I’ve been busy with other stuff lately and haven’t been able to put much time into this yet, but capturing a few thoughts from the past couple weeks:

• I want to ask everyone else on the event team for their volunteer needs. Get them thinking of where volunteers can help. Then I need a bunch of information – how many, what time, what will they do, is a must do task or a nice to have? Ideally this drives them to think about what they can delegate before/during/after the event.
• I want to write down clear task descriptions/duration. What does a room monitor do? Where do they report? Who do they call if a speaker doesn’t show, projector doesn’t work?
• I don’t know if it’s possible, but I’d like to add to that something about why the task is important to the event (why do we need room monitors?) and maybe – this is harder – how to benefit from it (meeting a speaker, seeing how the event works from the inside, ?)

Scott Gleason mentioned at SQLSaturday Jacksonville the idea of different color shirts for the organizers so that anyone can say “find someone with a red shirt” or whatever.  I like that idea. Ideally attendees can clearly identify a volunteer and a leader, and it even helps volunteers find a leader if they need help.

I also want to take a look at whether hiring a couple temps for the day would smooth out the logistics. We do pretty well in Orlando, but that first hour is still intense. More volunteers is one option, but maybe just paying for help wouldn’t be terrible.