The organisers' side of your event, in one place
Flashlights runs the parts of an event nobody in the audience sees: a lightweight speaker intake, the speakers and their files, volunteers and teams, sponsors, the schedule, and the emails that hold it all together. One instance serves one community, edition after edition.
Everything between the idea and the opening session
Built from running real conferences and meetups, and derived from the portal that runs PyLadiesCon. Every part exists because an organising team needed it.
Speaker intake and checklists
A lightweight speaker intake: people propose a session and you say yes or no, or you invite the speakers you have already chosen. Then profiles, sessions and two-sided checklists with reminders, so a speaker always knows what you still need from them. Not a call for proposals system.
The schedule
Rooms, slots and sessions, with recordings and uploads kept with them, plus a public program widget and API your website can read.
Volunteers and teams
Applications, teams, and permissions granted through teams from one catalogue, with presets such as Organizers, Program and Sponsorship. No Django admin for the settings organisers need.
Sponsors
Tiers, contract requests, donations and their stats, kept by the organisers. Sponsors never need an account. Switch the whole area off for an event that has none.
The numbers
An organiser dashboard with volunteers, sponsorship and donations against their goals, and attendee counts read from Pretix or a CSV export of whatever takes your registrations. Public stats pages with a year-over-year comparison, off with one switch. Flashlights registers nobody; it keeps the records.
Editions
One event a year or a series of dates, in person, online or hybrid, with venues and rooms. Plan the next edition while the current one runs.
Your name on it
The name, colours, logo, favicon, share image and policy links come from environment variables. One image serves any community, and the design system restyles every page.
Runs on any host
A plain container with a boot contract: web, worker, release. Heroku and compatibles, Azure Container Apps, Cabotage or a plain server, each documented.
Your own code, without a fork
A community adds a Django app to the image and may replace a core template or static file. Upgrade by bumping the image tag, not by merging.
The emails
Invitations, reminders, notices and the rest of the portal's own emails, each written once in Markdown and sent as text and HTML, through any SMTP provider. Sign-in and verification codes come from the account system as plain text.
No third-party code on any page
Every script, stylesheet, font and chart is served by the instance itself. No analytics, no advertising, no third-party cookies. The only other host a page touches is your own bucket, for the pictures and files people upload.
Documentation per release
Each release publishes its own version of the docs, and an instance's help links point at the version it runs.
Who makes Flashlights
Flashlights is published for use and study, maintained by one person, and does not take code contributions. Bug reports and ideas are welcome as issues.
Multi-award-winning open source contributor and serial conference organiser. Flashlights is what she wished every organising team had: the organisers' side of an event in one place, under the community's own name.