User:Sonkiki/Hackathons/handbook/Manage Participants

Registration
The registration is a big task. In many cases, the registration form it will be the only time when participants interact with you before the actual event. Therefore, it's crucial that you invest time to think about what you want to know from participants, before you open the registration. E.g.: If you are planning on running the Mentoring Program, you should ask for who wants to be a mentor, and who is a newcomer.

Using multiple registration forms instead of one
As a lessons learned from WMAT (Wikimedia Hackathon 2017 Vienna), the organizers suggest using three registration forms instead of one. The reason: This way, you get a much more manageable spreadsheet. If you have all the info in one big spreadsheet, it can be difficult to work with it.
 * 1) Scholarships: Not all the people who apply for a scholarship will be able to come to the hackathon. Open form before the actual Hackathon registration!
 * 2) Hackathon registration
 * 3) Accommodation: Not all the people who register for a hackathon want accommodation. If you put it in a separate form, people will be more aware that this is a separate point that they (if they aren't sent from a chapter and don't have a scholarship) have to pay for it themselves.

Additional questions to consider
During the registration processing, some additional questions may need to be asked to eased the process for persons attending the conference, some examples may include; Be sure to leave a blank field, where participants can approach you with needs like this.
 * Requesting a Certificate of Attendance to be provided

When to close the registration?
Some organizers close the registration about a month in advance of the event, others leave it open until the day before.

Make sure you communicate your registration deadline very clearly! It is certain that you will have last-minute requests from people who forgot about the registration deadline. Prepare for this, and figure out a process in your organizer team how to deal with these last-minute requests.

Scholarships
Lessons from WMFR Organizer:
 * Ask every chapter to send ppl to the hackathon with scholarships
 * Committee with the stake holders (i.e. the chapters that contributed money or material to the hackathon)
 * Registration form
 * French form with link to CiviCRM was error prone
 * Registration wizards with several steps (split them up thematically)
 * 45 people applied for scholarship, 40 were admitted
 * Flights for scholarship recipients organised by WMFR
 * Should be organised by a travel agency

Coordinate with other chapters
There are not just the central WMF scholarships, but also scholarships from each chapter. As a hackathon host, you have to coordinate closely with other chapters. Some chapters pay for travel costs themselves, and the host pays for accomodation and gets their money back from chapter after the event. Either way, it is important that you establish a process for this.

Visa
As a host, you will have do help participants get visas. Each (host) country has different processes, so make sure to know how your country's process works well in advance, before you even open the scholarship registration.

WMAT gathered the information about 2 months in advance. This helped a lot because things always get stressful in the end with last minute registrations/ participants.

Public Transportation
Ideally hackathons allow people to travel to and from the airport and around the host city for free. WMDE and WMCH were able to work with their local governments / transportation agencies and find ways to provide attendees with hackathon name badges that also included public transportation passes. WMCH even was able to email these passes out in advance of the event. Whenever possible, we like to spare costs to event attendees.

Accommodation
Who shares a room with whom? Assigning rooms to participants will take some of your time. You have to work closely with the venue. Even if you give the task mostly over to the people at the venue/ hotel, participants will still approach you with requests and questions. Be sure to allow some time for this task and have one person who clearly owns this task and is responsible for this in your team.

Payment process for participants
Prepare PayPal invoices and mail them to the participants who didn't get a scholarship and pay for the accommodation themselves. If a person is unresponsive and/or does not pay, you can send the invoice to the chapter associated with that participant, and ask them to cover the cost, and/ or reach out to the participant in question.