program guide
Jul. 16th, 2009 04:28 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
donastraya.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
dragoncon_lj_archiveI think it might be too early to ask, but has anyone seen a daily program/panel guide? i.e what time what panel is scheduled for
donastraya.livejournal.com posting in dragoncon_lj_archive
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 08:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 09:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 10:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 10:55 pm (UTC)Heaven forbid Track A have an easy centralized way to see the provisional schedule for Track B so that they can work out conflicts BEFORE the scheduling dept plays roulette for them.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 02:41 pm (UTC)Because it's understood that the schedules on the track websites are unofficial, provisional schedules. Posting them on the Dragon*Con website would give the imprimatur of finality to them, not matter how many times the page said "UNOFFICIAL PROVISIONAL SCHEDULES."
Heaven forbid Track A have an easy centralized way to see the provisional schedule for Track B so that they can work out conflicts BEFORE the scheduling dept plays roulette for them.
This is what the directors' meetings are for; there is an ENORMOUS amount of coordination that goes on behind the scenes. Scheduling issues basically boil down to "hey, that actor has another commitment at that time, we have to move that panel" (which can affect several other panels, for which we again have to check guests' schedules) and "wow, that panel really ought to be in a larger/smaller room, what have we got?" which, again, affects other panels. Anything that happens at the track-room level is basically unchanged from whatever the track director decides, but anything that happens in a ballroom goes in front of at least twenty peoples' eyeballs.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 12:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 08:48 pm (UTC)Also they are working on a iphone app with a schedule and I hope a map.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 09:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 10:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 01:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 08:51 pm (UTC)I always have a plan A and a plan B for things I want to see just in case one moves to another time or there are two at one time I wanna see.
49 days and counting kids!!
no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 09:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 09:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 10:07 pm (UTC)Last year I only found the schedule posted here, in the LJ, but nowhere on the website, and even the individual fan track websites didn't all have their schedules posted - some did, but most didn't even up until the first day of con.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 10:14 pm (UTC)But still, it's really a pain in the ass to find the schedule ahead of time. I'm looking forward to the iPhone app, but I expect to have a hard time with that too, if all goes according to historical precedence with scheduling.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 10:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 02:00 am (UTC)trouble finding it?
Date: 2009-07-16 11:08 pm (UTC)Please believe that I am not meaning to be snarky here. You know, I haven't actually looked at it in over half a year; maybe it got shuffled out. Let's take a look at it!
Hunh. I did a Google search for "dragoncon" and hit "I feel lucky". That got me to http://www.dragoncon.org/index.php (the home page). There's that nice Navigation menu on the left; I picked "Convention Events" and that wasn't it, but I could look at individual tracks under "Fan Tracks", or under "Public/Media Relations" there are links for the Pocket Program and Schedule Grids. Either one of those would be likely to give a visitor the schedule that'll get printed in the Pocket Program, once the volunteer staff have those close enough to post.
I dunno, cousin, I'm not finding this hard. Granted, I'm not representative of the target audience, but when I asked my late-fifties-aged mom, who's quite pleased to understand what an "mp3 audio book" is, if she could find where the "Dragon*Con Schedule" might be, she came back to the phone in four minutes and said, "Baby, they haven't got it ready to show yet." I'm figuring the target audience is probably MORE tech-savvy than either of us, neh?
Re: trouble finding it?
Date: 2009-07-16 11:36 pm (UTC)Second, last year I found the link to the Pocket Program here in LJ by way of a google search because the website NEVER HAD IT UPLOADED. If it did, it was after the con started because that's when I stopped looking for it, having finally found it in the LJ forum.
The track schedules were also never fully listed. Only a handful of the tracks in the list actually had schedules available, most of which were not tracks that I wanted to attend.
So no, it is not actually all that easy to find the schedule. You can find a couple of links where a schedule is supposed to go, but the schedule doesn't actually make it there.
Re: trouble finding it?
Date: 2009-07-16 11:53 pm (UTC)I found the link to the PP on the website last year. Before Tuesday. Downloaded the whole thing to my Palm, as a .pdf, then went back and edited it down to the tracks I and my household were most interested in, and redownloaded it to my Palm as a spreadsheet.
You're looking for a chance to be righteously irritated, methinks. Have a fun link (http://www.crankypantshome.com/), and I hope your weekend goes better than today did!
Re: trouble finding it?
Date: 2009-07-17 12:11 am (UTC)I am not the only person who has had trouble finding the schedule in the past, and as a con organizer myself, I am offering samples of difficulty by visitors and suggestions on how to improve the website and the visitor's experience.
As for your comments about misunderstanding, yes, I apologize for misunderstanding, but it's rather condescending of you to throw in that last bit about "pretty simple computation of standardized English grammar code". Had it occurred to you that perhaps English is not my first language, or that people on the internet did use formal English rules in their writing, so that it would not be my natural assumption to apply formalized rules to your comment?
You're looking for a chance to be righteously defensive, methinks, by someone pointing out a problem in the organization that, clearly, others have seen as well.
Re: trouble finding it?
Date: 2009-07-17 12:12 am (UTC)Cranky Pants are a bit Off Topic.
Date: 2009-07-17 03:10 am (UTC)Alternatively, if you just NEED to have the last word, go ahead; I don't care about "winning" so much as I care about "making our world more pleasant".
One of my husbands is a professional AI programmer, and the other is a software tester, and both are considered highly expert in their respective professions by large chunks of the industry; I know how to phrase things for coder consumption. I could have improved my statement a tad by using "parse" instead of "understand" -- but as a man who stood upon his dignity over the phrase "tech savvy", especially in terms of "I code html by hand and I run the website", you are implicitly setting the conversation onto a computer geek basis of thought and comprehension. A person who grokks computer code is a person who processes concepts in terms of definition and function.
Pronouns refer to the most recently mentioned applicable noun(s). This isn't "formal English", this is kindergarten English. Persons who learn English as a non-native language are MORE likely to understand the textbook version of the written language than they are the colloquial versions; your suggestion is not relevant to the topic of you getting crankypants over your own failure to succeed in a Reading Comprehension Skill Check, much less to the OP topic of "has anyone seen the schedule yet?"
Nor is your general Intertubes Rage entirely relevant to "has anyone seen the schedule yet?". You were doing good on the statement that you haven't seen it but thought you'd seen a Tweet that it'd be out today, only you couldn't find it; you might've been okay with slight frothing at the keyboard over your personal trouble finding it at all before con started last year, but you set the connotative levels of scorn in your word choices to eleven.
Have I seen the schedule yet? No. Are you making anything better for anybody by kvetching at the the web staff (in absentia, no less!) because you, personally, can't find the schedule in one click? No. Are you helping Straya solve her quest for intel? No. Are you making yourself feel any better by getting picking out something I wrote in a post that starts with the assumption "Joreth has pointed out a problem", tests it, and finds it to not prove true?
If yes, then I refer back to my closing statement in the previous post: Have a fun link (http://www.crankypantshome.com/), and I hope your weekend goes better than today did!
You sure remind me of my baby brother. He's a tad bit older than you. Very smart guy, but so quick to jump to angry conclusions! And always shocked when I really DO decide to get antagonistic, instead of carefully pointing out independent facts and alternative viewpoints.
Re: Cranky Pants are a bit Off Topic.
Date: 2009-07-17 04:24 pm (UTC)2) if you don't care so much about "winning" so much as you care about "making our world more pleasant" then drop the conversation already. If you didn't "need" to have the last word, then this comment didn't "need" to be posted at all.
3) understanding math is not the same thing has having perfect English skills. Nor do you have any basis to make any assumptions about how I "process" or "grokk" or "parse" anything as you have no idea how my mind works except for the fact that I understand html coding and therefore understand how websites work, which was a fact that I had to provide. I apologized for the misunderstanding already regarding the pronoun "us" - it is a common mistake, from both English as a first language and English as a second language people. Persons who learn English a second language are not "more likely to understand the textbook version of the written language" because it depends on how they learned English. My best friend learned English by watching BBC comedies while growing up in Germany, so he has a lot of trouble with formal grammar rules, but he understands English humor (better than I do, not having been exposed to British humor until adulthood). Pronouns are notoriously complicated to a large portion of the population. Again with the assumptions and lumping in people to categories. And I apologized for it already.
4) You still have not seen anything regarding "emotion" from me, let alone a strong emotion like "rage" or even "scorn", however your posts are just dripping with condescension and not conducive to encouraging me to be friendly towards you. The person who merely offered the links to where I could find the schedule was MUCH more helpful and I told her so.
5) My original complaint has not been proven untrue. The schedule *is* currently not available, which is annoying, often not made available until right before the con, which is also annoying, and when it is made available, it could be made easier to find than it currently is, and I gave specific suggestions as to how that could be accomplished.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 10:56 pm (UTC)http://publications.dragoncon.org/index.htm#Grids
no subject
Date: 2009-07-16 11:08 pm (UTC)As a community organizer myself, I'm pretty familiar with how difficult it can be to get the schedules up and available, but in my own communities, we make it front-page news on the website and have a link directly to "schedules" on every page header and we have a Twitter feed that we update with scheduling information (that also uses a widget on the homepage for those who don't follow Twitter directly). We also have a LJ page, where the info is copied, but it also links directly to the website, so although there are multiple sources of information, all the sources lead back to the main website and the front page of the main website. We have never had anyone ask us where to find the schedule or when it will be up because that information is the easiest information to find.
As a con-goer, I appreciate all the effort put into making D*C a fantastic event - I wouldn't miss it for anything. But from one con organizer to another, a suggestion would be to make the schedule information less of a hunt than it currently is.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 01:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 04:35 pm (UTC)There's also the qualifying phrase "once they're posted". As I said, I found the schedule last year by doing a Google search and having it direct me to the LJ, less than a week before con (because I had been keeping an eye on the website prior to that). I went to check the website after that and still no schedule. I don't doubt that it could have been posted after I stopped looking for it, once I found it in LJ.
And some of the tracks do post their schedules, but not all of them, particularly the tracks I happened to be interested in.
The schedule links are currently found under the "Public/Media Relations", which is not intuitively obvious to newcomers that this is the place to find a schedule. One has to either start clicking randomly to find it or click methodically down the list to find it, which can take time and, for the internet generation attention span, some people lose interest before they ever get there.
A simple link on the home page that says "schedules", somewhere near the top, preferably in the headerbar, would take a lot of the guesswork out of the process, and an announcement about when to expect the schedule would also prevent people from asking constantly "is it there yet? is it there yet?"
Keep in mind that this is your 8th year, so you should be pretty familiar by now with the website and how it works, but newcomers, people with fewer years experience, and people who don't remember where they found it last year might have more trouble navigating the site.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 02:15 pm (UTC)I check and very true, it's not up yet....but now I know where to look. I thought I had looked there, but must have missed it and for some reason I thought it came out earlier last year.
I'm gonna go hide now since I seem to have set off some very interesting conversations that I really had no intention of starting.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 03:27 am (UTC)I also got the schedule grid from the website around the same time, but I don't remember where it was linked.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 01:57 am (UTC)This year, I'm going to try to put it on my BlackJack II as a doc... still figuring that out... if anyone has any ideas about that, I'll be happy to have them!
no subject
Date: 2009-07-17 06:08 pm (UTC)Of course, I tend to do that when I *should* be packing.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-18 10:14 pm (UTC)I'm wondering there will be anything Clockwork related now Mr. McDowell is in the brochure. What will we all have to sacrifice eh : D