Alternatives to upcoming and wiki for tracking participants...

[jesse....@openaid.org]

Upcoming and/or wiki editing isn't meeting the needs of many potential
BarCampBankSeattle participants. Does anybody have a low-friction
tool for event sign-up and tracking?

[Tara Hunt]

Some camps have used Eventbrite.com successfully. You can even charge a small fee (sometimes $15 will ensure that people come after signing up)

Tara

www.citizenagency.com)
blog: www.horsepigcow.com
phone: 415-694-1951
fax: 415-727-5335

[Eric Skiff]

PodCampBoston2 is using EventBrite and we're looking at it for PodCampNYC2 as well.

Alternatively, you could create a simple php/mysql webform or even use something like wufoo to generate a form with the exact data you want to collect.

Going into PodCampNYC2, we're going to be using more of these systems, but we're working to build in the immediate "I'm part of this" payoff that you get from editing the wiki. When people sign up to attend or speak, we want that reflected in the site right away.

-Eric

On 6/19/07, jesse....@openaid.org <jesse....@openaid.org > wrote:

--
Eric Skiff
http://clipmarks.com
718-809-8692

Blog    : http://GlitchNYC.com
Podcast : http://AlternativeMusicShow.com
Puppets!: http://FeltUpTV.com

[Tantek Çelik]

On 6/19/07 8:04 AM, "jesse....@openaid.org" <jesse....@openaid.org>
wrote:

>
> Upcoming and/or wiki editing isn't meeting the needs of many potential
> BarCampBankSeattle participants. Does anybody have a low-friction
> tool for event sign-up and tracking?

While I can understand that wiki editing can be a bit more "geeky" (as
evidenced by only the millions of geeks who have edited Wikipedia and other
wikis), I find it hard to imagine a *lower* friction tool for indicating
event sign-up than a single radio button click (upcoming).

I'd challenge you to come up with a user interface for indicating event
participation that is lower friction than that. And if you do, I'd say you
have a decent startup on your hands ;)

Tantek

[Tara Hunt]

Oh...I've also used Confabb.com for signing up to a few "un"conferences lately that has been pretty nice. You can even put the sessions in there and have people rate them, establishing the BarCampers as speakers.

Tara

--
tara 'miss rogue' hunt
co-founder & CMO
Citizen Agency (www.citizenagency.com)

[Tara Hunt]

Some would say it is TOO low friction as evidenced by the poor signup to attendee ratio. Putting your name on a wiki is low committal...kind of a drop it there and forget about it for some. It may show big numbers (for BarCampSF, for instance, there were over 350 names there), but results in poor planning (we ended up with so much leftover food, I could have cried - what a waste!). I wrote a post on the phenomenon of lowering the barriers to entry too much and getting high ratios of 'drive by' visitors to actual dedicated community members the other day and got back oodles of anecdotes from people who have experienced the same.

Is volume our goal? Nope. Engaged, excited people are our goal (or mine, anyway). If someone can't take the 2 minutes it takes to sign themselves up to Eventbrite, I highly doubt they will take their entire weekend to come to my event.

It would be interesting to hear from the wider BarCamp experience on this one. Ratios? What did you use? Have you had more than 1 BC and used various tools?

And Tantek, remember that you are ALWAYS a special case. ;)

Tara

[amy seidenwurm]

I've really enjoyed using Wufoo for events. It is more of a form engine than an invite, but it will get you a lot more information about attendees and makes cool charts for you as well.

On 6/19/07, jesse....@openaid.org <jesse....@openaid.org > wrote:

[Marc Nathan]

The BarCamp Houston Team is using the wiki for our second round of planning, but quite frankly we're only doing it because of a conscious effort not to strictly use email which has been our default system.

I met the founder of this company, www.openteams.com, a structured 3-pane wiki designed for corporate collaboration a few weeks ago at another unconference (www.opencoffeeclub.org ) that might work for barcamp planning. OpenCoffee Club itself is using www.ning.com, but there are lots of bottlenecks with that for collaborative planning.

I know that PodCamp Boston 2 is using www.eventbrite.com to handle their event registration and promotion which seems pretty effective for those specific tasks.

Marc Nathan
m...@bulldogfinancial.com
713-569-3703
Skype, IM & Social Networks: marc1919
blog: www.bulldogfinancial.com/bullblog

[Adam Helweh]

I have used Event Wax (www.eventwax.com) with decent results. Last I saw it
was free.

Adam Helweh

Secret Sushi Creative - Deliciously Creative Design & Marketing

Phone: (408) 625-0637
Email: Ad...@Secretsushi.com
Site: www.secretsushi.com
Blog: www.secretsushibites.com

[Scott M. Stolz / WisTex]

I'm not sure what you mean by low-friction. But one suggestion would
be meetup.com. While not perfect, it does have a number of features
that other websites don't have, such as simple message boards, e-mail
discussion lists with archive on website, RSVP for events, e-mail
reminders automatically sent out to those who RSVPed Yes or Maybe, the
ability of the organizer to send out e-mails to the group, etc.

http://edtech.meetup.com/26/
http://www.barcamp.org/BarCampHouston

Scott

On Jun 19, 10:04 am, "jesse.robb...@openaid.org"

[heather...@gmail.com]

We used wufoo for BarcampLA 2 and 3. I thought it worked great -
collected email, you can ask specific questions (volunteer &
sponsorship) and you can embed it in a page (like the wiki).

http://wufoo.com/

I highly suggest it.

-Heather

On Jun 19, 8:04 am, "jesse.robb...@openaid.org"

[Chris Messina]

Looks like PBWiki now supports embedding Eventbrite:

http://blog.pbwiki.com/?p=208

Pretty decent!

Chris

--
Chris Messina
Citizen Provocateur &
Open Source Advocate-at-Large
Work: http://citizenagency.com
Blog: http://factoryjoe.com/blog
Cell: 412 225-1051
Skype: factoryjoe
This email is: [ ] bloggable [X] ask first [ ] private

[Corsin Camichel]

Wow, this is really nice.
Anybody know if Eventbride has an API? Would be interested in writing
a Mediawiki extension for that.

On 6/20/07, Chris Messina <chris....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Looks like PBWiki now supports embedding Eventbrite:
>
> http://blog.pbwiki.com/?p=208
>
> Pretty decent!
>
> Chris
>

--
Corsin Camichel
coc...@gmail.com
Blog http://cocaman.ch/wp/
BarCampSwitzerland http://barcamp.ch
Play Free Sudoku http://www.ProperSudoku.com
Send Free SMS http://www.ProperSMS.com

[Matt Mullenweg]

For my birthday party last year I just created a custom page template
for WordPress, the comments became the RSVP. I can shoot you the
template if you like.

--
Matt Mullenweg
http://photomatt.net | http://wordpress.org
http://automattic.com | http://akismet.com

[Jesse Robbins]

Thanks all, I set up something using eventbrite.

-Jesse

[Ben Askins]

We just ran an event in Australia, Rails Camp, where we used Event Wax
(http://eventwax.com) to handle registrations. I couldn't recommend
the service highly enough. Very simple and flexible.

I'll post a little more on Rails Camp later.

cheers,
Ben

[Dave Brondsema]

For BarCampGrandRapids this year and last year we wrote a simple PHP
form that writes registration info to a text file that the organizers
can check. Upon a new registrant, I manually add them to our mailing
list. It is live at http://gr-jug.org/barcamp/

On Jun 19, 10:04 am, "jesse.robb...@openaid.org"