Talk:ConChair

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Looks like my addition to the Executive Committee article kinda partly collided with your work on Con Chair.

Or...I wonder if you're thinking of the same structures I am? To me, the chair or executive committee have basically the same jobs; and for that reason I think they kinda belong together in one article. With a discussion, somewhere and eventually, about why some cons choose one and some the other (chair more common by ample safe margin I think?).

dd-b 20:01, 10 Oct 2005 (PDT)


multiple timelines

There are at least 4 different timelines in this wiki.

  1. ‎Art Show - Timeline (Talk)
  2. ‎ConChair (Talk)
  3. ‎Dealers room (Talk)
  4. ‎Web Site (Talk)

I think that we should consolidate them into a single master time line check list. Starting from the one on the con chair page but breaking it out. The auxiliary time lines may or may not continue to exist where they are. It should be terse and read like a punch list. Heavily linked to other pages. A single location for contributors to collaborate, and a single location for users to refer. --Tbmorgan74 11:23, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Arisia has a timeline document of the sort you describe, and I could import it if you like. When I added the Con Chair timeline, my intent was that it should be only things the con chair must attend to personally, to make embedding it in the con chair article reasonable. I believe the intent with the other timelines here is that someone who has just volunteered to run an area should be able to get as much information as possible about running that area from the article about the area without having to refer to other articles, and that any exceptions to this idea should be accompanied by links to the articles that an area head would need to refer to. The issue is, however, that the management function of determining that everything is proceeding according to schedule wants the information in one place, and the people doing it want it in all different places, and these two functions want the data not to diverge when it is edited. Which means maybe a wiki is not the right tool to encapsulate it. --phi 12:14, 14 February 2007 (PST)
I agree that timelines are more suited to a database rather than a linear text format. A database will prevent data divergence. Even a 2 dimensional spreadsheet would be entirely suitable. But those are hard to collaborate on in a wiki. Wiki tables are a nightmare to maintain, and casual editors will be deterred. Even in industry we struggle with this problem with our MS project schedules. --Tbmorgan74 12:28, 14 February 2007 (PST)
Mediawiki has a certain amount of ability to embed pages in other pages. Perhaps this could be used to manage multiple views of timeline data? --phi 14:02, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Google Spreadsheets

On an unrelated matter I came across just now Google spread sheets. Apparently it is a multi user collaborative spreadsheet with revision control.
http://docs.google.com/
It even reads existing excel workbooks. But It does not do graphs and charts. nor VBS probably. But I could see several people working on textural data in rows and columns while using the sort features and formulae --Tbmorgan74 15:06, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Sadly the sort feature in Google Spreadsheets is slow and affects all viewers, so it is not able to present data in different sorts simultaneously. --phi 15:08, 14 February 2007 (PST)
Very true, sad indeed :( Is this helpful :
http://jspwiki.org/wiki/BrushedTemplateSortableTables
But that seems to be on JSP wiki, not media wiki that we are on.

--Tbmorgan74 15:18, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Im replying to myself. This is better information :
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Sorting
With an example here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_list_of_Dutch_provinces --Tbmorgan74 15:21, 14 February 2007 (PST)


Test table

Province Population Area (km²) Density GDP(PPS in mil. € 2003) GDP per cap. (in € 2003)
South Holland Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
North Holland Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
Utrecht Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
Limburg Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
North Brabant Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
Gelderland Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
Netherlands Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
Overijssel Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
Flevoland Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
Groningen Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
Zeeland Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
Friesland Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts
Drenthe Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts Template:Nts

Results

Conrunner does not seem to be running mediawiki 1.9 Maybe the best thing is to update conrunner installation. When the above table becomes sortable, then we will be getting somewhere. --Tbmorgan74 15:35, 14 February 2007 (PST)

Problems at my host. I would upgrade to at least 1.8, but my host isnt running the right support software for it. --Bill Taylor 16:47, 14 February 2007 (PST)
I think we are upgraded to 1.9.2 now. Try some edits and see if things are working. I had some trouble with the ISP getting this to work. I backed up as of a few hours ago, so we won't lose much, if we lose anything at all.
As for your table, I think we still need to build the templates to support it. --Bill Taylor 18:00, 16 February 2007 (PST)
Hurrah! It works. That table was just copied from wikipedia. The important thing is that the little Triangle arrows exist and would sort a table if there was good content in it.--Tbmorgan74 09:09, 19 February 2007 (PST)


Where were we?

We were talking about a table-based all-inclusive timeline. I will propose a table format here for such a thing shortly and we can sort out the format before we populate it.--Tbmorgan74 09:09, 19 February 2007 (PST)

Months Out Department Event Predecessors Successors
0 Chair The con itself test test
-12 hotel liaison sign contract negotiate contract post it to the web site
-11 Art Show Send out packets making packets get artists packets
1 Chair Conduct wrap up meeting test test
2 Chair Conduct wrap 2ed meeting test test
I think if you want to embody dependencies then the tasks need unique identifiers. The problem with using text for those is that to make them unique they have to be long, and the longer they are the more prone to typos they are. The problems with using numbers for those are that it's only a partial ordering, and that this tool isn't able to renumber. I suppose we could use an alphanumeric code. Arisia's timeline (note: dates mostly but not entirely relative to the '06 convention; we will need a different date representation) dispenses with dependencies because for the most part they're self-evident. --phi 09:48, 19 February 2007 (PST)
I agree that predecessors successors are not easily done well. This is not MS Project after all. Best to leave them out and replace with a general Comment field. Also I have been playing with the date format to get what you see, something that sorts the way we expect. Its surprisingly not easy, because the parsing engine behind the sort is not perfect, it is what it is. The come out is that the # sign comes after the minus sign, whereas the plus + sign comes before, (when sorted alphanumerically). So we may have to just pretend the # means "plus" when we read the words. Con #03 = Con plus 3 months. The default display is whatever is in the raw text. You want to click on the double triangle to make it point down for chronological--Tbmorgan74 11:58, 19 February 2007 (PST)
Silly me, I realized my mistake, and now realize how to do plain numbers in the cells to sort properly. The above table now shows how to sort properly going from low negative numbers, through 0 to higher positive numbers. --Tbmorgan74 14:55, 20 February 2007 (PST)

Convention level

I think we need to make sure this article defines its scope - it seems to be talking mainly about conventions that are run on a yearly or intermittent basis. The timeline doesn't apply for national conventions, such as the Australian Natcon, or to a Worldcon where the timelines need to start some three years out. I'm not sure if this is because the whole of this wiki is aimed at small conventions (ie not National or World) or if a Worldcon ConChair article exists anywhere else. --Perry Middlemiss 17:40, 11 July 2008 (PDT)

You could be right about the focus being on smaller conventions. But there is no fixed rule about that. It just happens to be true that most people contributing here have that experience. I know I'd like to see something more comprehensive. Something that talks about planning and organizing as a whole, then gets specific for different types of Cons. A weekend Gaming Con is certainly different from a Worldcon or a ComicCon and they each have quirks to be addressed. Feel free to expand away. We certainly have the room for it! --Bill Taylor 20:09, 16 July 2008 (UTC)