SamAware

SamAware is a pretalx plugin with enhanced features for speaker care during a conference.

It is designed for conference staff taking care of speaker check-in, talk assistance, program coordination, stage operations, and similar tasks. SamAware was originally developed for the Speakers' Desk at Chaos Communication Congress.

Features

SamAware enhances the pretalx orga interface with these features:

• Dashboard with at-a-glance stats on missing speakers, unreleased schedule changes, etc.
• Incremental search for talks by title or speaker name
• Overview page for each talk gathering the relevant submission and speaker information
• List of talks with "Don't record" setting
• Tech Riders for talks with special technical requirements
• Speaker Care Messages with internal information on a speaker that will be displayed prominently when accessing them or their talks

Installation

SamAware requires at least pretalx version 2025.2. It is available from PyPI and gets installed like any other pretalx plugin. First, install the package into your pretalx installation's Python environment:

(env) > pip install samaware

Next, you need to collect static assets:

(env) > DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=pretalx.settings django-admin collectstatic

Afterward, restart pretalx.

SamAware should now appear in the pretalx orga interface of your Event under "Settings" / "Plugins" / "Features". You can enable it there for each Event. It requires no configuration.

Development

For a local development environment, set up a Python venv or use a dev container.

pretalx itself must be installed in that environment. One option is to create a full development setup as described in the pretalx docs. Alternatively, you can get the latest pretalx release from PyPI by running:

> pip install pretalx

In both cases, you then clone the SamAware repo, change to that source directory, and add it to your environment like this:

> pip install -e .[dev]

You probably need to collect static assets and apply migrations:

> DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=pretalx.settings django-admin collectstatic
> DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=pretalx.settings django-admin migrate

If not done already, initialize your pretalx dev instance through:

> DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=pretalx.settings django-admin init

It is useful to create a demo Event for development. This requires the "Faker" and "freezegun" Python packages. Setting it up in the "schedule" stage provides the best starting point for SamAware development:

> pip install Faker freezegun
> DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=pretalx.settings django-admin create_test_event --stage schedule

Now, you should be able to start the development server through:

make run

Make sure to have a look at the Makefile as it also provides useful targets for testing and linting.

Finally, open the running instance in a browser and enable SamAware in the orga interface for your demo Event under "Settings" / "Plugins" / "Features".

Security

Should you encounter any security vulnerabilities in SamAware, please report them privately. Use GitHub vulnerability reporting or contact Felix Dreissig directly.

Copyright

SamAware has been created by Felix Dreissig.

It is released under the ISC License.