Akshay -- I just got your email, so here are some thoughts I have on the current design and features I'd like to make sure are considered (things that are important from an organizers's point of view, but may be easy for others to miss).
- Allow attendees and speakers to edit the information they have submitted (for instance, if they decide to change their affiliation, or the title of their talk, they should be able to do that).
- Sometimes, conferences have more than one venue (for instance, we might be hosted by a university and be using classrooms in two buildings, plus the cafeteria). I think the ability to use different locations, and to link to pages that have more information about the location (such as addresses and transit directions) would take care of this.
- Sometimes, events don't fit into regular timeslots. For instance, a conference may have talks running every hour (1pm, 2pm, 3pm, etc) but also have a poster session that runs for 2 hours (1pm-3pm) and lunch beginning midway through a session (1:30pm) -- so we need to be able to customize times for each event.
- Allowing attendees to register even if they do not have an account on the wiki is a good option to have, because sometimes events are trying to recruit people who are not Mediawiki-savvy. In Fedora, we do this by creating a special namespace for events that is editable by non-users (you need a login to edit the rest of the wiki). You can see the registration for one of our events here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Archive:FUDCon:Toronto_2009#Pre-registration
- Think about the process of selecting talks and generating a conference schedule. You have a lot of talk submissions, and you need to (1) pick the best ones, and (2) assign them to time-slots in different rooms. This is often done by a group of people (who may be working distributedly). So this is one scenario to make sure the extension handles.
- It would be wonderful to have a schedule generator -- after the conference organizers decide which talks will be at which times in which rooms, they should be able to tag the "successful" talks with their time/location, and then there should be a page that pulls that data and creates a schedule grid (such as http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Toronto_2009_BarCamp_Schedule). Perhaps that page would automatically pull in some other information too (like directions to the location, or a short introduction or message-to-attendees for the conference) so attendees could just print that page and use it for reference.
- You might notice that each entry in the schedule grid above has a log linked to it -- it's important to be able to link back to more information about the talk (abstract, materials people need to participate in an activity, etc) and to be able to put in notes and minutes afterwards.
Hope this helps; I'm happy to test/draft/comment more specifically on particular features/ideas/workflows if you like, you know where to find me now. :)
This post was posted by Mchua~mediawikiwiki, but signed as Mchua.