I just heard from Pat Beauchamp today. While she retired in 2020, she’s coming out of retirement to run CSICon 2022!!
The call for volunteers has started! You’ll help for about four hours, and none of that time will be during anything that you’ve paid for – when the talks start, we’re in our seats. In exchange you’ll get free admission to the party Saturday night, and are invited to the free staff & volunteer dinner (probably Thursday night 5:30-6:30pm). Sometime speakers attend the dinner too.
Volunteering may have other, random perks. Once, the two volunteers who were checking badges before the magic show were asked by Banachek to be part of his show. Another time, the volunteer who was helping organize the book signing lines had to spend 15 minutes in a room with the authors as some technical glitches delayed the start. I always randomly assign volunteers to check tickets for the Thursday workshops; and once the workshop starts I insist that you continue checking from inside the workshop.
We volunteers help with setup and tear-down (mainly of the book sales area), help at the registration area, check badges and tickets (all before events begin), organize the book signing lines, and so on. If you attended one of the last CSICons and preregistered, a volunteer probably handed you your packet. During the popular booksigning events, you may have heard me saying “The end of the line is in front of me” as I backed away from the rapidly growing line.
The we site hasn’t been update from 2019 yet, but if you go to https://csiconference.org/, click on Info, scroll down and click on Volunteer, that page has the email address to use, volunteering@csiconference.org . I coordinate the easy stuff; if you have other relevant skills, e.g. award-winning PR abilities, I’ll put you in touch with the CSI staff.
— Scott