Organising a conference will take your sanity to a dark corner and whisper into its ear until it weeps real tears.
It's not that it's a lot of work 1 it's that the work goes round and round in ever decreasing circles, leaving you feeling like a tiny plastic penguin racing down a slide in the shape of a Lorentz attractor.
I'm on my third conference as a main organiser, two of which are happening this summer. First the mighty Galaxy Community Conference is coming to The Sainsbury Laboratory (TSL) and we're organising our first independent Summer School on Plant Microbe Interactions at TSL shortly after. Both are shaping up to be amazing, but both are doing my nut.
The Galaxy Community Conference is a well-oiled machine and Dave Clements, its core organiser, is a logistical wizard. Dave is the main reason all previous GCC's have gone off like rockets. My and my teams problem has been with the infrastructure we have needed to implement on our side.
The root of the problem 2 is money. Taking in money from 250 participants is harder than it sounds like it would be. We thought we'd done our due diligence up-front, we compared all the available payment systems, checked pricing, sorted out the likely pitfalls and consulted with our finance teams. We thought we were ready to do this. But then the question-tennis started. A 'can you just' here, a 'can you clarify' there, a 'can you give us this information (again)', tens of 'can you get this signed by your company director' and a million 'can you describe your product and pricing scheme'. And don't get me started on the weakness of the IT platforms these companies require that we use - ever tried to set up a shopping website on the Drupal platform? Don't. It's like this:
The whole experience is maddening, not least because we may have to do it again and I don't know what we could have done to avoid these issues.
The next conference I do will be a strictly cash on the door affair.