[pmwiki-users] Convention and Scheduling support.

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 03:52:18PM -0400, Stirling Westrup wrote:
> I have a number of friends on the committees for some of the upcoming
> worldcons. They are looking for some cheap-as-possible collaborative
> software to allow them to organize things. Many of the features of
> PmWiki would be ideal for them, but there is functionality that they
> need that I can't see how to easily supply via PmWiki.

These are just "off-the-cuff" ideas:

> As a consequence I was wondering if anyone had any ideas about setting
> up the following:
> 
> 1) A scheme that lets users change and modify panel proposals but
> requires some sort of administrative approval to get on the actual agenda.

Perhaps (:include:)?  Let people create panel proposals as individual
wiki pages -- anyone can edit.  Then, have a separate (password-protected)
agenda page that simply does an (:include:) of the accepted proposals.

> 2) Some way of letting panel participants register and provide
> availability information and panel preferences.

> 3) Some way to edit the convention schedule so that participants can be
> matched to panels which are matched to available rooms and time slots.

Sometimes self-selection works best -- just let people add themselves
to the panels they're interested in, and if there's a mismatch then
see if you can get people to switch.

> This sounds like a lot of work to implement, and I don't think there are
> any existing recipes that come anywhere near being able to do this.
> 
> Any suggestions as to the easiest/cheapest way to set some of this up?

How soon would you need this?  As far as signups are concerned, some
of the planned blogging features might be able to help with signup
(i.e., by having something like an "add me to this panel" link).

Pm