howto/conference.md

@@ -763,3 +763,51 @@ out of scope, or have come up after the evaluation was performed:
    stream conferences online. requires hosting and managing our own
    services, although Carl Karsten @ https://nextdayvideo.com/ can
    provide that paid service.
+
+### Conference organisation
+
+This page is perhaps badly named, as it might suggest it is about
+organising actual, in person conferences as opposed to audio- or
+video-conferencing.
+
+Failing a full wiki page about this, we're squatting this space to
+document software alternatives for organising and managing actual
+in-person conferences.
+
+#### Status quo: ad-hoc, pads, Nextcloud and spreadsheets
+
+Right now, we're organising conferences using Etherpads and a
+spreadsheet. When the schedule is completed, it's posted in a
+Nextcloud calendar.
+
+This is hard. We got about 52 proposals in a pad for the Lisbon
+meeting, it was time-consuming to copy-paste those into a
+spreadsheet. Then it was hard to figure out how to place those in a
+schedule, as it wasn't clear how much over-capacity we were.
+
+Lots of manual steps, and communication was all out-of-band, by
+email.
+
+#### Pretalx / Pretix
+
+[Pretalx](https://pretalx.com/) is a free software option with a hosted service that
+seems to have it all: CFP management, rooms, capacity scheduling. A
+[demo](https://pretalx.com/p/try) was tested and is really promising.
+
+With a "tor meeting scale" type of event (< 100 attendees, 0$ entry
+fee), the [pricing](https://pretalx.com/p/pricing) is 200EUR per event, unless we [self-host](https://docs.pretalx.org/administrator/).
+
+They also have a ticketing software called [pretix](https://pretix.eu/) which we would
+probably not need.
+
+Pretalx was used by Pycon US 2023, Mozilla Festival 2022, Nsec, and so
+on.
+
+### wafer
+
+[Wafer](https://github.com/CTPUG/wafer) is a "wafer-thin web application for running small
+conferences, built using Django". It's used by the Debian conference
+(Debconf) to organise talks and so on. It doesn't have a demo site and
+it's unclear how easy it is to use. Debconf folks implemented a [large
+amount of stuff](https://salsa.debian.org/debconf-team/public/websites/wafer-debconf/) on top of it to tailor it to their needs, which is
+a little concerning.