30 min. or 50 min.
Assume we have 1 hour blocks, and would like to give people 10-15 minutes to get to their next session. This gives them time to digest their last session, digest a snack, get a drink of water, or prepare for their presentation.
Short sessions will be scheduled for 30 minutes. We ask that people get let out at least 5 minutes early to get situated for their next session.
Longer sessions get 1 hour, but it’s really 45-50min. We ask that people get out without creating a stampede of Drupal-fans rushing out since they are late for their next session.
If there are sessions that really need 1.5hrs, we will determine if that can be accommodated. No promises.
how many should we pick?
First off, I love the picks idea, and that it will (maybe?) make a schedule for you once the final topics are settled – that would be awesome.
In the past, I’ve voted for sessions I was not interested in attending – stuff I thought would be good for the camp to have for example. So I could just vote for all the ones I thought were cool.
For this one, I’m really trying to stick to my picks – ones that I would definitely go see if they make it. So how many should I pick? I would guess 10-15? Some will end up as 30 min talks, and not all will be selected. Maybe we should give the users some guidelines on this?
We should improve the calendaring+picks system
Here’s what we can do to improve this system, and I’m writing this down here so that when we begin work on the SANDcamp site, I won’t forget to make this change.
Attendees are ‘required’ to pick some sessions in advance by indicating sessions that they’d be interested in attending. Presenters are looking to see if their session becomes ‘popular’ enough to get a presentation slot.
Presentation slots are assumed to be 8 per day (for sake of argument). Attendees have already indicated that they will be coming either Sat, Sun, or Both days. Thus, if an attendee were attending for both days, they’d have 16 ‘picks’ to fill.
So, to handle this UI in a cohesive manner, we allow each attendee to ‘pick’ sessions from either the Views page display, the Node itself, or the Node Teaser on a Presenter’s bio. In any case, their picks get added to a block which follows them around the site in any Session space, and this block is displaying a truncated version of the node’s title + the PickedIt icon, plus a decrementing counter showing the number of ‘picks’ they have left. Pick another session, and your max picks gets one deducted. Unpick a session, and it goes back up, all the way to 16 again.