Originally written by Rick Kovalcik

What you did?
Recruited people for Area Head Positions.

Pitched in when Areas needed help (taking this to the extreme I did is not necessarily a good thing, see below).

What went right?
In general I gave first preference to the person who held an area-head position for A'07. While I think dynasties are bad, I think people should do a job for 2-3 years. The second and third year you can make optimizations to what you do the first year.

All of the At-Con area heads did a great job.

What went wrong?
I tried to do too much myself. Especially at con. I should have picked a single separate head of OpsDesk. (See OpsDesk report.)

I also spent a lot of time working SignShop and Logistics. While this wasn't as bad as OpsDesk, it did leave me sleep deprived.

I needed to more clearly communicate budgets and expectations to the Area Heads.

What should be done differently next year?
Pick a single OpsDesk Head. (See OpsDesk report.)

Make sure everyone knows their budget.

More pre-con communication. I should have had a couple of conference calls with all the area heads.

In past years there was a "Comment Form" which was available at Info Desk. We should revive this and make it available at Info Desk and Ops Desk. Especially with a 4 day convention, people want to be able to give feedback. Having the multiple gripe sessions lessened the need for this a little but some people were still looking for it.

What sort of schedule/timeline did you use?
Picking the Area Heads as soon as possible after I was chosen as Div Head. IIRC, all Area Heads were in place by the end June. I think this was good.

Are the any changes you'd make to the schedule for next year?
Not that I can think of.

Vendors you used?
None.

Experiments to try next year?

Any comments about the rest of the con (other divisions, hotel, ...)?
I think the split between back-of-house (Operations) and front-of-house (Member Services) worked pretty well. Info Desk was in Operations for communication with Sign Shop but that didn't happen that much. Sign Shop printed signs and handouts that we thought Info Desk would need. Info Desk could probably be moved back to Member Services.

The information flow from Transportation to Sign Shop and Info Desk didn't work that well at all. Some of it went to the Div Head list so that I was able to forward it on to Sign Shop (and thus Info Desk). But there was some last minute transportation stuff that only went to ConChair (which I was lucky enough to see).

There was confusion between Publications and Operations on who was producing the Staff Internal Newsletter. I think we should just decide it is Operations (or OpsDesk). Operations is going to better know the issues and whether an updated version is necessary. More about this Staff Internal Newsletter in the OpsDesk report.

Elevators. I'll try to write up some thoughts on this elsewhere. But this probably needs to be moved to Member Services and have someone dedicated to running it. Joe Dumas (Jan's brother) might be interested.