I realize that it’s been an entire week since SQLSaturday 35 in Dallas and that’s an eternity in the blogosphere, but I’ve been recently reminded of a very painful lesson: you pay for taking days off. Two days out of the office to go to Dallas cost me much more than two days worth of work; I’m not sure what temporal and spatial laws are in effect that cause this, but it’s damned annoying. It’s not making me look forward to next week, when I’m taking the entire week off; I should be behind for the rest of the month.
Anyway, the trip to Dallas was especially great for me; I grew up in Northeast Louisiana, and many of my friends moved to the Dallas area after college. Unfortunately, I was only able to catch up with two of them (Evan R. and Brad W.); they graciously allowed me to use their couches, saving me a lot of coin for what was essentially an unpaid employee training expense. It was great catching up with them, and I hope to be back that way in the near future.
This particular SQLSaturday was also very cool because it’s the first one that I attended simply as an attendee and NOT as a speaker; this was eye-opening for me, because it gave me a chance to experience some things as an outsider (although I did crash the speaker’s dinner on Friday night), and that gave me a chance to reflect on what it’s like to not know all of the details about an event, and what can be done to make sure people know what’s going on when, where, and how. I’ll get to that in a second, but let me throw some thoughts out there.
What Worked Well…
I don’t think anyone can say enough about the team of volunteers from the North Texas SQL Server User Group; these guys simply ROCK, and they pulled without a hitch. I especially liked the fact that they spread out the work effort over several volunteers, and that every member of the team took their responsibility seriously. In my mind, however, there were a couple of amazing contributions at this particular event that often get overlooked, so I want to give a quick acknowledgement to them:
- Having a designated photographer was a great idea. Everywhere I looked, there was a volunteer taking snaps. I’m not sure where those pictures will be posted, but we’ve had volunteers in the past take some great photos, but never really treated them as a full-time member of the team. I think having someone designated to capture the memory of the event is a great idea, particularly if it can be folded into networking opportunities later.
- The food and food distribution was amazing; whoever picked the caterers did a great job, and the way it was laid out was simply wonderful. Although I loved the ice cream at the end of the day, the sugar rush (and subsequent crash) was a bit tough for me personally. Great idea, but unexpected side effects; I slept through most of the last session 🙂
- Finally, Ryan Adams was the sponsor coordinator, and I watched him work those tables several times throughout the day. That was a nice touch, and I hope the sponsors appreciated having someone who was available to them all the time to handle any issues that they may have had come up.
Others have noted how great the facility was; I couldn’t agree more. I’m hoping that we can find a similar venue for our next SQLSaturday in Atlanta. Registration worked great; I think having an early morning raffle incentive helped keep the distribution of the attendees relatively constant, and they had several lines available for people to check in. I did feel a bit of “what happens now” after I made it through the line, but it was easy to spot where everyone was hanging out.
One thing that I really liked was the use of a claim ticket for filling out speaker evals; we had done something similar for the last Atlanta event, but the Dallas crew did it a little different. Each attendee got a single ticket at the beginning of the day, and they used that same number throughout the day to fill out speaker evals. Unlike us, however, they chose to do all of the drawings at the end of the day.
Finally, the event guide was amazing; it was very thorough and complete, and looked very professional. All in all, I think the event was a wonderful day, and I hope people really appreciated how well things were handled.
What Didn’t Work So Well…
There were a couple of minor issues, however, and I mention them only so that other SQLSaturday coordinators can plan from them. The brochure was wonderful, but the central schedule was organized around tracks, not times, which meant that if you were hopping tracks, you had to keep scanning in order to find the time something was occurring in order to see what classes were available. This was a departure from the traditional scheduling format, and I just think it didn’t work as well as the planners hoped. The planning team did have a great web tool for picking a schedule, and I noticed that many people were walking around with paper copies of those; those schedules were the traditional arrangement by time.
Second, and this was completely minor, I felt lost at the beginning of the day. Again, this was the first event I’ve been to in a long time where I was simply an attendee, and it was a little overwhelming to go from the registration desk and walk into a mass of people milling about. I’m not sure what can be done about that, but I’m wondering if introducing an usher would help make that transition slightly less disconcerting.
Third, the sponsors were responsible for providing their own tickets; this was both good and bad, so I need to follow up with sponsors about how they felt about it. Waiting on people to fill out forms did create a traffic jam, but it completely took away some of the set-up responsibilities from the organizers. The sponsors may also have benefitted from having people hanging out.
Finally (and this happens at every SQLSaturday I’ve been to), I don’t think enough mention was made of the fact that there is a thriving SQL Server community that meets every month behind every SQLSaturday. We get so caught up on the day, that we forget to give enough shout-outs to the local or national PASS communities. Tim Mitchell tried to do that at the end of the day, but it was done after the raffles were over and people were packing up to leave.
These, of course, are minor quibbles; overall, it was a great day of training. The classes I went to (for the most part) were excellent, and I felt like I came back with some new ideas to try out.
Plans For Future Events…
So here’s my final take-away, and what I plan to do at the next Atlanta SQLSaturday:
- Punch up the mention of the local chapter and PASS a LOT. Focus on getting people connected to those organizations.
- Reward people for making connections; find some variant of Twitter Bingo to help people make local connections.
- I loved the claim check idea with a single number for the whole day; I think we’re going to steal it, but continue to do raffles in-session and save the big prizes for the end of the day.
- Contact the sponsors and ask them how they want to handle raffle tickets in the future.
Other Writeups….
A lot of other people have already written about their experiences at SQLSaturday 35′; in case you missed them, here’s some of the ones I read:
SQLAJ – What I gained from volunteering at SQLSat35
MidnightDBA (Jen) We Made This, Part 1 of 2 (Thoughts on SQL Saturday 35)
Made2Mentor: My SQL Saturday Experience
Ryan Adams: SQL Saturday Weekend Palooza
Stu,
Thank you for the nice report!
I want to comment about the sponsor’s raffle tickets. This was one of the things that “didn’t work well”. Here is why:
– People had to write their info right before they drop the ticket. As a result a huge line built in the morning and people were jumping all over each other and slowing down the traffic. People were mostly concentrated on inserting their tickets, than having a productive conversation with the sponsor. And who can blame them? The situation looked like chicken-fight at one point 😉
– Many people didn’t come to see the sponsor’s tables because they didn’t want to deal with the additional hassle.
In general I think the idea with sponsor raffles is beneficial. I understand creating the tickets puts additional burden on the organizers, but there must be a better way to handle it.