Private Beta Starts Now

This blog has been quiet for some time. I was surprised by the large number of people interested in taking part in the private beta, so I spent most of my time getting that ready.

I am thrilled to announce, that starting today, I will begin to invite people to try out the frabulous platform.

Invitations will go out in waves. If you have signed up but do not receive one right away, please have a little more patience. If you still have not received your invitation mail in two weeks time, please contact support (at) frabulous.net.

Celebrating the launch of the private beta, the frabulous website has received an update, including a brand new “Tour” page.

The private beta will take some time and there is no date set yet for a public launch. In case you are impatient, you can still sign up for the private beta.

Conference program on mobile devices

When you plan and publish your program with frab and frabulous, not only do you get an HTML export suitable for the web, but also some other file formats modeled after another open source project, pentabarf.

The beauty of this is, that there are already several apps out there that understand those file formats. So it is really easy to get your schedule into the hands of your attendees.

General Purpose Apps

For Android phones (and, of course, tablets) there are two apps, that can be reused for more than one event. If your attendees have those installed, they only need to point them to the right address on your website to easily access the program on their phone.

The first one is called Giggity and the second one Giraffe.

Open Source Apps

Many other apps are tailor-made for a single event, but the source code is available, so it is comparatively easy to roll your very own app!

For iOS (Apple’s iPhone and related products) there is this FOSDEM app by Leon Handreke and others.

For Android, there is pentabarf-android by Ulrich Dengel.

And for webOS (HP/Palm devices) there is Raphael Kallensee’s app and FrOSCon-HD by Robert Kowalski, which is optimized for the TouchPad tablet.

Having your own mobile conference app on multiple platforms has never been easier. Of course, some technical skills and familiarity with the respective platforms are required, but you should be able to find excellent freelancers who can handle that part for you. In many cases, the original authors of the apps may be available for customizations. And if not, we are more than happy to help you find someone.

Cannot wait to try this?

You can download and use frab right now, or you can sign up and be notified when the frabulous private beta starts.

Link: Conference Organiser’s Handbook

Peter-Paul Koch, also known as ppk around the internet, has organized the tech-conferences Fronteers and Mobilism. He is also a frequent speaker at other conferences. So he has quite some experience with conferences from different points of view.

He took those experiences and put together the Conference Organiser’s Handbook. The handbook is a wonderful resource for everyone who is planning a conference. I found some small bits are rather specific for small to medium size tech-conferences like Mobilism, but otherwise it is full of wonderful insights that can be applied to a wide range of events.

I have not yet found another free resource for conference organizers that is as comprehensive and on topic as this one. I highly recommend you to check this out.

frabulous: What to expect

If you have come here from the frabulous website, you probably already know the screenshots on the homepage. They show various features, that are already available in frab and can be used in frabulous as well. But those screenshots are very small. I am working on enhancing the website, but I did not want people to have to wait to learn about those features. So here are those same screenshots in a higher resolution (click on them to view them full size) and some explanations of what they show.

Dashboard

This is your home page when logging in to frabulous. Most prominently it shows you the latest changes. I spend a lot of time reloading this page and looking at what new talks have been submitted, who signed up and all the other things happening.

In addition to that, you can find some nice graphs here, showing you a bunch of interesting statistics of your conference.

Call for Papers

Many conferences allow people to submit talks. Collecting those submissions via email is really cumbersome. frabulous offers a web-based submission interface. Interested speakers can create an account (or re-use their existing account from another conference) and enter their submissions.

This leaves you with structured, searchable data about speakers and submissions in a central place.

The submission interface allows for speakers to enter a personal profile including a short and a long bio and a photo. And of course it allows to submit talks. On top of that it also allows the speakers to specify exact times of availability. This is a great help when planning the final schedule, especially for conferences that span several days.

Review submissions

Hopefully, you will have more submissions than time slots for talks. Being able to select from a large number of submitted talks increases your chances to create a high quality program. But in order to make a selection, you need to have a review system in place. frabulous provides you with a dead simple review system, that assists you in rating a large number of submissions in a minimum amount of time.

When you select talks, you can have frabulous send an automatic email to the submitter including a confirmation link. This gives your submitters instant feedback and lets them reconfirm their appearance.

Plan the schedule

Once all the talks are selected, you need to put together a schedule. If you prefer to plan this offline, frabulous lets you print cards with all the talks that you can push around all you like. Online planning (or entering the results of your offline efforts) can be accomplished by simply dragging events to the appropriate time slots. frabulous will watch out for conflicts like overlapping talks, people being supposed to be at two places at the same time and speakers not being available.

Wait, there is more

That is just a small excerpt of frabulous’ features to give you an idea of what frabulous is all about. If you cannot wait to try it for yourself, sign up now and you will be notified as soon as the beta test starts.

Welcome

Hi there!

How nice of you to stop by. My name is David. I am a web developer from Bonn, Germany. For the past six years I have also been the principal organizer of FrOSCon. FrOSCon is a conference about open source software. When my friends and I started FrOSCon it was nothing more but a pipe dream. But we managed to grow it into a well-loved event with 1,500 attendees from all over the world.

FrOSCon has always been organized in our spare time. That is why we tried to use best of breed open source software tools to keep everything organized from the start. We learned a lot about how specialized web-based software can assist you with the many tasks involved in making a conference happen.

At the beginning of this year, I started out to incorporate the lessons we learned into a new open source software, frab. And while frab has not yet had an official release, we already used it to organize FrOSCon 2011.

With frabulous, I want to take this all one step further: frabulous is a hosted version of frab, or a Software As A Service (SAAS). frabulous will make it incredibly easy to leverage all of frab’s benefits without having to install and maintain your own server. With this I hope to reach a lot more potential users.

This blog will keep you updated about everything that is happening with frabulous and frab, though shorter updates will more likely appear on Twitter, so make sure you follow frabulous there as well. Additionally, I will post the occasional article about other topics surrounding conference organization. Last, but not least, I want to share with you other’s thoughts and tips about conferences that I find all over the web.

Thanks again for visiting this blog. Make sure you come back some time soon.