Page 41 - BigConversationsDismantlingRacism

Physical Preparation Our registration lead brought several extension cords, power
on Day of Event strips, and duct tape to provide trip resistant power to each
registrar’s location.
Registration at the Each registrar asked for the attendee’s name and if they had
Big Conversation participated in any previous event. If “yes”, they then searched the
spreadsheet and confirmed the entered information – especially
confirming the email address and updating the status column. If
“no”, they entered the contact info with special emphasis on the
email address, if the individual was willing to provide it, and
status.
After the Event – Each registrar’s spreadsheet was copied to a USB drive at the
Merging the event and backed-up with copies via email. These were then
Registrar’s copied to our lead’s home workstation. After making multiple
Spreadsheets backups, he identified new entries by the value in the status
column and copied all of these to a new spreadsheet. He then,
based on the status column value, copied all previous attendees
who participated in the event and copied these to the new
spreadsheet.
Final Consolidation Our lead ran a final check and resolved any duplicate records.
and Verification of Records for those who had attended previous events but not this
Registration Data for one were then added and further checked for duplicates, looking
This and Previous for changed records where the registrar had forgotten to change the
Events status column. Finally, the list of panelists and other special
attendees were checked and their records were added if they hadn’t
registered – most had not.

Name Tags and Small-Group Room Assignments
Immediately after registration, attendees were directed to
another committee member who was responsible for small
group assignment. This committee member established a
system by which the requisite number of name tags for each
small-group room assignment was placed in individual sections
of a box on her table. For example, a small 12”x12”x3” box was divided into 20 sections,
one for each small group, and 15 name tags were placed in each section. (One of the name
tags was for the facilitator. The Speakers were also assigned a room). Each section was
assigned a room number and that room number was placed on the upper right corner of each
name tag. Since there was no pre-registration for the events, we didn’t know with certainty
how many people would attend. Her goal was to fill the small groups evenly and try to
achieve racial diversity in each group. We found the best way to insure diversity was to tag
half the name tags in each section of the box with a small dot in the corner to denote a

32