[Eg-oversight-board] Final conference thoughts

[Grace Dunbar]

I thought it might be useful to provide my suggestions for the Evergreen
conference and changes we may want to consider for the future.  Apologies
in advance if this is either rambling or redundant, or both.

The conference operates on thin margins.
Every year the conference committee is confident (perhaps overly confident)
that this year they will increase attendance numbers and increase
sponsorships.  The problem is that we can't increase our sponsorships
without increasing our attendance.  And our attendees who increase our
numbers are generally just employees of a library in an existing
consortia.  This exact complaint was brought up by multiple vendors -
essentially, the Evergreen conference is really only between 8 and 10
"clients" and having more circ or cataloging staff attendees at the
conference doesn't increase their ROI.  And that's fair.

And the attendees who can increase our numbers (local staff) seem to want
very specifically targeted information related to them at the conference.
The conference surveys have been pretty clear that end-user staff want and
expect *training* from the conference.  But that hasn't traditionally been
the aim of the conference, nor can we reliably provide that since the
programs are solicited from volunteers in the community. Also complicating
things for "training" on Evergreen features is that Evergreen is so
customizable that "training" or explanations of how to use certain features
may not jive with local policy for their consortia or library system.
Regardless, I believe we can, to some extent, provide that kind of training
in the pre-conference sessions.  However, we will need to be very selective
in the process of recruiting the pre-conference presenters (trainers) if
we're going to try to actively meet that need.

Also, I firmly believe that the conference should make money for the
project.  With that money, the project can provide outreach, build
infrastructure, and promote the community.  We want to provide a good
conference with stellar programs and a welcoming environment.  But the
conference is also for building relationships, allowing developers and
community leaders to conduct business and brainstorm, as well as providing
space for the EOB, committees, and interest groups to meet.  IOW, we're
trying to meet a lot of needs and there needs to be balance - we can't make
everyone happy all the time.  If you look at the breakdown of attendees,
systems administrators and developers are roughly 1/3, end-users are
roughly 1/3, and admin/consortia leaders are roughly 1/3.  Those are all
stakeholders that are important but their needs are very different.

To reduce overhead for the conference and to try to give *everyone* the
best experience we should at least look at making some changes. Based off
of my experience and the results of conference surveys, I have some
suggestions for changes to the structure and the sponsorships.
Note that the proposed reduction of the conference to two tracks had wide
support in the survey and the track reduction and changes to
pre-conferences and when/where IGs, etc. meet, should reduce the overhead
for costs associated with meeting rooms, A/V, signage, labor, etc.
See attached doc for details.

Thanks for sticking with the rambling...
And as always, this is just a suggestion based on my experience - I leave
it to y'all to decide what to take away from the information and what
direction to go.

Cheers!
Grace
p.s. Exhibitor and attendee surveys also attached.  For anyone who prefers
visual representations, just let me know and I can share the Google form
with you.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://list.evergreen-ils.org/pipermail/eg-oversight-board/attachments/20170523/ba9516c9/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Evergreen Conference Scheduling and Sponsorship Suggestions.docx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document
Size: 236300 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://list.evergreen-ils.org/pipermail/eg-oversight-board/attachments/20170523/ba9516c9/attachment-0001.docx>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 2017 Evergreen Conference Attendee Survey (Responses)(1).xlsx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
Size: 23956 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://list.evergreen-ils.org/pipermail/eg-oversight-board/attachments/20170523/ba9516c9/attachment-0002.xlsx>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Exhibitor Survey Evergreen 2017 (Responses).xlsx
Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet
Size: 5412 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://list.evergreen-ils.org/pipermail/eg-oversight-board/attachments/20170523/ba9516c9/attachment-0003.xlsx>