Well I have not had a party like you are thinking of BUT I have had people help me process my many animals from my yearly hunt and some of what I do and what you want to do overlap so i'll give you some input with my experiences in mind.
1. Unless this is going to be a 12 hour day where people arrive, help, and then eat some of this at towards the last 4 hours of the day... I think time is just simply going to be against you with the nature of the food products you are planning to make and then smoke.
2. If you want people to eat some of the food they are helping you make then the only FEASIBLE approach is to make a cured sausage like a pork frank or some type of cured kielbasa and then GRILL grill enough of what you make so people can enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Take the the rest of what you make with everyone and start smoking it OR set it aside to be smoked at a later date while you are by yourself. No way in the world smoked sausage is going to be made, smoked, and eaten all in the same day without people staying 12+ hours at your place waiting on it.
3. Jerky is a possibility if you make ground meat jerky. You have them help mix in all the cure and jerky seasoning and then roll it out between 2 sheets of parchment paper and use a butter knife to form jerky sticks. Lay a q-mat that has the square holes on the jerky and lay a smoker on next. Flip the jerky and the rack so that you can now peel the parchment paper and put the rack in the smoker. Do this for a smoker's worth of jerky and MAYBE you can have jerky smoked and ready in 4-5 hours. That is the fastest smoked item you can do but isn't really a meal. Set aside the rest of the mixed jerky meat for making jerky the next day or whenever you want to.
4. Curing bacon... you can get them to help you cut the bacon belly into sections that fit into gallon ziplock bags, weigh, then measure and add the cure and ingredients and then the work is done. You gotta wait days for the cure to do it's job on bacon so no way they will be eating bacon the same day.
So with all of that said I think the biggest success would simply be to have people there to make some sausage with you that you grill that day for them to enjoy BUT make enough of it so you can smoke the non-grilled stuff the next day or put it in the smoker with the understanding that it will be done long after they are gone. You can also make some non-cured sausage as well like Brats so there is an option of a cured grilled sausage and a "fresh" sausage so people can try both. I wouldn't do more than 2 sausage items.
Also sausage making is really a 2 man job at minimum when you are doing a lot of it. So no matter how many people you have over make sure you have at least one RELIABLE person to help you actually get the job done hahaha. Other than that you can set people in stations of:
- meat cutters for grinding (1 person minimum)
- grinders who take the meat from the meat cutters (1 person minimum)
- once meat is ground, mixers (1 person per each tub you have to mix the sausage in)
- stuffing (1 person)
- feeding sausage (1 person)
- once sausage is stuffed, sausage linker (as many people that want to participate but need minimum 1)
- sausage cutter to cut the links once sausage is linked (as many people that want to participate, but need min 1)
- Vac sealer bag load (1 person to load bags)
- Vac sealer operator (1 person to seal sausage with the vac seal machine)
- Cleaning crew (EVERYONE but grillmaster) - clean all the tubs, tools, machines, etc.
- Grillmaster - grills the sausage while everyone is cleaning up and setting up to eat
So doing sausage is probably the best option BUT don't expect it to be smoked and edible in time. Grilling it will be fine and then all the sausage not grilled gets smoked when you get a chance :)
Again don't take no more than 2 different types of sausage and have at least you and 1 other person you can rely upon to make it happen because you can see the steps above work well in pairs but many of the steps benefit from more people involved.
I hope this info helps some :)
