By the time I went to my first Linux convention in May 1997, I had
been going to science-fiction conventions for twenty years. I
immediately noticed that the people who attend and organize Linux
conventions are much like science-fiction fans; they have similar
interests, strengths, and weaknesses.
I also noticed that, by the standards of SF conventions, hacker-run
gatherings are, well, primitive. SF fans have a continuous
tradition of amateur-run conventions going back sixty years; in that
time, they've forgotten more about how to run conventions than hackers
have yet had time to learn.
In this document, I try to adapt and summarize some of these
techniques for the use of people running Linux and open-source
gatherings. If you apply these, I guarantee you'll give the
customers a better time and be less stressed-out from running things.
If you're looking at HTML through a Web browser, you can download
If you have questions or comments about this document, please feel
free to mail Eric S. Raymond, at
Programming may be what draws people to technical conventions, but the
most important interactions are the spontaneous ones that happen
because you've got a lot of people with similar interests bumping into
each other. The more of these an attendee experiences, the richer his
or her experience will be.
The way to encourage these interactions is to create areas in the
social space that people naturally gravitate to when they have
nothing else to do. Here are two good techniques:
If possible, try to arrange the physical layout of your convention
space so there's one traffic area that people more or less need to
pass through in order to move between program items, the show floor,
and their hotel rooms. Ideally this area should have places to sit
and snack food nearby.
What you're trying to do is make a comfortable place to wait for
events that tends to gather people and promote conversation.
The biggest single design mistake that people who run technical
conventions make is failing to promote after-hours social interaction.
If people just dissipate after dinnertime for lack of a place to find
conversation, that's a sin and a waste. Any SF fan knows that the
really worthwhile stuff at a convention happens between 9:00 PM and
two or three in the morning.
The way to fix this is to have what SF fans call a `con suite' --
a suite or public room open at least from just before the end of daily
programming until early the following morning. At some SF conventions
the con suite never closes.
The con suite should feature lots of places to sit. It should have
sodas and snack food, and perhaps beer. You'll need one or two people
to run it, but this is light duty; it mainly consists of keeping the
snack bowls filled and a bit of cleanup.
Informative signs are vastly more important than people usually
realize. Your event won't work if the attendees and staff can't find
things. It's also important to help attendees form a clear mental map
of what's where which (among other things) tells them where the focal
areas are.
Each program room should have a sign listing its event times. Key locations
like the con suite, convention ops room, and green room
should be signposted. The registration desk should have a large sign
nearby featuring a floorplan of the public areas. Key intersections
in the hall pattern should have this-way/that-way signs pointing to
nearby locations.
Good signs reduce the hour-by-hour friction costs of running the event.
This is so important that there should be one person on staff whose
only pre-convention job is to worry about signage -- to walk through
the space in advance locating and laying out signs, and then making
sure they're printed and erected before the convention opens.
There are lots of things SF fans have learned about how to run
convention programming smoothly. Here are some high points:
To reduce the load on the convention staff, recruit gofers. Ask
convention attendees to help work the convention. Have a signup sheet,
and a gofer monitor who tracks the hours they work. Here are some
uses for gofers:
Every program item needs a room monitor. The room monitor's job is to
make sure AV equipment is in place, route last-minute requests from
the speaker to the con staff, and give the speaker a high-sign five
minutes before the time slot ends.
Typically you want two monitors per program track, alternating. While
one is in the room assisting a speaker, the other is waiting in the
green room for the next speaker.
You also need rovers. A rover is a troubleshooter not assigned to
a specific area. Room monitors can be gofers, but rovers should be
core staff with decision-making authority. Give them radios with
a link to the convention operations room.
At SF conventions it's traditional to have a `green room' which is
a staging area for speakers (the term is borrowed from show business,
in which the green room is where actors wait for their turn on stage).
The green room should have water, snacks, places to sit. But it's
more than a perk for speakers; it's also a way to keep control of
them. Your speakers should be urged to check in at the green room
ten or fifteen minutes before their talk. There they can be met by
their room monitor and escorted to their talk venue.
If you run your green room and your room monitors properly, you'll
find you can avoid the accumulating schedule slippage that's otherwise
common at technical conventions. That never happens at SF conventions.
Another un-obvious friction cost is the time cost of finding people
whose faces you don't know. Often (for the staff) these are people
in special categories like core staff, gofers, speakers, press people, and
vendor reps.
SF fans address this problem with badge ribbons -- one color for core
staff, another for gofers, another for press, etc. This makes it
much easier to scan a room and quickly locate (for example) the core
staff members.
Plan for last-minute panics. It always happens, no matter how hard
you plan for other things. To cope, show up a day early.
Total up all the hours you think are needed for setup, then give
yourselves the extra day.
If you do this, you'll actually have time to print programs, put up
signs, and do all the other little things that you grossly
underestimated the necessary time for. You'll also get a good night's
sleep before the show opening -- that's important.
Finding people whose faces you don't know is also a problem for
attendees. Here are a couple of techniques for addressing this
and supporting other kinds of peer-to-peer communications:
A `voodoo board' is a message drop for attendees. It's a big cork
board covered by a printout of all the pre-registered attendees'
names, with a checkbox next to each. Next to the board, place
a little table bearing a box of push-pins, an index-card-sized filebox
with alphabet dividers, a couple of ballpoint pens, and a bunch of
small memo pads.
Instructions posted above the board should explain how to use it.
When an attendee arrives, he/she should put a check next to his/her
name.
To leave a message, write it on the memo pad and file it in the box
under the initial of the recipient's last name. Then put a push-pin
next to the name.
To check for messages, just look for a push-pin next to your name.
If there is one, retrieve your memo and remove the push-pin.
This setup may be low-tech but it works really well. Ideally, it
should be placed just off the daytime focal area of the convention.
One of the things it does is prevent the rest of your message boards
from getting clogged with person-to-person notices.
Cover a large section of wall with butcher paper. Have felt-tip pens
nearby. Mark the top ``GRAFITTI WALL'' in huge bloob letters. Seed
it with a few jokes and a cartoon. Stand back...
This is a fun hack I saw at Linux Expo '98 that I'm going to import
back to SF fandom. Recognition dots are signals about your interests that
you can attach to your convention badge.
Have an easel or section of wall, again covered with butcher paper,
marked ``RECOGNITION DOTS -- MAKE UP YOUR OWN''. Nearby, have a table
bearing few packets of multicolored gummed-paper dots (all stationery
stores carry these), a several felt-tip pens (again in multiple
colors), and a scissors.
Seed the display with a few pre-designed recognition dots. For
example a red dot with a dollar sign on it might identify Perl fans,
or a blue dot with `P' Python fans. A yellow dot with "MS" underneath
and an international `forbidden' graphic over it might have ``I hate
Microsoft!'' next to it. Or a green dot with "/." on it might be for
Slashdot regulars. Or a big roman-numeral two (for the Second
Amendment) on a blue dot for geeks with guns.
You want to encourage people to design their own dots for
constituencies you didn't think of in advance. People will
get very creative and funny about this given half a chance.
I've seen many technical conventions where the core staff gets run utterly
ragged because they're rushing around fighting fires all the time. SF
fans have found that a lot of this can be prevented by having a
well-designed table of organization.
Such a table has multiple functions. It defines areas of
responsibility, so people know whose job a given task logically is.
It helps pinpoint areas where staffing may be inadequate. And
(perhaps most importantly) it helps the core staff figure out which
jobs can be done by gofers. Gofer hours are cheap compared to core
staff hours; you want to use gofers as far up in your organization as
you can (but no further).
At SF conventions there are generally three tiers of
organization; the convention committee, the core staff, and the
gofers.
The convention committee sometimes incorporates themselves as the directors
of a nonprofit organization formed to run the event; they're the
people legally responsible for the convention. Their main job is to
manage the core staff.
The core staff are volunteers recruited before the convention by the
concom. Core staff have full-time responsibilities at the con.
Gofers (as we've discussed above) are part-time volunteers recruited
at the convention itself. They're the footsoldiers.
The convention committee (or `concom' in fanspeak) are the managers of
the core staff. Here are some of the jobs that belong on the concom:
The buck stops with the con chairperson. The concom votes on policy before
the convention, but at the convention itself the chair's word is
final. He is the chief firefighter and troubleshooter.
It's important that the con chair not have other jobs besides
being con chair. If he does, he will stress out and probably lose the
big picture while chasing lower-level problems.
The vice-chair's job is to backstop the convention chair and stand in for
him if necessary. It is not quite as critical that the vice-chair
have no other jobs, but it is still a good idea to avoid this if
possible.
This position is what technical conventions usually call ``program
chair''. This person is a department head responsible for designing
the convention program, recruiting speakers, and assembling the
program schedule.
The actual printing of the convention booklet is sometimes attached to the
programming department. Otherwise there's a separate concom-level director
of publications.
The chief-of-programming job should not be combined with ops
chief, hotel liaison, or vendor relations.
This person (``ops chief'') is a department head responsible for managing
the core staff at the convention. Operations areas include gofer
management, registration, security, signage, the con suite, management of
AV equipment, and sometimes running (as opposed to planning) the
programming.
This job should not be combined with program chair, hotel
liaison, or vendor relations.
This person is responsible for relations with the convention hotels.
This includes both arranging room blocking before the convention and
dealing with reservation problems and facilities snafus during it.
At large conventions, hotel liaison is a full department with several
core staff attached to the director. This is mainly so at least one
can be on call to handle problems at all hours.
This job should not be combined with ops chief, program
chair, or vendor relations.
This person is responsible for the show floor -- booth sales before
the convention, troubleshooting vendor problems during it.
This job should not be combined with ops chief, program
chair, or hotel liaison.
Core staff are organized into departments, each directed by a concom
member. Some departments (such as hotel liaison at a small con) can be
one-man shows. Others (such as operations) need to be generously staffed.
Again, at the convention itself the core staff should spend most of their
time managing gofers who do the actual legwork. One of the functions of
a ``gopher hole'' room is to provide a labor pool.
If you work too hard, you are not working smart. The practices I've
described are intended to help you work smart.
One thing many hackers have with many SF fans is the combination of poor
socialization with intelligence and a problem-solving attitude. While
the poor socialization can make both kinds of attendees irritating to
deal with, the intelligence and problem-solving attitude means they
also tend to be very productive if you know how to manage them.
Accordingly, work on your communication and persuasion skills -- and use
them to offload as much of the work as possible onto gofers and random
volunteers recruited on the spot. Don't think of this as laziness, think
of it as self-preservation.