How to introduce the participants to the event before it starts

The next 404 festival will begin very soon. For its opening, I prepared a page on which I gathered all the participants so that they could recognize each other in person before the start of the festival: antonshein.ru/404fest (carefully, the traffic is hidden behind the link).

Under the cut, I will talk about why you need to create such pages for events, and also talk a little about the technical implementation.
')


The value of any event is not only read in it reports and workshops held, but also in people. The more people managed to meet at the event - the better.

It is much easier to meet new people, if you have already seen them somewhere and you know something about them. To do this, on the official website of the 404 festival there is a page with participants: 2012.404fest.ru/members .

But reading a dry list is boring, and viewing this way more than 700 participants is almost impossible.

At the same time, a long list of photos is perceived much easier and attracts more attention. If only because it is often possible to suddenly understand from the photo, for example, that you are reading this person’s blog or are somehow familiar with it virtually.

In addition, registered members can add each other to their favorites, and see who has added them to their favorites. This further removes the barrier in person-to-person communication. Since in this case, at least there is always a topic to start a conversation.

The easier it will be for people to meet at an event, the more benefit they will be from participating, and the more likely they are to attend it next year.

Technical details

The technical implementation itself is as simple as a stump. First, the participants' page of 2012.404fest.ru/members is parsed , after which the information of each participant from the list is parsed. After that, it remains only to save the data to the database and display them.

This could be finished, but there are a couple of interesting points.

Userpics

Last year I made the first version of such a page and the userpics simply took the participants from the site of the organizers. After that, the site of the organizers quickly fell.

This time I transferred the pictures to my server, but decided that if I gave more than 700 userpics to one connection, then my hosting would not stand even if I used a lazy download.

Therefore, all previews of userpics were combined into sprites of 100 images each. In total there are 8 pictures like this:


Whether such design will sustain a habraeffekt - it will become clear soon. :)

Floor

It was interesting to group participants by gender. But there is no such data on the official page of the event. I had to determine gender by name. A list of female names was taken and a simple comparison of the name of the participant with him was sufficient in most cases. Some names had to be added manually.

The only difficulty was names like Sasha, Zhenya, etc. In this case, the search for a vowel at the end of the last name helped.

Such simple measures were enough to sort the participants by gender. But I do not exclude that an error has crept in somewhere. So if suddenly the system has distributed you not there - let me know, I will correct it right away. :)

Manual data processing

Participants are not robots, and enter data casually. Therefore, when grouping, you cannot simply rely on string comparison and you have to work out many options manually.

For example, for grouping by city, its name has to be processed like this:

function getCity(sRaw) { var sCity = $.trim(sRaw); var aCityTranslate = { 'Yekaterinburg':'', '. ':'', 'Tolyatti':'', 'Novokuybuyshev':'', '55.895386,37.597364':'', 'Tula':'', ', ':'', 'Inc., ': '', '. ': '', 'Yoshkarola': '-', 'Zhigulevsk': '', 'C': '', 'LLC, ': '', 'Novomoskovsk': '', '':'' } sCity = aCityTranslate[sCity]?aCityTranslate[sCity]:sCity; return sCity; } 

The same lists are used to group by company and profession, only they have much more elements.

Otherwise, everything is quite simple and workers' and peasants. But if some moments are interesting - ask, I will try to tell.

PS: By the way, I myself read 404 a report on time management: 2012.404fest.ru//themes/i-ll-be-back .



If you are from Moscow and you are not going to the 404 festival, but you are interested in learning how not to cover deadlines and find time to develop skills and create your own projects - write me in a personal. If there are several interested people, I will read the report tomorrow evening (most likely, in the Workstation co-org).