JT Smith

The organizers of the past few conferences gave us some good data and some great advice, but prior to YAPC in Madison, there has been very little infrastructure handed down from one organizer to another. As we go into the home stretch before YAPC::NA 2012, our team will give a wealth of infrastructure to the next YAPC::NA organizers, whomever they may be. To them we leave behind:

• A standard domain: yapcna.org. It is short, easy to remember, and specific to our conference.
• A Facebook Page with >100 built-in followers.
• A Twitter account with >100 built-in followers.
• An RSS feed with >100 built-in subscribers.
• blog.yapcna.org, which is not only full of content, but which has been integrated into blogs.perl.org, the YAPC mailing list, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, RSS, email subscriptions, and Ironman Perl.
• www.yapcna.org, (hosted by Plain Black) which is full of great content that can be used as a starting point year after year. As time goes on, this site will be something that the Perl community just knows and can point to. And it’s page rank in search engines will continue to soar as more and more sites link to it over the years.
• A Google Apps account complete with GMail, Google Docs, and Google Analytics.
• A spreadsheet of over 150 potential donors for YAPC::NA, and what their historical response to sponsoring YAPC has been since 2009.
• A project plan containing a list of everything that needs to be checked off in order to ensure a successful conference.
• A budget to work from with line-item details for every single expense and revenue of YAPC::NA 2012.
• All the historical documentation that we were able to gather from the organizers of YAPC::NA 2009 through 2012.

We hope this is the start of a tradition. Our team hopes that each year YAPC organizers hand down a set of tools and technologies that is greater than those left to them. 

We’d also like to start one more tradition. We set all kinds of records this year: we sold more tickets than any previous YAPC::NA (though we have a long way to go to beat YAPC::Asia); we sold out of both workshops and the hackathon; we raised a lot of money from our amazing sponsors; and we made important changes to the structure and execution of YAPC that we hope will set a good path for YAPC for years to come. So the tradition we’d like to start this year, is for every YAPC to out promote, out fund raise, and out sell every YAPC that comes before it. We hope that the tools we’ve left behind will not only make this possible, but easier, for those who come after us; just as the data and advice we received from previous YAPC organizers gave us a good starting point.

We wish the applicants for YAPC::NA 2013 the best of luck with their bid and their conference. 

[From the YAPC::NA Blog.]