Workshop organizing guide (#489)

_data/sidebars/community_sidebar.yaml

@@ -42,6 +42,10 @@ entries:
     - title: Workshop 2020
       url: /precice-workshop-2020.html
       output: web
+
+    - title: Organizing
+      url: /precice-workshop-organizing.html
+      output: web
 
   - title: preCICE minisymposia
     output: web

pages/community/precice-workshop-organizing.md

@@ -0,0 +1,122 @@
+---
+title: Organizing a preCICE workshop
+keywords: precice workshop, workshop
+summary:
+permalink: precice-workshop-organizing.html
+toc: true
+---
+
+While the preCICE workshop lasts a week, it takes several months of preparation to make it successful. In this preparation, the complete preCICE team plays an active role, while the event management role rotates, to integrate different perspectives and to distribute the load. In cases where this makes sense, we organize the workshop together with local user groups, opening further networking opportunities for the community.
+
+In this page, we document common steps and lessons learned, aiming to make onboarding of new organizers easier. Besides, who remembers what material the registration desk needed last year, if we cannot even remember what we had for lunch?
+
+## First urgent steps
+
+Do these steps as soon as possible, as other major steps depend on them.
+
+### Set and advertise a date
+
+Decide on a place and date before the previous year's workshop, so that this can be announced to the current participants.
+
+Factors that typically contribute to a date decision:
+
+- Venue availability
+- Lecture-free periods
+- School holidays
+- Overlap with other related conferences (check, e.g., ECCOMAS, IACM, SIAM)
+
+Once finalized, a "save the date" entry should be listed immediately on:
+
+- the preCICE website (news banner, community overview, first dummy page of the workshop)
+- the preCICE forum
+- the social media platforms that preCICE is active on
+
+### Find a venue
+
+If not at the same time as the date announcement, decide on a venue, and book rooms as soon as possible after that. Depending on the local workflows and availability, room booking requests might need to be done more than six months ahead, so aim to book at least the main room at the time that the venue is decided.
+
+Typical room requirements:
+
+- Fitting around 50 people (but not much larger than that)
+- For the hands-on training course and the user support sessions: easy access at every seat, (collaborative) working surface, enough power sockets, stable internet connection
+- For the talks: good acoustics and visibility, recording infrastructure
+- For the world café: (standing) tables, placed far from each other, isolated from noisy areas of the building
+- For the catering: ideally next to the rooms, isolated, standing
+
+With "recording infrastructure", we mean infrastructure to capture the speaker audio+video, slides, and an additional microphone in separate stream (a meeting camera system is typically not fitting the purpose). We can provide specialized hardware to do the mixing of these channels into what you later see as recordings on YouTube, if this is not already available in the room.
+
+The rooms for the training and the talks are typically different, even if the schedule is typically structured as a single track. The catering and the world café can typically use the same room and tables, but reusing the collaborative working room for the world café is also fine.
+
+### Define financing scheme
+
+Typically, the workshop is co-funded by participation fees. An important dependency for subsequent steps is which entity can collect and process such participation fees. This might be an association supporting scientific activities, an event management unit of a university, or an external company. The setup should allow to model an income to reinvest into maintaining preCICE.
+
+Multiple types of tickets are typically defined:
+
+- early -vs- late registration
+- full price -vs- discount for academia
+- training course included -vs- only main part of the workshop
+
+In addition, free registration is accounted for:
+
+- holders of a [support license](community-support-precice.html#2-support-license)
+- invited speakers
+- organizers (if possible)
+- special cases
+
+Finally, account for a number of travel grants (at least for the invited speakers), if possible.
+
+### Set milestones
+
+Set clear responsible persons for each task, and track progress in a collaborative project board.
+
+Important dates to set:
+
+- "save the date" announcement: one year ahead
+- call for contributions (needs a form): open six months ahead. An early call mainly acts as advertisement and helps participants that need a visa application to travel.
+- open registration (needs a form): the earlier the better, and useful as a concrete action when advertising.
+- abstract submission deadline and contribution acceptance: the earlier the better, typically before the early-bird registration deadline. Aim for 3-4 months before the workshop, to facilitate the visa process. The contribution acceptance can be as short as one week after the deadline.
+- early-bird registration deadline: important for estimating the number of participants, driven by the catering requirements.
+- request catering offers: typically 3-4 months before the workshop.
+- reserve tables for the workshop dinner: typically 3-4 months before the workshop.
+- late registration deadline: typically 2-3 weeks before the workshop, to give an accurate number of participants to the caterer.
+
+## Registration infrastructure
+
+Two forms are mainly needed, and it is easier if they are decoupled: an abstract submission form, and a registration form.
+
+The abstract submission form should collect:
+
+- Kind of contribution (talk or poster, if offered)
+- Presenter
+- Authors
+- Affiliations
+- Contact email
+- Title
+- Abstract (plain text, max 1500 chars including spaces)
+- A disclaimer that, if accepted and the presenter registers, this information is going to appear on the website
+
+This form can be implemented in any survey tool. Live access to the data by the preCICE team would be helpful, to understand where further advertising might be needed.
+
+The registration form should collect:
+
+- Name
+- Affiliation
+- Billing address (depending on the financial setup)
+- Contact email
+- Dates/modules that one plans to attend:
+  - Training course
+  - Main workshop
+  - Dinner
+  - User support session (if the only event of the day)
+  - Potential other social events
+- Dietary restrictions
+- Permission to include contact details in a participants list distributed to the participants
+- A disclaimer that photos are going to be taken on site and will be used for advertising
+- Potential questions of interest for the workshop (particular topics of interest, goals)
+
+This form is typically implemented by the local organizers. Payments including invoices or receipts could be part of the process or separate.
+
+After submitting either form, the applicant should get an automatic confirmation (feature not available in some tools, e.g., Nextcloud), which includes information on how to pay the registration fee.
+
+On-site registration is typically not planned or advertised, but can be handled in small numbers.