Bigger WordCamps spend a lot of time in registration of the attendees upon arrival or for workshops and handing out swag like T-shirts based on lists that exist (mainly on paper). A QR code on e.g. a cellphone or tablet could speed up things.I saw somebody already opened a trac ticket (https://meta.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4162), but there was nor further follow up, so please find below my proposal after having led registration and swag at WCEU 2019:
Phase1: Add the QR code in the email when buying a ticket and on the WordCamp site when attendee logs in with the personal credentials.
Phase2: Attach as pkpass (or other) to the email and allow downloading that file from the site.
WCEU has been using for the last 2 years a system that prints badges when attendees arrive. The average time per person is 40 seconds because the name needs to be spelled or checked, so with almost 2800 attendees, no time should be wasted. Then the T-shirts size is requested when buying the ticket so when swag opens, manual comparison of the name on the badge and the request made on the site is done to hand out the correct T-shirt. Having a unique QR code per person would enormously speed up in both cases when using any system that can scan those codes.
For Phase1, the following should be considered:
1.1 The unique string to use: A QR code can hold any text. Proposal is to use the first part of the URL of the site followed by the postID of the ticket, e.g. ‘2019.europe-534’ (The postID is what is also received when exporting tickets from the website to CSV, so could be used in other applications). Another unique string could maybe be added if needed for an extra check (like the first 10 characters of the access token as generated in camptix).
1.2. Generating the QR code: Using a local PHP library like http://phpqrcode.sourceforge.net/ or using the google API (e.g. https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=300×300&cht=qr&chl=2019.europe-534&choe=UTF-8)
For Phase2, libraries like https://github.com/tschoffelen/php-pkpass would be a starting point
Having this QR code would help for any application built around a WordCamp:
- Scanning the QR code to print the badge (current system that WCEU is having can do this)
- Scanning the QR code to see the size of the T-shirt requested (with the unique postID of the user and checking the CSV from the site, this can be done)
- Scanning by the Sponsors to later get in touch with the user (as done on WCEU), of course with all proper information to both parties.
Please leave any comments or further ideas so we can build all together on this.