Attendee Experience
Give attendees a voice and a return channel — right-sized contribution features that compose onto machinery you already run
Last Updated: 2026-06-13
Implemented — Epic 7 (Stories 7.1–7.6) — Story 7.7 (curated thank-you marquee) in development.
Overview
For a community of ~200 practitioners that meets ~3 times a year, the old idea of personal dashboards, bookmarks, a recommendation engine, and a mobile PWA was always too much machinery for too little recurring engagement. Epic 7 is the right-sized replacement. It adds a small set of organizer-voted features whose single thesis is this:
The login was never about gating consumption — content is, and stays, free to everyone. The login exists to gate participation, and to make a contributor reachable so a suggestion can become a dialogue.
Anonymous visitors lose nothing. Logged-in attendees gain a voice (they can shape future topics and even put themselves on stage) and a return channel (you, the organizer, can reply, follow up, and close the loop).
The contribution loop
Everything in this section follows the same low-effort shape:
Attendees contribute → Organizers triage with near-zero extra effort → the loop compounds
Attendees suggest topics, raise their hand to speak, ask the questions the apéro didn’t have time for, and thank the people who run BATbern. You review and approve at most — there is no new standing task and no always-on feed to keep alive. Each feature self-runs once built, and every contribution lands in a surface you already use (the topic-suggestion admin UI, the speaker kanban, the event task list, the public archive).
event-management-service and partner-coordination-service) and existing infrastructure (auto-publishing, the SES newsletter sender, the ShedLock scheduler, the public archive). Nothing new to operate.
How attendees sign in
Contributions are login-gated and ride on the existing “Continue with Google” sign-in (Epic 12). A first-time contributor is provisioned just-in-time with the default ATTENDEE role — which is sufficient for every contribution endpoint in this section. No invitation, no separate account, no per-role login.
The one deliberate exception is Thank-the-Organizers, which is anonymous-allowed (friction hurts most there) and protected by a Turnstile + rate-limit abuse guard instead of a login.
Guardrails
These features were chosen against three guardrails the organizer committee set, and they stay inside them:
- The physical apéro stays sacred. The post-event Q&A (7.5) is the digital afterglow — it never digitizes or intrudes on the in-person ritual.
- Cadence-match. Only event-triggered communications — no always-on feed that a thrice-yearly rhythm would make look abandoned.
- Login = reachability. Gating is there to enable dialogue, never to restrict access to content.
Features
| Feature | Story | What attendees do | Where you triage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Topics From the Floor | 7.1 | Suggest a future event topic (title + rationale) | Existing topic-suggestion admin UI (community badge) |
| Speaker Self-Nomination | 7.2 | Raise a hand with a session title + abstract | Existing 8-state speaker workflow (kanban) |
| Slides-Online Email | 7.3 | (Receive) the one post-event email they’ll open | Auto-created event task → one-click send |
| Thank-the-Organizers | 7.4 | One-click thank-you, optional note | Appreciation surface (count + notes) |
| Post-Event Q&A | 7.5 | Ask & answer per-session questions for ~14 days | Takedown / extend / close-early; freezes into archive |
| Event History | 7.6 | See the events they registered for / attended | (Attendee self-service — no triage) |
Related
- Topic Voting → — community topics share the partner topic pool
- Phase B: Outreach → — where self-nominated speakers are triaged
- Task Templates → — where the slides-online task is seeded
- Workflow System Overview →