CSC Event No.1

Another late event review, but what can you do 🙂

So the first CSC event is done and I feel it was a great success particularly for a first event in a new format.

A lot of this due to the organisers effort, the same as with all good conferences, in this case Gabriella Davis, Mike Smith and Matt White (the rest of us can best be called helpers)

I really really enjoyed the day, it was the right mix of tech and none tech, and even with only 2 paths there were times when I wanted to be in both rooms at the same time, I learnt far more than I expected particularly in the life sessions (the “The challenge of home working” workshop was fascinating), it also gave me a wonderful heads up on various technical subjects that I am bit behind on (or even missed totally in the general overload of the Internet), both of these areas were key as with a lot of other conferences its all about the corporation rather than the worker and technical subjects are limited by vendor or product, where as here they are only limited by how useful and interesting they are.

You could see people getting into the far more interactive/discussion format of the event after the first couple of sessions, and this will grow as nearly everybody has something they can teach the rest of the attendees.

The finances of the event were a bit different to normal conferences, but once you understand the underlying reason for the conference they make sense, The Turtles and LDC footed the whole bill :/ with no sponsors or other help, but we were not allowed to do any sales pitches (Matt White even made sure my slide deck template was as low key as possible) and this is because the conference and its future siblings are genuinely not a sales pitch, it is plan that Gab has come up with to try and rejuvenate and expand the IBM Social Community, there were and still are a lot of good people in it but due to a variety of reasons it is getting smaller as people move to other technologies (such is life), personally I think that this is because the existing “yellow bubble” is very inward facing and while what used to be called ‘Groupware’ is now called ‘Social’ used to be limited to only a couple of vendors every bugger is now at it and so the community needs to flow with that.

So to sum up, I felt we achieved a good break through and now need to get the balance of future events right (not too many not to few and of what sort as well as getting the right useful subjects in place) so we can build on the Idea, we have proved to those people who did not come thinking it was a sales pitch that it was not judging by the feedback we have got this is exactly what people want.

viva la Community

Stupidly I did not take any photos, which is extra dumb considering how nice the venue was but here is my short 10 min slide deck (though slide share seems have done something odd with my fonts)

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