Few post-Flock thoughts

[Rafal Luzynski]

Hi,

I'd like to share few of my post-Flock thoughts mostly
focusing on what we did wrong. Please take it as my
personal feedback in order to improve organization of
the future conferences. First of all, I must admit that
most of the things went OK so these nitpicks are really
minor and small.

0. If you offer your phone number as an emergency number
for the conference attendees make sure the phone is always
charged and you always carry it with you. According to
Murphy's law, whenever you leave your phone at your place
or let it be discharged one person gets lost or needs
your help for whatever reason. :-)

1. We should have issued a "ticket" system for the buses
to the Browar Lubicz party. We ordered two cruises of one
bus for two reasons: first, 250 people were not supposed
to fit into one bus, second, the minimum order of a bus
is large enough to make 2 or maybe even 3 cruises.
It turned out that the second cruise took only 7 passengers
while the first one was full. One bus should take about
160 passengers. Unfortunately, there is no system which
stops more passengers to enter the bus. According to what
we nicknamed Student's theorem during my university years,
every bus can take one more student. :-) I guess we managed
to fit 240 people into the bus. Alternative explanation
is that there were only 170 people at the party. There
was no such problem on other events because we had
intercity quality buses with sitting places only, there
was a simple rule: no more seats = no more passengers.
Somehow this problem also did not arise at the ship
party: we had to split into 2 groups, one was eating
and another was cruising and then we had to swap and
as far as I noticed we did split into 2 roughly equal
groups smoothly.

2. IMHO we should not also worry about splitting all
attendees into 2 separate groups during the ship cruise.
Originally we were trying to make sure we are all
at the same place and it led us to the problem that there
was no large enough ship in Krakow to take 250 people
for a cruise. The aim was to ensure we all integrate.
But we actually were split and I don't find it was
a problem. You can't integrate with 250 people at the
same time. You can integrate with 10 or 20 or slightly
more but even 100 is impossible.

3. The last official conference event was the wallpaper
hunt, attended by 8 people only. We took a long walk
to the tram balloon loop and now I think it was an
unnecessary waste of time. It would be better to spend
one more PLN and take a bus from the hotel to the tram
stop. Also it would be better if one person collected
the money and bought tickets for everyone instead of making
a queue and letting everyone to buy tickets for oneself.
The system I proposed would be good if we were a group
of 10-20 people and bought one group ticket. OTOH I hope
the attendees enjoyed the tram ride.

Best regards,

Rafal