[Scale-planning] Expo Pass

Mon Mar 6 23:43:26 UTC 2017

Sadly, I missed SCALE this year -- you guys are making me all nostalgic
and stuff. :)

I'll just add a comment: any changes to badges which reflect different
levels of admission are not going to make a single whit of difference
unless you add door/area monitors. Trust me, I've been the conference
chair of several very large conferences, and this is an issue I've dealt
with time and time again.

Speakers do not want to call out attendees who shouldn't in their rooms.
Even when we gave them full carte blanche to enforce the rules, they
just wouldn't do it. We asked why, and the most common answer is that
they didn't want to look like an asshole in front of the other
attendees. No matter how you cut it, the speakers end up looking like
the bad guy, and that affects their mood, their audience's mood, and
ultimately your presentations.

You can have roving monitors who look for folks with the wrong badge and
gently remind them, but that doesn't do much in the long run. The only
solution that ever worked was to have entrance monitors who watch for
correct badges. And yes, this definitely adds a fair amount of overhead.

We did run with a compromise solution for many years, and that was to
take volunteers from the attendees, and have them sign up as an
"ambassador" for 2-3 sessions. Their job was to stand by the door of the
room at the designated time and check for proper badges. When the
presentation was to start, they went up to the lectern and read a
pre-placed biographical introduction to the audience, and that was it.

In practice, this worked out really well. The speakers had someone who
kept them on schedule, who did a nice little intro, and who made sure
people in the audience had handouts. The ambassadors liked it because
they got to wear a neat little blue "ambassador" flag on their badge,
and we invited them to a cozy little "welcome" session prior to the
start of the conference, with some little snacks and such. This made
them feel special, and after a year or two, this caught on and we always
had more than enough ambassadors. The benefit to us, as the conference
committee, was that we didn't have to hire or find door monitors. Since
the ambassadors were pulled from the attendees themselves, they did our
work for us.

It's something you might want to consider, if you intend to more
strictly enforce the badge issue.

Thanks,
Bruce

On 2017-03-06 14:40, Anthony Chow wrote:

> I was passing out the SCALEx15 t-shirt  at the Expo Hall on Saturday.  There was a lady who wanted a T-shirt but she does not even have a badge.  Wonder how she could get into the Expo Hall. 
> 
> I think color code the badge for Full Conference and Expo Hall Only is a good start.  This may not fix the problem entirely but we can apply the Defence-in-Depth principle to this problem i.e. this will help some what.
> 
> Anthony. 
> 
> On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 2:07 PM, Caryl Bigenho <cbigenho at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hi Folks! 
>> 
>> Great show! I'm not surprised to learn about the people misusing the Expo Only passes. It is sad that they would do that, but it is a real problem! Would it be possible to make the "Expo Only" badges more evident? Every way I can think of would be pretty complex... different art work, or maybe "Expo Only" in Red instead of black. Or how about a different font for the and larger print for the "Expo Only" type? Even that would be a bit complex. Maybe just a different color lanyard?   
>> 
>> Also on the topic of badges... If the name badge part of the print out could take up 2 adjacent regions so it could be folded in half and the name could be seen from both sides it would solve the problem of 50% of the people wearing badges that show as blank white cards (the back of the name card). It is nice to be able to speak to people by their names, but half the time it isn't possible (unless you already know them... but maybe you haven't seem them for a while and can't remember their names?). If this is done, the fold should be on the lower edge of the badge for easy insertion into the badge holder. 
>> 
>> Caryl 
>> 
>> P.S. One of my booth volunteers actually went back and paid for a full pass because he felt he wasn't going to do enough in our booth to deserve full admission. As it turned out, he was a big help, especially on Sunday when several of us had to go over to the OSSIE track and he filled in admirably ... overcoming his shyness to really relate to the people who were stopping by and asking questions. 
>> 
>> -------------------------
>> 
>> FROM: Scale-planning <scale-planning-bounces at lists.linuxfests.org> on behalf of Mx Siltanen <mrsiltanen at gmail.com>
>> SENT: Monday, March 6, 2017 1:35:12 PM
>> TO: SCALE Planning List
>> SUBJECT: [Scale-planning] Expo Pass 
>> 
>> FYI - 
>> 
>> Clearly a number of people were purchasing the expo pass to attend the presentations: 
>> 
>> "I friend told me that the expo pass is cheaper, I think it's $20, I don't know what it's limitations are. The talks I saw today were fantastic, total" 
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