A wonderful time

Leilani and I are just back from two weeks in Egypt where we married and went on to spend our honeymoon in the sun. Some 100 people from 20 nations travelled to Cairo to celebrate the big day with us. It was a true privilege to walk around a place far away yet frequently bump into friends and family. Some of our wedding guests followed us to our honeymoon location and the party continued there. We had a wonderful time in Egypt and we have a wonderful time ahead of us.

Co-ordination and communication is key when a large number of people gather in a far-away location. Old style email and telephone were the main tools when communicating with event managers, hotels, travel agents, florists, musicians and other suppliers in Cairo. With Skype it was easy to make conference calls and contain costs. We also made use of a selection of collaborative tools:

• The shaping of the event was done with mind maps using Mind Manager
• Communicating with guests was accomplished with a Typepad weblog. Only two all-guest emails were sent out. Our guests quickly became frequent readers of our blog and used the comments feature to share tips about flights and hotels.
• When the time drew close, we hosted a conference call to talk through the event in detail and allow our guests to ask questions. A summary of the call was posted to the blog within a few hours.
• For the detailed planning and to-do lists we used a single document residing in Writely and shared with participants in London, Dubai, Ljubljana and Malawi. We considered using Basecamp but decided to keep things simple in an easy-to-print document format.
• Needless to say, a large percentage of our guests brought their digital cameras. Via our blog, we are encouraging everybody to upload their photos to flickr and share them in a flickr group. This will become the official photo album of our wedding.

As somebody pointed out, we missed a trick: we should have provided Egyptian sim cards for everyone, with all names and numbers already keyed into the phones' contact lists. I shall pass on this idea to anybody else who is planning a wedding that requires people to travel to a foreign destination.

More than all the web 2.0 bells and whistles, what made our wedding such a fun and pleasurable time for everyone was Leilani's energy and persistence, getting all parties involved to come together to deliver their utmost. Another reason to be proud of my wonderful wife.

Comments

[Ben Poole]

Hearty congratulations to you both, Lars and Leilani.

As for your collaborative, buzzword-compliant approach to planning the great day, I would have expected nothing less ;o)

[Michael Sampson]

Indeed, hearty congrats to you both. This is wonderful news.