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)

Sorry I’m a bit slow with this review 🙂

So Blug has got an new name, a new venue and lots of new content, but praise be to all it still has Theo Heselmans at the helm and this year was was another brilliant outing

So what made it so good?

• An excellent turn out by IBM, yes they were a strategic partner which means that they should turn out for it but for a while now the community has really felt that IBM have not given a flying toss about them, however their behaviour during these 2 days really dispelled that feeling, major credit goes to the fact that proper high level people came and more to the point they left the lawyers at home, extra special credit goes to Suzanne Livingston who really injected life into IBM’s offerings.
• It did not feel cheap, there was no wastage or pointless things paid for, but it felt professional and confident in what it was delivering.
• Wide range of quality new content (I learnt a shed load)
• Theo has the knack of getting people into the vendor hall all the time without forcing you so the vendors are more relaxed.

All in all and hour for hour it was better than the main IBM Connect conference and anyone who just went to it rather than Connect has not missed out on anything, it is without doubt the premium IBM social conference of the year for Europe.

Highlights:

The Venue was full but never ‘packed’, however it was standing room only at the OGS

Matt white and I did a compact version of our learning connections dev leaving quite a few stunned faces in the audience, but we also got much more audience activity and questions than we got from the audience at IBM Connect which was very gratifying.

Our room was nice and airy but a tad bright for the projector meaning quite a lot of our code snippets were lost on the watchers. ah well

As normal the conference Bag for Engage/Blug had local guides in it, a very nice touch and something other conferences should do (although this is apparently normal for academic conferences and only the commercial ones are just packed with nothing but adverts)

Talking of which here are a dozen of the reprobates venturing out in search of food and Beer

Finally as per normal LDC tried to take a serious team photo to mark the event, and per normal it did not go so well, I name this one “Everybody pointed to the favourite part of the wall” after the Rupert Fawcett Cartoon and thanks to Tim Clark for taking it.