Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Summary of MWLUG 2010

MWLUG 2010 was a lot of hard work, but it all came together thanks to all the hard work of the volunteers, sponsors, speakers, vendors, and attendees. It was much better than last year. We had about a 20% increase in attendance this year. The session layout that the XPages speakers came up with worked great. Everyone like the approach of starting from the basics of Web development all the way up to the advanced XPages topics.

The flow about collaboration for the opening session done by Scot Rourke, David Via, and Kris Synder worked out very well.

Thanks to Avon Printing and Rebecca Leedy for their quick turnaround on the printing, conference bags, and T-shirts. Unlike last year's bags which were so small, the MWLUG 2010 bags can actually use for carrying groceries now that the conference is over. All the printing, bags, and T-shirts were done locally in the Midwest.

The lunch buffet on Friday was better than I imagined when I placed the order. Wish we had the money to have done a buffet lunch on both days. The hotel staff was very helpful. Only hiccups were the internet connections, parking, and room keys.

Highlights to Mention:

- We raised approximately $500.00 for the Cleveland Foodbank through the MWLUG 2010 Outreach Program
- Brian Smith was the lucky winner of the Hilton Garden Inn Raffle
- The evening at Pickwick and Frolic was great. We had 72 attendees attend the event. We all sat in the front. As a result, the comedians pick on Steve and Bill throughout the show. Steve and Bill were very good sports.
- The layout of the sponsor showcase and opening sessions worked out very well. It gave everyone a chance to sit down and talk including the folks from IBM which we never get a chance to do. Sponsors were happy to be in front of the attendees during the entire event.

Things to Improve on:
- One negative that we learned this year is make sure the hotel has significant amount of internet bandwidth. It was a bit hard to do the labs with only a 3Mbits wireless connection that died all the time.
- We need to change the Ask a Business Partner Expert to a slightly different venue.
- We need to include speaker evaluations
- BOF are too early for attendees especially after the evening event
- 45 sessions was a bit too much.

If you attended MWLUG 2010, please email me your comments and suggestions. We are trying to set something up with Survey Monkey, but that takes time.

Thanks everyone for supporting and making this a successful event. We look forward in seeing everyone in Milwaukee August 25-26, 2011 for MWLUG 2011. There is more to come from MWLUG during the year so stay tune.

1 comment:

Keith Brooks said...

Richard, Get roy's suggestion box app or just make a simple form in notes and post to the web.
But I am too practical and like to use our own tools.
Great job over all. Yes bandwidth was an issue, but otherwise all good.

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