EventGrid

Event Grid

The events grid feature within convention master is a comprehensive scheduleing system. Not only can it help you manage panels/lectures/dances (Activities) into a schedule of events, but it's flexability allows you also to be able to create free-form unconstrained schedules, as well as shift schedules for department staffing.

Manuals

1. Understanding the Activity Object - This guide is good pre-reading to understand the activity object, and will provide you some important context within the system how Activities differ from Schedules

Schedule Types

The events grid system can support four types of schedules.

• Activity Schedule This allows you to schedule fully created activities using venue rooms as resources to schedule activities into. This is the traditionally published "Event schedule" for most events.
• Shift Schedule This allows you to create shift schedules for scheduling staff within a department such as Reg or Ops.
• Free Form This allows you to create a schedule that uses free form text for both it's resources and it's entries. None of the free text used as either resources or entries will link to anything else in the system.
• Advanced A advanced schedule allows you to add venue rooms, job titles, or free text as resources, all in the same schedule. Each resource maintains the same constraints found in other schedules.

Terminology / Properties

• Venue - Venue is the representation of a hotel property. The hotel, venue or venues to which the hotel is hosted and operating it's activities.
• Activity - The actual events, panels, dances etc that will be put onto the event schedule.
• Schedule - The timeline object that holds your schedules
• Panelist - A person who has suggested, or is putting on a Activity

Workflows

• The panelist signup kiosk workflow
• The Activity Approval Workflow
• The EventGrid setup workflow

Properties

• Venue - A venue will be able to be set up, they will have the following features.
  • Not year specific - Each venue is NOT specific to a event year, and is available to all events within the software. With the idea that once a venue is set up, it can be easily re-used at future years.
  • Rooms - Each venue is able to have as many rooms as are needed. These rooms could be large ballrooms or small meeting rooms, or even called 'Pre-function area outside main theatre' or 'East Hallway'
  • Sub Rooms - Each room can be a sub-room of another room. For example "Ballroom A" can be a Sub-room to "Main Ballroom" this will ensure that the "Main Ballroom" cannot be put to use, if "Ballroom A" is already scheduled for things.
  • Default Duration - Each activity type will have a default duration in minutes which applicants will never see, but will be copied to the activity upon creation.
  • Availability - A hotel liaison or someone can set up the availability for a venue room per event. This will ensure that the events team will be only able to schedule events during times that the hotel contract allows.

• Activity Types - Each activity must be classified into some kind of activity type. Activity types are set up by the events lead.
  • Type - A activity type must have a name.
  • Questions - Each activity type can have a series of additional questions which must or may be answered by people offering to put them onto the panels. Questions
  • Colour - Each activity type can have a colour set so that activities of the same type can be grouped by colour.
  • Display Publicly - Activity types can be set to be displayed publically or not. This allows you to have a "Room Setup" type activity to block the room off during time periods, but also not have those blocks printed.

• Activities - Activities are things that you can schedule. Be it a dance, panel, competition, etc.
  • Applications - Activities can be created by people offering to do activities on a kiosk. Applicants will have to answer the series of questions based on the activity types.
  • Status - Activities can have a few status' as they move through the approval process.
    • New - A new Activity that has not yet been reviewed.
    • Approved - A activity that has been approved.
    • Denied - A activity that has been denied.
    • Deferred - A activity that has been deferred for later decision making.
    • Confirmed - A activity that has been confirmed.
  • Change Logging - As activities are altered, modified, approved, denied etc, the changes will appear in a log of the activity
  • Title/Description - Activities can have titles and descriptions.
  • Visible - Activities can be marked as publicly visible or not. This means that activities could be things like setup times for theatre or room changeover times
  • Duration - Activities will have a start duration in minutes based on their type, but this can be then later altered. Activity durations determine how much time in a schedule the activity takes.
  • Flags - Various flags added to the activities for various reasons
    • Adult/18+ Flag - Flag this event as adults only.

Something to consier, eventOverlap can either be allowed or denied. BUt cannot be denied by event. So ... this may need to be a per-schedule setting.

• Schedules - Schedules are the setup of a timeline. Schedules are ALWAYS specific to a specific event.
  • Activity Schedule
    • Purpose: Allows people to make activity schedules that can be published to the website.
    • Event Specific - Schedules are always specific to ONE event.
    • Resources - This uses Only Hotel Function Rooms as resources. (In Edit mode, all resources available, In public viewer mode only Used resources should appear)
    • Published - Can be marked as Published
    • Public - Can be marked as Public. When Published and Public, going to a URL could embed in a public page.
    • Titled - Can be titled.
    • Notes - A field called notes can contain private notes that are only visible to other schedule editors.
    • Password - A Password can be set. If set, the schedule can be viewed using a share link even when unpublished.
  • Shift Schedule
    • Purpose: Allows people to schedule departments like Ops, Reg, Dealers den. Can be very useful to allow OPS to know who should be in charge of any given department at any given time.
    • Event Specific - Schedules are always specific to ONE event.
    • Resources - This uses People OR free form entries as resources. (In public mode, all resources are shown even if unused.)
    • Published - Can be marked as Published
    • Public - Can be marked as Public. When Published and Public, going to a URL could embed in a public page.
    • Titled - Can be titled.
    • Notes - A field called notes can contain private notes that are only visible to other schedule editors.
    • Password - A Password can be set. If set, the schedule can be viewed using a share link even when unpublished.
  • Master Shift Schedule
    • Purpose: Combines one or more Shift schedules to make a combined shift schedule that can be used for event planning.
    • Event Specific - Schedules are always specific to ONE event.
    • Resources - This uses People OR free form entries as resources. (In public mode, all resources are shown even if unused.)
    • Published - Can be marked as Published
    • Public - Can be marked as Public. When Published and Public, going to a URL could embed in a public page.
    • Titled - Can be titled.
    • Notes - A field called notes can contain private notes that are only visible to other schedule editors.
    • Password - A Password can be set. If set, the schedule can be viewed using a share link even when unpublished.
  • FreeForm Schedule
    • Purpose Allow someone to make a schedule for purposes other than what we predicted.
    • Event Specific - Schedules are always specific to ONE event.
    • Resources - This uses free form entries as resources
    • Published - Can be marked as Published
    • Public - Can be marked as Public. When Published and Public, going to a URL could embed in a public page.
    • Titled - Can be titled.
    • Notes - A field called notes can contain private notes that are only visible to other schedule editors.
    • Password - A Password can be set. If set, the schedule can be viewed using a share link even when unpublished.

Event Grid Settings

Like Artshow, there are settings that apply to the event grid for this event. These will control various aspects of how the system operates.