand-crafted internally from Ordnance Survey (in the School of Geography). I can ask about re-using that mapping (I hacked it myself for the site map in the proposal). The OSM data for the campus is pretty good though (lots of map geeks around!).

Jeremy

Steven Feldman on June 11, 2013:

I haven't seen any objections to the proposal to use the designer so I am going to go ahead unless you shout today

I could do with a volunteer to help with the booklet, particularly any "other content"
BIG HINT

Barend's offer to do the cartomagic is gratefully accepted - will leave to Jeremy to provide source data but probably best to wait until we have had the logistics meeting on 5th July.

We are going to have to trim all of the abstracts to a consistent (and shorter) length. Ideally we would give presenters the chance to submit a more marketing abstract to "sell" their session but the admin may be a nightmare. Ideas? @Barry @Rollo

Barry Rowlingson on June 11, 2013:

I've already asked the programme team in another thread about whether they want to go through any kind of editing process. No response yet!

I could give presentation authors logins and permission to edit their abstracts, but again we'd still have to check formatting, length and maybe grammar, spelling etc.

I will have all the presentations in a database for us all perhaps by the end of the weekend. At this point we could set up an editorial spreadsheet, one row per presentation, one column per reviewer, reviewer edits abstract for online and booklet presentations, adds review date to spreadsheet.

Yes there's 200 or so to do, but if most of us attack it and each pres gets one or two reviews then it shouldn't take us long individually. Reviews done, designer can get details straight from web (with times/dates/session details too).

Need to decide on the length and format for web and print (some people tried to write paragraphs and lists and references in their abstracts - we need to dump all that).

We need a timeline for delivery of all this.

Steven Feldman on June 11, 2013:

OK I think us doing it may be the easiest way in the long run. I can put some time in next week

Antony Scott on June 11, 2013:

Happy to chip in with editing/content creation etc etc over the period Thur 13 – Fri 21. I think we need to go with what we’ve already got, with a bit of copy editing – getting more of people at this stage would be hard as you say...

Abi Page on June 11, 2013:

I am happy to help if I can.
I have the RGS conference programme from last year that I found pretty user friendly, it is A5 size.
The main map was printed on the backcover (no flicking through pages to find it)
The top of each page for the daily programme of sessions had a very clear indicator of the day / time slot to make it easy to find what was on

Maybe I can scan a couple of pages as an example

Rollo Home on June 11, 2013:

Barry - we (you and I) discussed editing the content (as there are spelling mistakes etc.) ahead of publishing the programme. Your thinking at the time was to wait until it was in the database as you weren't sure whether the changes would be picked up? At least that was my understanding of the discussion - so I didn't do anything ;-). Happy to edit when it's appropriate to do so.
One thing that you raised at the time was managing change requests from authors (be it presenter changes or whatever). I've set up a programme 'to do' on basecamp list to help coordinate this on our side, but I was wondering whether we should solicit these changes and/or give a deadline (presumably a print-deadline)