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Governance Guidelines¤

Warning

This document is in part a work in progress.

Note

Implementation is related to infrastructure.

Data and Volunteer Management¤

Conference Data¤

As organizers, we handle significant amounts of sensitive information essential to our conference's operations:

  • Speaker proposals and presentations
  • Attendee registration details
  • Financial transactions
  • Communication records
  • Volunteer information

We must manage this data professionally, ensuring compliance with legal requirements and maintaining the trust of our community.

Volunteer Boundaries¤

Our volunteers are essential to the conference's success. We respect their commitment by:

  • Maintaining clear boundaries between personal and conference activities
  • Protecting their private contact information
  • Enabling them to control their availability
  • Implementing professional communication channels

Through proper infrastructure and clear policies, we ensure both data protection and volunteer well-being.

Governance Structure¤

The governance structure reflects the committee structure to simplify the organization and communication. I.e., all members of a committee are organized in groups.

flowchart TD
    G["Conference"]
    S["Steering Committee"]
    D["Diversity Committee"]
    B["Program Committee"]
    C["Video Committee"]
    X["… Committee"]
    O["Office"]

    G --> S
    G ---> O
    S --> C
    S --> X
    S --> D
    S --> B

We trust people to act responsibly and professionally.
We grant access to a need-to-know basis and expect volunteers to respect the privacy of others.

We want to be open to alternatives if they provide significant benefits.

Tooling¤

We want to use as few tools as possible to avoid fragmentation and confusion.
We want to use common tools that volunteers likely already know.

Bad Practices and Solutions¤

Some bad practices we have identified and our solutions:

Topic Issue Solution
Sharing files Volunteers using personal Google accounts to share and manage files Organizational Drives with structured access control and defined user groups
Ownership of files Files that should be deleted are owned by personal Google accounts Organizational Drives with structured access control and defined user groups
Email communication Using personal email accounts for conference-related communication Organizational email system with shared inboxes and distribution lists
Disconnecting Constant reachability via personal accounts Dedicated conference accounts that can be turned off
Free accounts Free accounts have limited features and are not suitable for professional use Paid accounts with proper features, look for non-profit discounts
Private task boards Orphaned private boards cannot evene be inspected for relevance/data protection Organizational task boards
Other ownership Personal ownership of e.g., calendar invites for committee meetings Group Access to e.g. calendars and other tools used in the committees
Post conference No cleanup of unrelated files and folders after the conference Organizational post-conference cleanup and archiving of files and folders