Kiwicon is upon us again for the 7th year in a row. I’ve been at this most awesome and fun conference already 3 times and am not going to miss this year’s edition. I’m looking forward to a weekend full of talks relating to info security in the Wellington Opera House. Over 750 people have signed up and the venue is completely sold out so that a number of people who were late registering were out of luck.

The weeks before the conference are busy for the organizers, The Crüe, but the week before Kiwicon takes the cake. Last minute preparations need to be made, name badges sorted, crafting finished, and of course the merch orders fulfilled. This year it took us just about 2 hours to get all 271 orders sorted. That may not sound like much, but it is a big effort to sort hoodies and T-shirts into “dudes” and “chicks” and then put them all into numbered bags so that it’s easier and quicker to hand them out during registration.

The system is being improved every year. This year, we had a pretty smooth work flow and check points built in to avoid order confusion:

1. Sort all hoodies and T-shirts according to size and “dudes” and “chicks”.
2. Count all hoodies and T-shirts and make sure we’ve got them all.
3. One person writes the numbers on stickers (next year these will be printed).
4. Teams of two take sheets with the orders and bag the respective hoodies and T-shirts. They seal the plastic bags with the stickers so that the numbers are easily seen but also so that the bags could be re-used since some people ordered more than one item.
5. One person with the master list puts the bags into boxes in sequential order and ticks off the bags.
6. When a box is full and the orders have been ticked off, the box gets a check mark and is placed aside. All boxes are lined up in rows in sequential order for a quick check that all orders are there.
7. Rinse and repeat until done.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.