Posted by Jim at March 23rd, 2006

One of the places I work is GRACE, a small non-profit. Bringing churches and the community into the fight against racism is one of GRACE’s missions. GRACE does this in part through a conference called “Summit on Racism.” Every year, GRACE brings the community together to begin work on racism for another year.

Part of attracting the community’s interest means getting a speaker, someone that people will come in to hear. This year they managed to get one of the producers of Crash, a movie that just happened to win a couple Academy Awards just before Summit.

Last year the conference had about 400 people attending. This year its slightly over 600. Previous to the movie winning we’d been expecting attendence to be like last year, something that’s prompted more than one of us to say, “Looks like I have to buy more (insert just about anything here).” For example, I might insert the word “nametags.”

My role in Summit is to photograph things on the day, but (more importantly) to handle the registration process. Not too long ago “handling registration” actually meant doing data entry of all the registrations that people mailed into us. After I got more comfortable with programming and our web host provider allowed us to use php, things became a lot easier for me.

In the sense that I don’t have to do data entry, it’s easier by far. In the sense that I now field calls about problems with Paypal, it’s not exactly a cakewalk. One of the amusing things about Summit is that a lot of organizations send people to the conference. Unfortunately for us, Paypal has problems with organizational credit cards unless the organization specifically registers the card with Paypal. In short, Paypal is a pain for exactly the sort of group that we need it to be easy for. We’ve got a backup “pay by check” option for people when Paypal doesn’t work, but trying to pay twice annoys people.

Would I rather have people calling me to complain about Paypal than having to personally enter 800 names (as I did in 2001)? Yes. By far.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that the final days before Summit are filled with stress. I work at home and thus my work phone rings at my house. If, as happened this week, my wife is sick during the last couple days before Summit and attempts to rest, she will have a hard time sleeping due to the incessant ringing of phones. On Tuesday in particular, I sometimes found my cell phone and work phone ringing simultaneously with Summit related calls.

Beyond that there’s the matter of getting information about people out of the database, assigning them to small groups, printing out their nametags and making sure that the people at the front desk know who’s paid and who hasn’t. That’s an easy sentence to write, but passes over many layers of stress and lack of sleep.

So tomorrow is Summit. I’m hoping it goes decently and that I haven’t missed any major details.