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Getting started

Flashlights is the organizers' portal for your event: where volunteers sign up, speakers see what we need from them, sponsors are tracked and the schedule is built. This guide is written for any event that runs it, from a multi-day online conference to a monthly meetup; "we" are the organisers of your event, "the portal" is your instance of Flashlights.

Who needs an account?

  • Volunteers and speakers need an account. Sponsors do not: the organisers keep their record.
  • Organisers need an account too, and apply as volunteers; an existing organiser then reviews the application into a team that grants the Organize hub.
  • Speakers use the same account they would use to volunteer, so a returning volunteer already has one. You can create it yourself when you propose a session, or, if we invite you, accepting the invitation creates it for you. See the speaker guide for both routes.
  • Attendees do not need an account. Tickets are handled by the ticketing system your event uses, not by the portal.

Sign up for an account

  1. Open the portal and choose Create an account.
  2. Choose a username, enter your email address and a password.
  3. We email you a verification code; enter it on the page to finish.

If we invited you to speak, skip this: accepting the invitation creates your account.

Your handles

Your account page keeps your pronouns and your handles: website, GitHub, Discord, Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Instagram and X. They are stored once and shared with your volunteer profile and your speaker profile, so whichever form you meet first, the next one arrives filled in, and a change on any of them follows everywhere. All are optional on the account page; the volunteer application asks for GitHub, and for Discord when the event uses it.

Signing in

Sign in with your password, or ask for a one-time code by email: no password needed. The code is how speakers usually sign in.

Your email addresses

You can add more than one email address to your account. We write to your primary address, and to a secondary one only when the primary cannot be reached. To change your address, add the new one and make it primary.

What a small event can skip

The portal runs every part of a large conference, and an organiser turns off what a smaller event does not use. Each of these is a switch on the instance or the edition, and what is off disappears from the pages:

Part When to skip it
Volunteer applications A meetup run by a fixed crew: keep the Volunteer hub for the team, stop advertising sign-ups on the landing page.
Sponsorship and donations No sponsors this year: the sponsor pages, goals and stats go.
The speaker portal An event that takes no proposals: sessions can still be scheduled by hand.
Public stats Numbers you would rather not publish: the stats pages go.
Attendee numbers No ticketing system connected: nothing is counted.