[Plan21] NOTES FOR TOMORROW'S MEETING

[Brian Buhrow]

	hello. In preparation for Tuesday's lessons learned meeting, here are some notes on the
projects I took care of for the convention.

1.  Auction baskets

	For the most part, the process went well, in terms of the auctions runing and people being
able to place bids.  the largest problem we had was that the methodology we used for
pre-registering users for the auction site didn't work at all well this time.  Last year, I
asked Tiffany to give me a couple of TSV dumps which I pre-loaded into the auction site.  This
year, I asked her to send me the e-mails when they came in from the system.  This she did, and
I processed all the e-mails I received, but there were a number of messages I didn't receive.
I'm not sure why, since normally, e-mail is pretty reliable.  My suggestion for next year is to
try a hybrid approach.  I'll set up a mechanical e-mail recipient, as opposed to mixing the
e-mail with my regular e-mail, and also learn how to fetch reports from Formstack so I can do
periodic dumps of the data to verify things worked.  I think this hybrid approach will work
better and will resolve most of the issues with folks not being able to place bids.  The dumps
worked pretty well last year and we didn't have as much trouble with folks not being able to
place bids.  Alternatively, if I can figure out how to mechanically fetch reports from
Formstack, I'll set up a daily run to fetch data once per day, or twice a day, to make sure
things are up to date on the auction site.

2.  Door prizes
	As far as I can tell, this process went off without a hitch.  Although, we didn't receive
that many door prizes.  I was also a bit disappointed that we gave so many gift cards, but that
wasn't a problem with the door prize donation mechanism itself.  Perhaps, since I had a inimum
amount of involvement with this, tiffany can address the effectiveness or efficiency of the
process.

3.  Help desk phones
	I set the schedule up and heard nothing.  Did it work as we intended?

-thanks
-Brian