Week 2 Review
Hello all! I had a pretty good week here. Here are the main points
Informational interview with Marty Haught
I had a really good conversation with Marty Haught. He has a ton of experience organizing conferences and I thoroughly enjoyed talking about venues, budgeting, speakers and more. He gave me a ton to think about and I now have even more questions. It got me even more excited to speak to more conference organizers and see their perspectives. Special thank you to Marty for being the first person to respond to me and being so generous with his time and knowledge.
Great quotes from the interview:
- “when you think about the event, what’s the purpose of it? What are you trying to accomplish with it? What are the goals? And then from a programming standpoint, how do you meet those goals?”
Takeaways:
- Guides and scholars has had a big impact. Can I do something similar?
- I need to get more knowledge on possibly creating an entity for the event and figure out how taxes will work.
- Sponsors and venue are two of the biggest things I need to tackle first
Planning Blog
I got a very simple foundation going for my planning blog. I used a jekyll theme called Chirpy and I am really liking it so far. Took me a bit to get used to how it works and figure out how to customize it but I think it is going to really help me get something concrete out there fast without doing a bunch of programming (which I love but takes time and effort that I should be spending elsewhere). It is almost ready to go public with but in order to announce it to the world I need to figure out some socials stuff.
Ruby Central Community Slack
I didn’t know this existed until this week and wow what a great resource. I will definitely be reaching out to people on here to see if I can get more informational interviews from other regional conference organizers. I wanted to try to get two informational interviews in per week and I didn’t reach that this week so I need to get more creative about how I am reaching out.
The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker
Marty suggested this book in our interview and I just started it today but I am already enjoying it and it is getting my brain going on conference mode. I have never really read anything about organizing events like this so I am excited to see what other books are out there after I finish this one. I get a lot of ideas from reading so this is a good thing to do that I didn’t really think of until Marty suggested it. Thanks Marty!