Hackathons/Handbook/Event Interviews

'''**THIS PAGE IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. PLEASE DO NOT SHARE THE LINK AROUND AS THOSE INTERVIEWED WILL GET A FIRST PASS AT REVIEW BEFORE THIS IS ACTIVELY SHARED.'''** This message will be removed after review. (Please feel free to edit for typos. :)

All content on this page is from interviews with the 20 event organizers listed in the footnotes. See our hackathon guide for more event organization tips, programs and ideas.

This page is the result of a Mozilla Open Leaders project.

Safe Spaces
Codes of Conduct, Participant Guidelines, inclusion & event safety

Logistics
Signs
 * Our “Safety team” is there from the beginning of the weekend to the end. They provide emotional safety support and are physical safety first responders. This team of people came out of the participants asking for this resource.  (2)
 * Having a large safety team is important because you can’t ask volunteers to go through the entire conference on duty. They should also be allowed to experience the event and have the space to breathe and take a break. (2)
 * Have a physical location or a room for the safety team to take reports and interact with participants. As an event offers more safety resources you will get more requests for support. (2)
 * We have safety officers. There are multiple ways to contact them. One is associated with Mozilla, and one not. They are different genders. (7)
 * Online in our slack communities. Participation guidelines are pinned to the top of the channel. A bot sends the guidelines right away when you join slack. (6)
 * The Code of Conduct alias is active all year round. Anyone can email the alias which goes to the set of people who can help. (10)
 * Set up a mobile based chat that allows people on your Safe Spaces team to easily find and communicate with each other. (20)
 * Special emergency telegram channel for organizers who would deal with any issues. (3)
 * We did a poster version of the Friendly Space Policy, Our main conference room had small round tables so we put a poster on each table. (8)


 * Put posters all over the event with a shorter version of the Friendly Space Policy, photos of the people who could take reports, and an email address and phone number to call. Both men and women identified to take reports. (3)
 * MozFest participation guidelines are printed in large format on every space floor and translated into 7 languages (6)
 * Print out copies of your policy and have them at reception to people who missed reading it before showing up to the event. You need to communicate the policies in multiple places to ensure that no one can claim missing it. (20)

Training
For your response team For your participants
 * The safety team coordinators have been trained in transformative justice, de-escalating conflict and mediation. We trail our entire safety team and require that they have some previous training and experience. (2)
 * Hold in-person briefings to those on call for reports. What does it mean to be on call? Go over possible scenarios. (5)
 * We have safe space training modules, most of our volunteers do the training modules in advance (8)
 * Choose your safe spaces team both based on previous experience and training and also based on trust and reputation within your communities. Provide new training as needed and sync up with your team both by email and in person before the event starts. The team should help define and make changes to the reporting process as needed at each event. (20)
 * Before the event we have an online hangout where we go through everything with volunteers to train them. Volunteers make sure that anyone reporting is safe and then hand them off to the duty officer who has more training. (11)
 * Devise a clean avenue of engagement so people are clear on how to help each other and extending the resource into the night time activities. (2)
 * Train participants in the 4 Principles of a safe space: 1) Equalize the space. 2) Check your assumptions. 3) The right to be human. 4) practice consensual dialogue. (4)

Prevention

 * Don’t want to turn everyone into police. Make sure people can assume good intent. Help people to not jump to assumptions that someone is harassing especially with cultural differences.  (1)
 * You should change you participant guidelines for each event that you run, adapt it to your audience.  (1)
 * When there is an expected tough workshop or conversation the Safety Team will pre-stage there.  (2)
 * We co-created list of positive behaviors at event with attendees. We also listed behaviors we don’t want to see. This was a small-group icebreaker activity and each submitted the lists of behaviors on Mentee. (8)
 * When the event opens organizer read the entire policy outloud to all participants at the event. In a serious voice. Formal speech. Serious issue and please take is seriously. (3)
 * Our code of conduct is part of the registration process (5)
 * Attendees are aware of Participant Guidelines before they arrive. We do things ahead of time and update the website year round. Participant Guidelines are change to be event specific. We Tweet them out on social media and email the to every participant who has bought a ticket. (6)
 * At the opening of the event we asked one of the participants to do short story about how she had used the Friendly Space Policy as a support when she had felt harassment. I wanted to do this because I hear people questioning “I have never seen harassment - why are we wasting time and resources on this”(8)
 * We provide safety tips depending on where we are in the world with local knowledge on how to stay safe. (10)
 * We had a duty officer available at all times at the registration table in the main lobby. They stood out by not only having a specific role separating them from the rest of the organizers and volunteers in helping attendees feel safe, but also by their easily identifiable orange shirt.(11)
 * You need to help people remember to be safe and welcoming. Teach community about micro-aggressions and remind them that is not what they want to be doing. Anyone registered to our conference gets added to an online community forum. People can add their own examples. Creating a resource together. All attendees get pointed to this resource.(14)
 * Post your Safe Spaces team’s photos on your events page and identify them in-person at the opening of your event. You should also indicate multiple ways to report (in person, by chat, by phone, by email, by email after the event). (20)
 * I would recommend that organizers don’t just stop at making people aware of the Friendly Space Policy, they need to actually make sure that people know where to go to and who to go to.  (17)

Taking Reports and Responding to Problems

 * We provide a private  office space where people can give reports in case someone is uncomfortable.  (17)
 * How do you solve the “happy hour” problem? This is the unsolved problem. You can take alcohol out of the equation, or spread people out throughout the room who can pay attention for any issues. You will need someone who is willing to confront people, but they need to do it away from the group and begin with questioning and understanding the situation. Make sure the data that was reported is correct. “Were you in this situation?” and “Did this happen?”   (1)
 * Organizers need to have a conversation with someone first before reacting to the report. In the majority of the time offense was not intended. (11)
 * We created an incident response plan to go with the Code of Conduct (14)
 * Three people on event staff should discuss any issues before any decisions are made (3)
 * Except in the case of serious emergencies, the Friendly Space team discusses in a private chat and agree upon the next best steps. That way one person’s biases are not dominating the results.  (20)
 * Before you take action it is usually important to run your plan by the reporting party / target to make sure their are comfortable with your approach and decision. (20)
 * All reports should be written up and kept. If the person is at the event on behalf of their employer you should consider reporting serious incidents to their organizations HR team or their direct manager. (20)
 * If there is one person who is being a jerk, kick them out and notify the event. “We need to let everyone know that we had to remove someone from the event, we take this seriously.”  Helps people follow the rules. (1)

Cultural Considerations

 * Code of conducts can be tone deaf and can create a false sense of security. They are written to presume that people are going to violate them.  The collective ethic is more important. You should communicate that we are here taking care of each other, ask participants to be a collective part of the solution.  (1)
 * The development of having friendly space policies comes from the USA. in The USA it is taken much more seriously. It is politicized there. In Europe it is much more recent. People are still kind of learning what this actually means. People are still kind of reasonable. I would try to keep a kind of balance. I trust people that they are able to have normal conversations with each other. Maybe people can work issue out among themselves before conference staff. In 10 years FSP will be standard in german events but for now it feels strange to germans. (3)
 * It was suggested to have our own friendly space policy for the German speaking groups.
 * American ways of describing or identifying race and ethnicity is an important issue because we never use the term” race.” The Friendly Space Policy needs to be adapted to the surrounding and context instead of using the American model. If I was to organize a german-only conference I would spend more time on contextualizing and adapting it. (3)
 * MozFest also adheres to Mozilla's general code of conduct which was developed by communities around the world. Even for our event’s shortened version we cleared it with an international group. (6)
 * Safe Space policy is part of the Wikimedia Foundation project but it’s not like the Indian way of doing things, here there are a lot of subcultures. Everyone agrees that more diversity is needed. But writing down a code of conduct that works for everyone in India is not easy (9)
 * It's not just a translation, it’s something we came up with. It was more positively framed and less formulated as prohibitions and rules. We wanted to communicate positively that “this is for you.” (16)
 * In many cases people from outside the United States or who do not belong to a minority group have significant trouble understanding the need for having a Code of Conduct or a Friendly Space Policy. It is important to engage them in conversation and explain instead of reacting negatively to them. Having clear examples of past situations can help to illustrate. (20)
 * The Friendly Space Policy is mostly generic enough, but we also need to bring a bit more local context. When we organized WikiIndaba in 2014 the LGBT community was only starting to be recognized in our country and we had to explain what it means to be friendly. We had to be explicit. (17)
 * Code of Conduct and Friendly Space policies are North American. The language and the way of speaking is foreign. What do you mean when you are listing these things? It is better for events in different countries to create their own policies with more cultural context. I would have liked to use ours.  (8)

Inclusion

 * Language is a deciding factor in india. English becomes the preferred language so there is no favoritism. Hindi people who are not fluent in English can have someone who is good at both English and Hindi translating for them. (9)


 * Detailed note taking and sessions summaries for those who do not speak english as a first language or who are not physically able to be at your event (20)


 * Concept of a mouth: Someone can serve as a mouth for somebody else. Some people don’t want to ask a question in front of a large group. Participants can write something on a paper and then someone else will ask it. (16)
 * Pronoun ribbons for badges. Educate them in advance - and encourage everyone to participate. “This is the norm here at our event” Try not to “other anyone.”(14)
 * This work is hard to start because you feel like you are doing everything wrong. Its OK and you can’t do everything right and that is understood. You have to show commitment and show action. For us I think a lot of this work has helped  make us who we are and be successful. Anything that we have is owed to diversity and inclusion work. (12)
 * It’s not just about saying you have a CoC at the beginning of the event and then having nothing but white men present for the rest of the event. This makes your CoC less meaningful because you show you are not a place that shows by action that you value different perspectives. (12)
 * We are creating space and time for people from different backgrounds to come together and work together. How does it speak to different groups? The communities we want to serve are represented on the stage. Diversity inclusion lense is brought to every piece of the work, we are designing from the ground up as best as we can. (12)
 * We like highlighting diverse, early career voices, while complementing them with leading experts, (12)
 * We work hard to try and identify people with mobility issues, some of our participants are in wheelchairs or crutches. We connect with them in advance and the venue staff can show them easy ways to get through the building. (11)
 * Having quiet/silent woking rooms for participants who are introverted or need to get away from noise and socialising has been appreciated. This is especially important if your venue is far from your event’s hotel. (20)
 * We do captioning for some of the theaters. Someone who attended who was deaf so we connected with him ahead of time and got a list of sessions that he was interested in and all of those sessions were in a room with captioning. (11)
 * We have a mothers room - private room where people can do breast-pumping and has a fridge. 3-4 mothers using it this year - they became friends. We have assistive listening devices. Main theater or some of the other rooms. We make feminine products available in the women's room. These things send a signal to attendees and people with other needs. (11)

Philosophy / Other

 * Safe space goes beyond physical safety, extends into how are you experiencing the conference. How much of your opinion and vision can show up in that space.(2)
 * Participant and social media guidelines, are about honoring the place that we are in, the people already in the place doing the work, collective genius. It's important to go back to the intentional root. It is really had to create a safe space as an addendum. The consideration of that means comes after the creation of that space. We change ours every year. (2)
 * Parties are the most stressful for organizers (in terms of safe space enforcement) (3)
 * We renamed it the “Policy for Friendly meeting” to “Guidelines for inclusive meetings” This communicates that we want to have an inclusive meeting - then we can define how do we actually include each other. This was divided into “why do we need inclusive meetings” and “How is this connected to the diversity policy”. Then we have a list of “how to include each other” and “how to make everyone’s contributions valuable” and then it has some paragraphs about harassment (8)
 * There was no room for anyone to question why we want to have inclusive communities. This is at the core of what we are doing. (8)
 * The work of creating a safe space and helping attendees to feeling included starts way before the event actually happens and continues quite significantly after the event (dealing with cases . working through things). This is a significant allocation of time spent dealing with issues that come up. We don’t think this is because we are a nasty community but because we do so much work in this area - encouraging people to report - we end up with a lot to deal with. (12)
 * A lot of the Safe Spaces work requires a team effort but also a lot of inward reflection, analysis and personal growth. For most people, the process of learning how to create safe and inclusive spaces require those people to look internally as well, which is not very easy. We don’t talk about this enough externally but it’s good for event organizers to talk about. (12)
 * (Creating a Safe Space) Sometimes changing the thing that you are and really looking deeply at understanding what you are doing and the structure that you are building will be uncomfortable and involve changing significant parts of what you do. We understand deeply what we are trying to do and are mindful. This is a process that event organizers who are less mindful don’t always see. (12)
 * We have seen that the community feels special to people who are generally marginalized because we pay attention to this (Safe Spaces), even if we don’t always get it right there is clearly a focus. Starting this work is difficult because you realize how complex the problem is, how many mistakes you have made and how much there is left to do. (12)
 * Code of Conducts make some people feel uncomfortable and this is something to recognize. When privileged people who don’t feel like they need protection all of a sudden having rules of how they can conduct themselves. This can cause anxiety. Any mistake can make you feel guilty and worry. (12)
 * We didn’t have any reports made during our conference. However, we are aware that this is not necessarily a measure of success, and that the attention of events organizers should be focused on providing a safe atmosphere during a conference, to make sure that no problematic behavior happens. (19)
 * A motivation for creating your own policy: if you come up with your own policy you need to more actively engage in the whole topic. If you just sign off on someone else's policy then you don’t think about it as much. (16)

Pre-Event Engagement
Encourage participant excitement, planning and participation before your event starts

Outreach and Motivation

 * Google Summer of Code does not start until March but we do outreach all year. Outreach to students. Former students do outreach in their communities. Have flyers, slide decks, videos, etc. as resources for students to share. (13)
 * Participate in other events that take place before yours. Suggest or send our speakers to their events. Send speakers around to different cities in the region. Spread the word. (15)
 * Go to cities other and talk at conferences. Get teachers at universities to spread the word. (13)
 * Word of mouth is the best method. Someone telling the story of “This changed my life” is the best way to spread the word. (13)
 * Previous students help with outreach. It is self motivated and happens naturally. We see people participating because their friend did it or their brother or neighbor gained skills from the program. Finding passion they did not realize that they had. (13)
 * For specific session types, certain demographics are most likely to sign up so we reach out actively to others so they know that they are welcome. In a participant driven meeting all participants feel like they can create a space at the meeting and feel like they are welcome to. (12)
 * Some people just go in for the t-shirt but stay because of the experience / motivating experience. (13)
 * Provide resources for participants on how to get their job to send them to the conference or to find other funding. (2)

Communicate and sharing about the event

 * Before the event identify outcomes, build narrative that buttresses the outcome. We have done “x”, we have not done “y”, here is what you can do. Tell the story: How did we get here? Where are we trying to go? How does this event get us there? What can you do?  (1)
 * Publish the tracks or themes as early as possible. Themes are published 7 months before the conference. So people can already think about what this means and what kind of event they might be attending. (3)
 * Short, quick and informative videos. People don’t like to read documentation.(13)
 * One of the design principles of OpenCon - “3 days event does not begin on day 1 and does not end of day 3” The year round work is resourced more heavily than the year round meeting. (12)
 * The week before the event we had daily emails to everyone including the different ways to engage before the event. Suggesting different kinds to sessions they can do. Signing up and taking part in a workshop. Get to know the topic and how you would be taking it on. We did ad-hoc webcasts. Open education webcast. Design thinking webcast in response to what people wanted and we happened to have a slidedeck. (12)
 * Send only one thoughtful and simple email a week to attendees leading up to the conference   (5)
 * Make sure people attending understand  the main topics and think about them before. Make sure that they get  authority from your organization to make statements and decisions on the topics. (3)
 * Post photos of keynotes, the organizing team, the program committee and of past events to help give people a sense of what the event will be like and who might be there (20)

Pre-Events

 * Webinars online in advance of the conference. Presenter guidelines, set a baseline for the event. We are excited that you are coming! (2)
 * MozFest House is a pre-week event. It is a real opportunity to develop the event further. It is a week long in a different venue. It allows for: longer conversations, hackathons, meetups. (6)
 * Community calls with participants, work hard at getting new people to say ANYTHING. A word. Hello. Intros. The first barrier to contributing is the first time talking. Lesson there: create opportunities to find others. (12)
 * Organize small local/regional preparation meetings before the conference. People who are not attending the main conference can send others to the conference on a mission with something to do. (16)
 * Many small regional pre-hackathons or connected events in advance of our large yearly hackathon (20)
 * People participating in pre-event collaboration are “time privileged people” and those people may set a tone for the event that you are not looking for or take up a lot of space. Front-line hardworking people are not likely to have much time to pre-engage.  (1)

Session and schedule preparation

 * Many online programs lead to MozFest and everything ended at MozFest. “Your project is your session” (7)
 * Community call with all session organizers on the phone (5)
 * Many attendees at MozFest are facilitators. A few months in advance - the building traction. Github discussion through the summer after the call for proposals are closed. (6)
 * Sessions are selected or rejected or mergee. We tweak them to make them more participatory, help session leaders frame ideas.  Space wranglers help refine everything.
 * When the curation is finished in September then there is a whole lot of facilitator training. Guidebook, workshops, trainings. 1:1 coaching. (6)
 * Try to avoid bringing to many people into the decision making. Don’t have an open call for “what do you want to do at the conference” this can causes more chaos than anything else.
 * Program Committee should making decisions. Program Committee members can help by preparing participants for the conference and prepare for quality participation. (8)
 * We tried to really reach out to people in advance, directly asked people or teams to run this skill sharing sessions. (8)
 * More preparation will be done if people need to work together. If people run sessions alone they are more likely to wait until the night before or the day of (20)
 * Work with user groups and put out a call for papers and attendees. Open source community groups share the same vision. We rely on the organizers of other groups to find papers and topics for us. (15)
 * We have a Content Team who organizes our call for speakers. They prepare and detailed topics that we are looking for. They reference how we would like the speakers to do their submissions. They connect with people and experts to improve their topics.
 * Everyone on the content team is technical and each person on the team is in charge of a different area (15)

Tasks

 * Reading list which is editable by participants and has relevant books for each topics of the event. Pre-event “airplane reading” (4)
 * Presenters might say “in order to get the most out of this sessions, read this article first” (14)
 * We came up with technical tasks (example: set up mediawiki locally and send a screenshot.) Only those that completed this task or had a good attempt were invited to the conference. Showed commitment. (18)
 * During the application process people have to propose a project. Which was an improvement on just inviting people who were well known community members. People who were invited ended up spending the day figuring out what they were going to do. People who applied with a project already put thought into it. (7)

Individual Support / 1 on 1

 * Before the event, email each participant of the event individually and ask them questions. It is both  for your understanding, helps with participant buy in and is a negotiation between yourself and the participants. This can be done for events even up to 300 people and the time up front is worth the effort. Questions: Here are the event goals, do they look right? What is going to make your time at this event well spent? (this is the critical question) What should we talk about? What do you think we are going to argue about? Do you have any questions or concerns?  (1)


 * Mandatory questions about event intentions included in registration. (3)
 * When people register, ask them: “is there a project you want to work on”. (7)
 * Ask participants in advance: “what do you expect to take home with you?” Get the attendees own perception. Some of them were a particular strategy or tool. The people, the relationships, the network. (5)
 * Get on the phone with influencers and problem cases.  (1)
 * The the Open Con starts is when you are accepted. A bunch of people reach out to you and try to get you to think about what your goals are. Have conversations. We follow up with people who don’t do the pre-meeting activities. (12)
 * Travel is booked by people who attended the meeting. The first person you communicate with is the travel person and we want this person to be not an external agency but someone from “the family” so we control communications even more. (12)
 * Have an easy way for participants to ask the organizers questions. Talk page, chat group, organizers email list, etc. (20)
 * How to prepare people in advance is really hard question because people have different working styles (5)

Communication among participants

 * Telegram group talking to each other two weeks before the conference. Works really well. They answer questions to each other that the organizers would otherwise need to answer. (3)
 * Connecting newcomers and experienced ones. Match them based on the registration form. They can already start talking before the conference.
 * They meet in person the evening before the conference.
 * Buddy system - overwhelming support and approval. Everyone said that they would do it again (3)
 * Create a user profile in Sked so that participants can share details about themselves with other participants. (4)
 * Ask for user names, interests, IRC nicks in registration. Ask for permission share these details among participants. (20)
 * "Let’s all introduce ourselves." This thread runs throughout the whole event. (14)
 * Things to do in the city thread where participants can self organize sightseeing.  (14)
 * Our post event survey indicated that the facebook group have been opened sooner. (8)
 * Connecting people in advance on facebook. People can use it do things like to make plans, schedule informal gatherings and see who else is coming from their hometown. (2)

Building Excitement

 * To some extent pre-conference engagement is post conference engagement. We will have people excited from last year who keep the excitement up. (10)
 * Speaker series helps attract interest - share speakers in the early fall and get people thinking about how they can participate. (6)
 * People were excited about sightseeing - biggest thing that they were excited about. Organizers helped plan sightseeing and the event team built an extra day into the conference for that. (17)

Communication
Communicating with your participants or helping them to communicate with each other

Social Media

 * Use social media to allow people to tell their stories and then uplift their ideas. (2)
 * Twitter is very popular. Once the curation closes we see a lot of people tweeting their session times and screenshotting things. See people connecting (6)
 * Social media / emailings add pictures of swag.(16)
 * Sharing news about the logos we designed, the goodies, etc. was also very engaging on the social networks. (19)
 * We do a lot of social media, and do it differently in different country throughout SE Asia or Asia. There are many popular channels and different countries are big on different social medias. (15)

Chats

 * We had a fest wide slack - we started it later than we wanted to. More community moderation needed. (6)
 * Slack moderators: Main moderators are thoughtful, it takes months to get up and running. They need lots of experience to encourage help good communication. (7)
 * Slack has been the game changer for us. It is one of the biggest things that has changed the conference for the better and allows people to find other people that they have shared interest with and make plans. We open that up 3-4 weeks before the conference. We delay as long as we can - because we need to monitor/moderate it. (11)
 * Low barrier communications channels. Telegram group before the event. (16)
 * Organizers attend multiple events together. DebConf, FOSDEM, etc. We spend lots of time together on IRC where there is low key running commentary on life throughout the year. You bond because there is a low key containing presentence.  (10)

Other

 * Now we do nightly emails about what is going to happen the next day. (12)
 * Events should have a # and a wikimedia commons category (20)
 * We use different communications with different types of people. Identify newcomers and divide people into cohorts. Categories: New, not new but not involved, rock stars. Outreach to those different groups differently. (12)
 * This etherpad lists and signups creates a light way for people to connect. (5)

Co-creating events
Empower and work with your attendees to make a better event for everyone

Cultural sharing

 * Sticker swap (14)
 * Coffee Hacking statons: people bring coffee from their homes to share and teach people how to make it. There is a year round etherpad where people can list and discuss what they are planing to bring. (5)
 * People bring games from their home to share at pre-conference event. Also added to etherpad (5)
 * Attendee organized outings and social events organized on etherpad (5)
 * Cheese and wine is a big tradition - gained a life of its own. This has turned into a big cultural exchange. (10)

Event flexibility

 * We welcomed all spontaneous initiatives, for example this volunteer that proposed to create balloons sculptures during the event. I said yes, encouraged him, provided the material for him, and found some other volunteers to help him achieving his task.  (19)
 * Organizers spend most of the time making changes on the fly at the event. (6)
 * Emergent sessions - if you turn up and you want to continue a conversation or keep a session going you can. (6)
 * Physically changes spaces to accommodate needs and sessions. (6)
 * Lots of activities - lots of people doing different things. Artists, music, young people. Needs overlap or clash so always helping people get what they need (6)
 * Supply table full of stickers, post its, colors, note pads, etc. for participants to use as needed (20)

Volunteering

 * Physical sign up board for “things to do Friday night” organized and lead by attendees (5)
 * It’s possible when you are mentally expecting smaller number of participants and you want a higher level of commitment. Large events are about how well you know your audience.
 * One thing I have found common - committees are 10-12 strong but only 4-5 of them are actually involved. (9)
 * In some countries it is illegal to give specific jobs to volunteers / foreigners. Anything related to health, safety, first-aid or directing people within venues(17)
 * Many participants want to help, have easy pre-designated options for them to choose from during registration and at the conference itself: write a blog, take and upload photos, welcome newcomers, session documentation. (20)

Un-conference style sessions / spaces

 * Developer Rooms are unscheduled please where people can carry on the conversation with a smaller group. Facilitate a space where people have have these conversations. (15)
 * Birds of a feather lunch: People suggest topics and each topic gets a table. This help people with finding places to sit at lunch. (14)
 * Organizers hosted our own unconference session at our event about helping people get started with the “do-athon.” It was a help session but we also used this as a session to listen to participants. Where was the event connecting with people and where was it not connecting with people? We sat doing mid event and made changes to the “do-athon” program.  (12)
 * If people can’t find people to work with or could not use Github we had time where we could help. (12)
 * We put up blank table signs and markers so that people can indicate what they are working on or talking about making it easier for others to join in (20)
 * All event work is done by volunteering participants and their families. We hold a cheese event and serve a ton of cheese. This helps to engage +1s (partners / kids, etc) people can becomes “Cheese mistress”  (10)

Measuring Success
Metrics and measurements to show that your event was a success

Qualitative

 * Survey: did you start or join an initiative at the conference ? This means at least there was a constant exchange. Did you make new friends? These are kind of vanity metrics. (3)
 * The hardest to measure but best is trying to understand  what grows out of the festival? Startups? Projects? Inspiration for projects? Work open? Stories. (6)
 * People self reporting what they learned in surveys. (7)
 * Stories and anecdotes - interview series on the Mozilla blog.(7)
 * Showing a positive learning curve, take-aways, and measuring if people would come again. These are the best metrics for organization and external stakeholders. (16)
 * Ones that we really care about: Impact stories. Loose collection of types of outputs. Where we can draw that directly to something we have done. Where others draw a connection to something that we did for them or with them. Sometimes this is whole organizations being founded and growing. Sometimes it is someone having a really meaningful change in their outlook on a problem or on themselves. Sometimes people go and working on a policy and it getting accepted. All shapes and sizes. We don’t have an internal definition - we will take anything that is an impact story (12)
 * In our feedback surveys we ask lots of optional-to-answer open ended questions about improving various parts of our event and how new programs should be improved. The responses to these questions have had major impact in re-shaping our events over time. (20)
 * In our feedback surveys we always ask who at the event (or which sessions) should be recognized for their hard or good work or participation and especially when a person is mentioned multiple times we send personalized emails with quotes to that person thanking them for their contribution and impact (20)

Quantitative

 * Metrics: Race, Gender, number of small news organizations in attendance (5)
 * The number of participants does not have to grow. It’s not always a measure of success. (6)
 * Success measures: Range in voices / Diversity. People that change roles. Atendee -> facilitator -> space wrangler. People come back and reinvent in the festival in a new capacity. (6)
 * Reports. How many commits were there? How many patch sets were pushed? Our hackathon for beginners and is different than usual hackathons because we are looking at code contributions, not to build something shiny. (18)
 * Indicators: Number of attendees and speakers. Number of people coming from communities in major cities. (We try to connect with as many communities in asia as possible.) Members of leading communities. The number of businesses and enterprises. (15)
 * Award for the hackathon & press coverage. Can show that to sponsors. Anything that sheds a positive light or positive image to stakeholders. (16)
 * Validating numbers: the number of tweets and impressions. 180 people involved in the application process. 100 alum helped to curate. 5,000 people have attended Open Con branded events in the last few years. 600 people have been to community calls in the last 6 months and they are from X backgrounds and most of them comeback. Etc.  (12)
 * When talking to funders - we use a lot of numbers. Tweets show excitement generated at the event and how far it reaches out. These numbers exist year round. (12)
 * We always like to end our feedback surveys with the questions (ranked 1-5) "attending this event was worth my time" and "I would like to attend this event next year" and track these statistics year-to-year (20)
 * Every final report we have has statistics. Some of them are quite joke-y. For example in 2016 we had “how many people arrived with blue hair how many people left with blue hair,” “People brought this much booze to the cheese and wine event” “People consumed this many dinners” (10)

Event Follow-Up
Assign action items, support efforts and give feedback to participants and speakers

Post Event Engagement
Use your event as a catalyst, encouraging participation and enabling work after the event ends

Mentoring Programs
Help grow your communities bench depth with mentoring and buddy programs

Newcomer Support
Help newcomers to feel comfortable, welcome and ready to participate at your event