Seems like a hybrid system might make sense.

Reserve spots for presenters and scholarship winners, and decide on
both before registration opens. I'm sure it's difficult to coordinate
voting for presenters, and I know from having volunteered on the
scholarship committee that it would be difficult to complete that
process in time. But I think it would be worth it.

I think it also makes sense to reserve spots for some number of
volunteers. I think this would help with continuity, help to preserve
the idea that everyone is a participant, reward people who put in
considerable time, and also encourage more people to volunteer for the
more time-consuming jobs. As with presenters, volunteers would have to
pay for registration and their reserved spots would be
non-transferable. Code4lib could vote on which volunteer positions
guarantee the option to attend the conference.

I think the rest of the open spots could be divided between
first-come-first-served and a lottery system (50/50? 60/40?). The
people who are sitting at their computers the moment registration
opens would still get in, and the people who didn't know that was
required -- the newer folks whose participation is necessary for
code4lib to stay relevant -- would have a reasonable chance to see, in
person, what code4lib is all about.

Brett

Brett Bonfield
Director
Collingswood Public Library

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 9:50 AM, Edward M. Corrado <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I disagree about the random registration concept. As long as the time
> is announced in advance (which was done this year) people should plan
> accordingly. You didn't need to register the first minute this year. I
> registered an hour after registration opened and while I was initially
> on the waiting list, I eventually got a slot. If I ended up getting
> locked out it would've been my own fault. I could have done what
> others did and purposely avoided scheduling meetings around that time
> and rescheduled the one that was but I didn't. Yes, I have bazillions
> of other things to do and the registration time wasn't convenient for
> me, but everyone else has bazillions of things to do as well. It would
> not have been luck that got the people in who registered before me a
> slot - it would have been a combination of their good planning and my
> poor planning. Yes good people miss out when registration fills up and
> maybe the library world suffers, but a random process would still have
> good people miss out -- including those who would make the effort and
> adjust there schedules accordingly -- which I think would lead to the
> library world suffering more.
>
> Edward
>
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 8:00 PM, Karen Schneider <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> I was really hoping that our Associate Director for Library Technology
>> could attend Code4Lib. She did her best, but didn't make it. She was then
>> pushed hard, early on, to drop her hotel room, which she did not do (good
>> for her) though I'm guessing she has by now. We're a 5-person library and
>> it's amazing to have someone with her expertise (IT tried to steal her
>> before I arrived, but I took her back), and we wouldn't be what we were
>> without her. I felt I owed her Code4Lib, but busy with my own distractions
>> I hadn't been on this list for a long time, and didn't tune in to the fact
>> that registration for C4L has become so nutzo that either she or her proxy
>> needed to be sitting on the reg process the very minute it opened, not a
>> few minutes later. She was probably doing one of the 8 bazillion things she
>> does every long day that help keep us going and differentiate us from all
>> the other teeny-weeny uni libraries out there.
>>
>> The library world will be a little less than what it could be because she's
>> not at Code4Lib.
>>
>> My idea: registration should open for two weeks, close, and then assign
>> spots randomly (and if it's too hard to think how that might be done, I
>> have a few thousand old catalog cards you can toss in a bucket).
>>
>> FYI, I know what zoia is, and I even know WHO the real Zoia is, but
>> invoking that super-secret-stuff is just icky. Maybe she doesn't need your
>> super-secret decoder rings anyway. She does want to stretch herself beyond
>> what we can make possible. We'll keep looking.
>>
>> Karen G. Schneider
>> Director for Library Services
>> Holy Names University
>> http://library.hnu.edu