DrupalCampToronto organizing notes

We had the second organizers’ meeting for DrupalCampToronto 2009 today. I started a number of Google Documents for keeping track of minutes and tasks, and I also shared the sponsorship letter I’d revised extensively. One of the organizers mentioned that he had already found the letter useful. Hooray!

What worked well:

  • Asking someone else to take minutes made it clear that minutes are a rotating duty, which is good because it gets more people to pay attention and contribute, and it’ll help me see other ways of doing things.
  • Sharing all the documents through Google Docs made it easy to see changes in real-time and track the revision history. The interface was also more fluid than typical wikis.

What can work even better next time:

  • Task management – I’ve set up a Google spreadsheet for quickly capturing tasks, but there should be a better way to do this so that people can easily filter the tasks. BasecampHQ would be interesting, but it’s expensive and probably overkill. Maybe Manymoon?
  • Document management – I’ve shared each of the Google docs with the mailing list, and I’ll share more protected documents with individual people. It would be good to put together a central workplace.
  • Next meeting – We decided on the rhythm of meetings (every other Monday, same time, same place), but that would’ve probably been better to do earlier in the agenda rather than at the end, after another Drupal-related discussion.
  • Food – Gotta get better at nudging David @linuxcaffe to nudge _us_ about ordering the specials… =) He’s a great guy, Linuxcaffe is such a nice venue, and I’d like to make sure it works out well for everyone. It’s easy to forget to order and eat when the conversation’s flowing, but you end up starving when things are done!
  • Tables – a gap between tables is a good thing, so people can get in and out easily. =)

Learning more about organizing events… Cool!

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