The Making of a Powershell Forum Event

The Making of a
PowerShell Forum Event

by Don Jones and Christopher Gannon, PowerShell.org
September 2015

Contents

Contents

Foreword

What is a PowerShell Forum?

The One Rule

Guidelines

Naming

Finances and Legal Liability

Income Taxes

Legal Separation

VAT

Insurance

Too Much to Deal With?

Attendee Registration

The Venue

Location Considerations

Paying for the Space

Room Layout

Food & Beverage Costs

Audiovisual

Don’t Forget the Presenters

Evening Events

Getting a Quote

Extra Fees

Is Your Head Spinning?

A Sample Budget

Planning the Content

Finding Speakers

Call for Topics

Selecting Sessions

Creating the Agenda

Speaker Follow-Up

Paying Speakers

Virtual Speakers

Working with Your Venue

Special Meals

Audiovisual

Power

Internet

Read the BEO

Setting Attendee Expectations

Marketing Your Event

Sponsors

Minimizing Risk

VERIFIED EFFECTIVE™ Exams

Stuff We’ve Screwed Up

A Final Word from Don

Foreword

We’re often asked why we don’t hold a PowerShell Summit event in [insert your favorite place here]. The answer is simple: we don’t have the time to organize multiple events, and we don’t want to take on the personal financial risk of doing so. For us, PowerShell Summit is a global event. When possible, we hold it in close proximity to the PowerShell team to maximize their ability to participate. Because the team participation is a huge part of everyone coming together (the point of a “summit”), it doesn’t work as well when it’s held elsewhere.

However, that doesn’t mean there’s no value in other kinds of PowerShell events. But we at PowerShell.org aren’t the ones to run them all. Organizing an event takes majortime, and often requires some financial commitment. We simply aren’t willing to take all that on, as volunteers, for the entire globe! But you can, at least for your local country or region. If you’ve been salivating at the thought of a PowerShell-specific conference in your backyard, you’re the one to organize it! We’ll be happy to help – and this guide is a starting place.

This is intended to be a concise collection of the experience PowerShell.org has had in running PowerShell Summit events in three countries for four years. It also includes the organizers’ experience in running technology events since the late 1990s. We’ve tried to focus on the “stuff you didn’t know or might forget” aspects of running an event, so that you can enter into this endeavor with eyes wide open.

We must emphasize that our experiences are based on events primarily held in the USA, so some of the advice we offer may not be correct or relevant in other countries. Hopefully, we can at least draw your attention to potential areas for consideration, so that you can investigate locally and find out what the deal is.

We welcome questions – just use the “Website Feedback” forum on PowerShell.org, or e-mail .

Good luck!

Don Jones

What is a PowerShell Forum?

PowerShell Forum is a brand name of The DevOps Collective, Inc., the nonprofit corporation that produces PowerShell Summit events, runs PowerShell.org, and so on. The PowerShell Forum brand is intended to provide a recognizable brand name that members of the community can use to produce community-based events in their region of the world.

There is really only one rule, and a couple of guidelines, for producing your own PowerShell Forum event.

The One Rule

Your event must not produce a profit that is taken by any person, any group of people, or by a corporation or organization. PowerShell Forum events are intended to benefit the community, not to be a commercial success for a person or company. Any profits – that is, money you collect above and beyond expenses – must be distributed in one of more of these ways:

• To a qualified public charity (including the one that hosts PowerShell.org, if you like, which would be very appreciated – although making a donation to PowerShell.org is absolutely not a requirement)
  
• Held back and used to produce a future PowerShell Forum event

By using the PowerShell Forum brand name and trademarks, you agree to this rule, and agree to keep financial records for your event. You also agree to make your event’s financial records available to the public upon request.

In keeping with the above, presenters should not be compensated more than necessary for reasonable travel expenses and, at most, a small honorarium or speaking fee (rarely more than a couple of hundred US dollars, or local equivalent).

Please note that the PowerShell Forum logo graphic is a trademarked image, and may not be used without permission. Provided you follow the rule and agreements above, you are granted that permission by this document.

Guidelines

PowerShell Forum events are intended to be multi-day events of 1 to 3 “tracks” (or rooms). At least two days, and ideally three days, is suggested. Sessions may run anywhere from 45 minutes to several hours, and a single event may well have a mix of session lengths. In addition, evening events are usually offered to provide additional opportunities for networking and personal engagement. Events may be simple pub crawls, or may be organized hackathons, scripting games, and so on.

You should notify of your event, so that we can provide you with logos and other graphics assets, and so that we can help promote your event. Please indicate if your event will be primarily in English, or if it will primarily target speakers of another language. We will also help you contact and coordinate with speakers from around the world, including presenters from the PowerShell product team. We maintain a master schedule of PowerShell Forum events, and can help you try to avoid conflicting dates. We can also help coordinate dates with events in other regions, which can sometimes increase the availability of team members to present.

We urge you to coordinate dates with us prior to settling on a date, contracting a venue, and promoting the event. That lets us maximize our ability to help you secure speakers from the product team, in particular, since their time can be very limited. We do not guarantee that the team will be able to attend your event – but we’ll facilitate communications between you and them.

Note that you don’t have to coordinate with us – this is a guideline, not the rule. You’re welcome to run your event entirely on your own, and use the PowerShell Forum brand provided you follow the rule above. You’re also completely welcome to use this guide to run an event that doesn’t use the PowerShell Forum brand. We’ll still be happy to try and coordinate dates with you, and to promote your event – just ask us. You can even run events that run completely contrary to everything in this guide and we’ll still do our best to help promote your event, if you want us to (although the rest of this guide is merely advice from our experience, which you can follow or not at your discretion).

Naming

If you decide to use the PowerShell Forum brand name, then we ask you to append your country name, as in “PowerShell Forum Finland” or “PowerShell Summit Australia.” If we have “competing” Forum events in a given country, we’ll try to coordinate the various interested parties so that you can collaborate on a single, awesome event. In larger countries, we may work with you to suggest a more regional or city name, such as “PowerShell Forum Sydney” or something. If a group of collaborators from various adjacent countries want to throw a “regional” event, which changes cities from year to year, we’re happy to work with that, too. For example, “PowerShell Forum Scandinavia.”

And although these examples are European, we’re completely open to the idea of USA-based PowerShell Forum events, especially ones serving Central or Eastern US, since our current plan is to focus PowerShell Summit on the West coast (to be near the PowerShell product team at Microsoft headquarters).

Finances and Legal Liability

Your event is going to accept money from people wishing to attend, and that money may (probably will be) be taxable in your area. You may potentially owe income taxes for any income above and beyond your expenses (unless, in some countries, you donate those profits to a qualified charity). For that reason, and to help reduce personal liability, we recommend establishing a company or other kind of organization to actually run the event. How you do this, and exactly what you do, obviously varies a great deal from country to country, so we cannot offer specific legal advice.

Income Taxes

Some more detail: if your event makes a profit, then someone will usually have to pay taxes on that profit. Who pays taxes depends on where you live, and what kind of company or organization you’ve created. For example, in the USA, a “C-Corporation” would pay its own taxes on its profits, rather than the owners of the C-Corp personally paying those taxes. This enables the C-Corp to “hold back money” (after paying taxes on it) to be used on the following year’s event. A nonprofit corporation, in the US, wouldn’t even need to pay the taxes – but qualifying as a nonprofit is exceedingly difficult.

To be clear: PowerShell.org itself will not handle registration for you, will not collect money for you, and will not financially back your event. We are not able to do these things, given our corporate legal status. For reference, we use either PayPal or Authorize.net for registration fees, and the transactions are coordinated for us by EventLoom.

Legal Separation

Another reason to have a corporation is legal separation. For example, imagine someone falls down and injures themselves at your event. They might bring legal action against the venue, but they might also pursue legal action against you as the event organizer. If you personally organized the event, that might make your personal assets – even your house! – a part of the legal action. If a corporation organizes the event, then in many cases only the corporation’s assets would be at risk. There are rules you have to follow, in most countries, to maintain the “separation” between you and a corporation you’ve created; you need to consult a lawyer, or books on corporate law, for more information.

VAT

Finally, in many countries, you may be required to collect VAT, and provide VAT invoices, for your registration fees. That may entail registering to collect the VAT, including VAT in the registration fee, and sending the collected VAT to the government tax authority. Because rules differ so greatly across the world, these are things you’ll need to figure out – but often times, having a corporate entity can make it all a bit easier, and a bit more separate from your personal finances.

Insurance

Depending on your event venue and your country, you may need to maintain liability insurance as well. Ask your venue for any rules or recommendations they may have. There are numerous companies that sell event liability insurance. It’s often very inexpensive, and is good only for the duration of your event. In some countries or at some venues, it isn’t required.

Too Much to Deal With?

If all this seems like a pain or a big step, then a PowerShell Forum might not be the right kind of event for you (and now you understand why we don’t run thirty PowerShell Summit events all over the world). Starting out, it may be easier to do a small PowerShell Saturday event, where you can just charge a small amount to cover pizza and the venue. The intent is for a PowerShell Forum to be a regular, annual event, and so the “overhead” of maintaining a corporation would be justified.

Attendee Registration

We recommend using EventLoom.com for your event registration website. This is the same system used by PowerShell Summit, and it can handle everything from session proposals through attendee registration and payment. It combines the functions of sites like MeetUp.com, EventBrite.com, and others, all in one place. It charges a simple per-person fee based on your attendance, and gives you the option of passing that fee (and credit card processing fees) along to attendees.

Some thoughts based on our registration experiences:

• Make sure you’re collecting full names to print on people’s badges. We suggest collection last names in a separate field, so that the badges can be more easily sorted on that name.
  
• Many times, someone other than the attendee will be registering and paying. You may want to explicitly ask for the attendee’s e-mail, rather than the e-mail of the person registering.
  
• You’ll usually have at least one company who wants to send multiple people – allowing for group registration is important (EventLoom does this).
  
• People will not read pre-registration information, and they often have spam filters dialed up so high that e-mail is not a reliable means of communication. Establish a single authoritative place where people are expected to check for updates and announcements, and focus on communicating that location to everyone.
  
• Collect information such as dietary accommodations, accessibility needs, etc. at the time of registration, but re-confirm it a month out.
  
• Establish, and stick to, cancellation/refund/transfer policies. It will come up. Keep in mind that, at a certain point, you will have difficulty refunding someone’s money and re-selling the seat to another attendee. Figure out when that is, and make that your cutoff date. For reference, PowerShell Summit events do not offer refunds, although we do often permit name changes or transfers. In those cases, the person making the transfer is responsible for any financial arrangements from the transferee.
  
• Decide if you will accept forms of payment outside those your registration website accepts. Wire transfers, mailed checks, and other forms of payment are often asked for – rarely, but enough that you need to decide if you’ll accept them. A downside is that you have to hold a seat for someone and hope that the money arrives on time. PowerShell Summit stopped accepting “alternative” payments because of problems with companies paying in a timely fashion.
  
• Try to keep registration as simple as possible. Don’t offer a variety of early bird discounts, registration options, etc. We’ve tried this in the past with PowerShell Summit and it adds more complexity and confusion than you might think, and doesn’t add a great deal of value.

The Venue

Selecting a venue is perhaps the most complex part of an event, and it can help to understand just how they work. We have found that using Microsoft offices for a multi-day event can be pretty difficult and restrictive, and so this guide will assume you’re working with a hotel or conference center.

You may have access to other kinds of venue – perhaps a university lecture hall, or a corporate meeting facility. In that case – great! You’ll potentially save a lot of money and hassle. Still, read through this section just so you have an idea of how commercial meeting venues often work.

If you’re considering using a Microsoft office, know that – for PowerShell Summit – we’ve found them to be less than ideal. Their security requirements, need to have a Microsoft sponsor, and other restrictions can create a less-than-ideal environment for a multi-day event. Still, if you feel you’re able to work through those problems and have a willing Microsoft space, it’s definitely an option.

Location Considerations

Unlike a one-day PowerShell Saturday, where almost everyone’s local, a PowerShell Forum may draw people from across a region, or even from nearby countries. Make sure you’re taking that into account, and consider the following when selecting a general location:

• Transportation from the airport and other transit hubs should be readily available and not ruinously expensive. If attendees will need to rent a car, consider the cost of venue parking.
  
• The venue should be near ample lodging (hotels) of a reasonable, business-class type.
  
• The venue, or nearby hotels, should have a good selection of restaurants and other facilities so that attendees can find a meal in the evenings.

Paying for the Space

Many venues of this kind will provide you with your meeting space “free of charge.” Some will even provide basic audiovisual (projectors and microphones) “free of charge.” So what’s in it for them? Rooms and food. Many venues will ask you to commit to a certain number of hotel room-nights (conference centers may have partner hotels they work with), and most will ask you to commit to a certain amount of food and beverage fees. The more meeting space you want, the more you’ll have to commit to. This is what creates the potential for risk: if you want to make sure you have two presentation rooms that can accommodate up to 200 people total, you’ll often be committing to feed at least 125 people for however many days. A smaller room requires a smaller commitment, but provides you less room to expand if you sell out quickly. It can be a tricky business.