search

openSUSE / osem

Open Source Event Manager. An event management tool tailored to Free and Open Source Software conferences.
http://osem.io
MIT License
872 stars 492 forks source link

Scheduling Posters, Lightning Talks, and other "Nested" Events #2625

Open cycomachead opened 4 years ago

cycomachead commented 4 years ago

I'm submitting a ..

Expected correct behavior: I'd like to accept a bunch submissions to all be scheduled in the same room at the same time.

I'm looking to run a conference that has a poster session, possibly more than one. I'm still learning OSEM, but so far, I don't think I can do this in the current setup.

Is there a way to have multiple events going on in the same session and room? Like I'll have a dozen posters in the same 2 hour slot.

Thanks! This has already been a fantastic help for our event. I've been hacking it up like crazy, but hope to make some PRs. 😄

bennettscience commented 4 years ago

I like this request. The way I'm getting around it is just creating a single session and listing presentations in that room during that particular time.

cycomachead commented 3 years ago

Update / New Thoughts:

This pattern occurs in a few scenarios, the second can be lightning talks where we'll have 9 5-minute talks in a 60 minute session. The remaining time is Q&A.

The current best solution I've done is to schedule a 1 hour session, and within it, the lightning talks at 5 minute intervals. This isn't super desirable -- since a 5 minute interval on the schedule isn't great in the UI, and it's unlikely to hold to those exact times. However, having events as "Unscheduled" is also not desirable.

One thing that I've noticed: Only the UI prevents you from starting 2 events in the same room at the same time, but if done in the database, things all work out correctly.

Possible Idea: What I think I'd like to do is propose that an event have a "parent event". An event with a parent event -- even though not directly scheduled would not show as 'unscheduled', and would be shown in the schedule views as happening at the same time as the parent event. (Possibly with some order defined? Or it could be up to the conference team to specify that in the description.)

hennevogel commented 3 years ago

I would prefer fixing the schedule UI to work with smaller timespans instead of inventing another association.

That things are lightning talks (or however you want to call them) you can reflect in titles for instance.

cycomachead commented 3 years ago

I think it's not just indicating what a session is to attendees — titles, track types, etc. are all handled in the schedule.

The way I'm thinking of it is this: Users submit their proposals, which we accept and schedule, but multiple proposals end up making into a single logical session at the conference.

The challenge is that, not all events should have an equal display in the schedule. e.g. If I have 10 posters for 90 minutes in the same room, then it doesn't make sense to show them all at the same scale. With very short 5 minute talks, one twist is that we have a few people on our conference team who have expressed not scheduling them at 5 minute intervals, but just showing them as part of a longer session.

In the current data modeling we should just not "schedule" them in the UI, but then they show as "Unscheduled" which is a bit confusing to users. That's why indirectly scheduling them I think makes it easier to solve the UI challenges with a more clear data model.

https://www.snapcon.org/conferences/2021/schedule/ -- this what our current schedule looks like. you can see on Thursday we have a 1 hour session with 9 5 minute talks. Even within that setup, it's really challenging to link those events together at a data level that would lend to adapting the UI. (It can be done, but it's quite messy.)