Suggestions for Contest Leaders or Event Organizers

[TheCotMan]

Why not start a thread on how to make a successful contest/event? Spectators, players and leaders all have ideas on how to make a contest/event better.

So? What are your ideas?

(Some of mine:)

Only volunteer to head a new contest/event if you are excited about the contest/event -- People are attracted to excitement, and there is nothing like a passionate leader to generate interest and excitement.

Your knowledge in the contest/event should exceed your passion.

Delegate, delegate, delegate: as a leader, you will be able to have more fun doing other things at DefCon, others may enjoy sharing in the spotlight as co-organizers, or ??? and players/people have a better time if the organizer is not not stressed due to being overburdened, or overly self-medicated with booze because of the stress.

Organization, early planning, early announcements. (No need to explain these.)

Unless you really know your group, accept you should request, consider, and be willing to accept ideas from your peers-- the forums allow for this, as well as mailing lists, DefCon/2600 Local Group meetings, and to a limited extent, "blogs" or web pages with e-mail addresses. (Big clue here! A leader not in-touch with the masses may not be a leader very long.) Will the people respect you in the morning?

What else? What do you like about successful contests? Dislike about unsuccessful ones? (Apply these as a spectator, player/member, or leader.)

Thanks!

[AlxRogan]

Always bring spares...make sure you have alternate methods for any processes you have that are dependent on X

Never underestimate the possible number of contestants (wardrive at DC10)

Be flexible!

Guess that's it for now, as more synapses wake up, I might edit.

[kallahar]

Lessons learned from the Robot Contest:

1) Keep people excited. For the robots, people need to be working on them *months* ahead of defcon. That means that they need to be kept interested for a long time. I've been doing this by posting pictures of my progress and encouraging others to do so, and making sure that people ask and get their questions answered.

2) Event Time. Make sure people know what time and where your event will be held, there have been several contests in the last few years that I missed watching because I didn't know when/where until it was too late. (big whiteboard in the contest room maybe?)

3) Set up the contest area so that it's easy for spectators to watch. The lock pickers were up on stage, and the robots had a camera being projected onto the wall. We had a very large crowd for the robots and without that camera we wouldn't have been able to keep enough people interested since only a few could see the actual arena.

4) Unofficial time. The more time people can practice, the longer the interest holds. Having the lock pick boards open the whole time helped bring first-timers into the contest. I plan to have the demo robot running for a few hours friday to try to increase interest for the competition and hopefully to inspire people for the following year.

[LosT]

Make sure you are running the contest with notification from both Russ and Jeff ;)

Like Kallahar said, you have to keep people excited, and give them enough time to make a serious effort at the contest if it requires a build-

LosT

[russ]

Re: Suggestions for Contest Leaders or Event Organizers

Keeping people informed is very important... I agree. From this perspective, if you have contest information or updates that you'd like released on the Defcon RSS feed, shoot it to me at russ@defcon.org and I'll get it to the right people.

Make sure you are running the contest with notification from both Russ and Jeff ;)

Like Kallahar said, you have to keep people excited, and give them enough time to make a serious effort at the contest if it requires a build-

LosT