Everyone at a Software Conference
A look at conference personas
In order to address the needs of conference audiences thoroughly, we need to understand who makes up that audience. As we begin preparing for 2019’s Abstractions II, we at Code & Supply have put in our best effort to document comprehensively a list of persona characteristics.
Before sharing the chart in full, it is important to explain a few things. Most importantly, this list is certainly not complete and a part of publishing this is to get feedback on what we missed. While we aimed to be comprehensive, I was able to make several updates to the chart while writing this article as new things popped into my head and I’m sure there are many aspects still to be uncovered.
Next on the list of things to know is that people can have more than one characteristic. The goal of this chart is to be able to go through each node and say “who is responsible for interacting with this person?” to help us define team roles. That means we only care about one thing at a time. This is especially important to remember in the “Motivation” section. One of the nodes is to “collect swag”. Few conference attendees are motivated solely or primarily by collecting swag but there are moments where that is their primary motivation. Even if it is for a few minutes, it defines who they are in those few minutes for the purposes of this exercise.
Primary Categories
Conference organizing is complex and involves many people. Attendees are just part of the equation and to do this correctly we needed to account for everyone that was involved in any capacity. That means breaking our chart up into three primary categories: people that pay to attend, people that are paid to attend, and people that do not attend but are involved in some other way. These groups have significantly different relationships to a conference and the division helps create order in the chart.
Paid to Attend
Starting off with paid to attend, this category is meant to cover anyone that is providing some sort of service that helps the conference happen and is required to be in attendance for some portion of the conference.
This category includes the vendors paid to provide services, talent needed to create the conference program, and staff that manages all of the conference logistics.
Doesn’t Attend
Some people that are part of conferences do not attend but still are significant to the conference’s success. Vendors that provide services with no required conference presence are important to have documented so a team member can be assigned as a liaison to them.
Pays to Attend
Not only do we have general admission ticket purchasers in this category, but we also have their guests who may pay or may get a reduced registration and exhibitors that may be at the conference to promote a product, provide information, or demo a project.
In this category, “General Admission” branched into so many categories that it needed its own chart. In it, we considered a lot of emotional things that make up a conference attendee. Their motivations, personalities, and experience levels on both a professional level and in terms of attending conferences.
How This Document Will Be Used
This document helps drive the roles needed for our team. We will go through each end node and cross-check this with our list of team roles. If we can’t identify who is responsible for taking care of a node, we will adjust our roles so that we can address it.
For example the “Impaired Hearing” characteristic under “Accessibility Needs” helps us to think about the options for creating a conference that would be enjoyed by someone with impaired hearing. The role handling this would need to be someone that is working with vendors and can research captioning options, signers, or other advancements. This node would even need to be addressed by multiple roles: someone to find a vendor, someone to assist with a captioner’s A/V needs, and someone that will handle their registration so they can get into the conference and be prepared for the event.
Help us expand this list by leaving a comment on this article or emailing conference-personas@codeandsupply.co.
