Community Event Planning
$10.00
Minimum price
$20.00
Suggested price

Community Event Planning

About the Book

If you’ve ever thought about hosting a code sprint, hackathon, (un)conference or workshop, this book is for you. In it, we explain what you need to know to plan and execute a successful event, including:

  • assembling and organizing your planning team
  • identifying and securing a venue for your event
  • how to get money and pay for things
  • volunteer recruitment and management
  • determining your event format and creating your event’s schedule
  • advertising your event
  • tickets and registration
  • insurance, liability and what to do when things go wrong
  • deciding on must-haves and nice-to-haves (e.g., food, wifi, etc)
  • dealing with venue logistics (space, sound, power, etc.)
  • codes of conduct, after parties, considerations for serving alcohol
  • how to keep the momentum once your first event is over

About the Authors

Christie Koehler
Christie Koehler

Christie Koehler is an experienced software engineer, technical project manager, community organizer and speaker. She works at Mozilla (makers of Firefox) as a project manager on the Developer Evangelist team. Christie is Co-founder and President of the nonprofit Stumptown Syndicate, co-chair of Open Source Bridge, and co-organizer of BarCamp Portland. Additionally, Christie facilitates Code ‘n’ Splode and Women Who Hack, monthly user groups for women in technology.

Sherri Montgomery
Sherri Montgomery

Sherri Montgomery is an IT Business Systems Analyst for Mentor Graphics. As a member of the Business Intelligence team she cultivates order, grows projects, engages users, facilitates teams, coordinates testing, and strives to make huge data sets meaningful. Sherri also produces town hall events for the Mentor BI community and speaks about complex BI migrations strategies and performance tuning.

In her spare time Sherri manages conference logistics for Open Source Bridge and is co-chair for Ignite Portland. She also meditates, makes awesome vegan food, creates art for trade, teaches Hatha Yoga and hikes. Sherri can often be found teaching yoga to geeks at conferences she participates in.

Audrey Eschright
Audrey Eschright

Audrey Eschright is a programmer at Elevated Code working with Ruby, Rails, and occasionally iPhone development. Writer of essays, recipes, horror comics, and knitting patterns. Photographer working with digital and film cameras, including Polaroid, Holga, and pinholes. Community organizer of unconferences like WhereCampPDX. Core team member of the infamous Calagator. Agitator for a variety of grassroots local tech.

About the Contributors

Reid Beels
Reid Beels

Table of Contents

  • Chapter 1: Getting Started
    • Quick start guide: the essentials
    • Why do we have events?
    • Types of events
    • Sample timeline
    • Assembling and organizing your team
  • Chapter 2: Shape Your Event
    • Knowing Your Audience, Knowing Your Goals
    • From Tone to Strategy to Results
    • Fundraising
    • Marketing
    • Volunteers
    • Developing Content
  • Chapter 3: Logistics
    • What are Logistics?
    • Important Information to Track
    • Type of Event Dictates Venue
    • Participant Needs
    • Finding a Venue
    • Power
    • Network Infrastructure
    • Audio/Visual
    • Catering
  • Chapter 4: During Your Event
    • Materials List & Transportation Plan
    • Schedule Run-Down
    • On-Site Volunteers
    • Catering Assistant
    • Greeters
    • Registration Assistants
    • Floaters / General Volunteers
    • Other Volunteer Positions
    • Signage
    • Swag
    • Registration
    • Why Ask for Pre-Registration?
    • Ways to Register
    • Different Types of Badges
  • Chapter 5: Momentum
    • Communicating with attendees
    • Keeping momentum
    • Assessing your event, retrospectives
    • Wishlist for next time
    • Planning your retrospective
    • Surviving participant feedback
  • Chapter 6: A Short Guide to Problem Solving
    • Debugging Your Team and Planning Process
    • Tips to keep your team and planning process running smoothly
  • Appendix
    • Code of Conduct - Stumptown Syndicate
    • Sample Unconference Budget
    • Volunteer Policy - Stumptown Syndicate
    • Open Source Bridge Photography / Recording Policy
    • Logistics Planning Worksheets
    • Open Source Bridge Logistics Run-Down - Day 1

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earnedover $14 millionwriting, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub