Re: Conferences - why attend?

malcolm weallans said: > The challenge we all face is how to persuade the powers that be that we > are > making a good investment by paying for somebody to attend a conference. > > What are the benefits of the conference compared with the cost of > attendance? > > The benefits are that you get to sit though lots of presentations which > might be relevant to your job function. (I would defy anybody to convince > me that all marketing presentations are that relevant to the audience but > that's the cynic in me speaking). From my experience of attending many > worldwide user conferences, local user group conferences, and Infobahns > the > %age of relevant presentations is at most 40%, and is often much less. Each conference is different, and it's only prudent to be very clear what the business / technical value of the content will be. I would never advocate ANYONE to sit down and pay to hear a marketing message, nor do I believe that it's fair for anyone to ask you to pay to be sold at. > Even the Chat With The Labs series of webcasts is becoming difficult to > justify with so much time being spent on the marketing message and so > little > time on real technical issues. Well, then, I think you should make your concern heard. I agree entirely with what you are saying, and if the lab chat is turning into marketing BS, then they are wasting your time. > OK so you can take certification exams - big deal! What is that worth in > reality. Agreed 100%. > OK so you can listen to some of the experienced people talking about the > product - that is fine for the speakers but if all they do is to > regurgitate > information then it is not that beneficial. Sometimes that can be useful too. > OK so you can network with other users of the product. > > And what about the costs:- > > Generally a 5 day conference is now around $2000. The cost of travel and > accommodation is roughly the same amount unless you are prepared to catch > flights at ungodly hours and stay in ungodly hotels. > > There is also the question of the time away from work. Currently I am > sold > out to clients at a rate in excess of $1000 per day. > > So a five day conference is realistically going to cost in excess of > $9000. Yep. > I did make enquiries about going to the conference in Vienna, and the > upcoming one in Anaheim. I was told that if I wanted to attend the > conference I could do so at my own expense and by using my holidays. I > can > see my wife's reaction if I tell her I'm taking a week off to attend an > IBM > conference and it's going to cost $9,000. (Those of you that know my wife > can guess at her reaction). My only alternative is to publicise the name > of > my company by doing a presentation. (Wake up David Williams!) But so far > I > have submitted a possible presentation to three conferences and had them > turned down. After all I wanted to talk about the realities of how to > survive disaster recovery and outline some of the reasons why we have > failed > to recover from disasters with the promptness that a customer should > expect. > (It really is surprising how many things can go wrong when you try to > recover - I can spend many hours talking it if you would all like) And I think it's a pity you haven't had a chance, but keep trying, you may be lucky some time. <SNIP> > The quality of the conference and the relevance of the conference to the > attendees varies according to the type of organisation that runs it. If > the > conference is run by VARs it will be more relevant to people who work for > VARs. If the conference is run by IBM then it will be more relevant to > the > people who work for IBM - and possibly to people who like hearing a > sanitised message from the supplier. If the conference is run by a group > of > enthusiastic amateurs it won't have the same razzamatazz but it might be > more worthwhile. Ah! But what you REALLY need is the enthusiastic amateurs, and it seems that Lester Knutsen seems to have a near-monopoly on those. > We all have to make the choice and vote with our attendance. If we don't > attend IBMs conferences they will still run them as some people within IBM > have budgets to spend, but if we don't attend IDUG/IIUG or local user > group > meetings they will inevitably fold. That is true. But think about the converse: if 100 people (or 100's of people) attend the IIUG conference (or some other conference with significant IBM impact), would that not send a stronger message to IBM about the user community's regard for Informix than a million whingeing posts on CDI? > I don't think the BOD should be telling us to attend the IBM conference - > although I have seen no publicity for it other than from IIUG - but we > should really consider if the user organised conferences are what we need, > and if they aren't then let's make them so. But one message I would send Key phrase, there: if users feel that user organised conferences are what users need, then users should stop being keyboard warriors and start organising conferences. > to > the IIUG BOD is that any conferences in Europe are expensive for the > average > attendee. Unless the csts are reduced the benefit will be outweighed by > the > costs of attendance. I can't disagree with you. > So, that was my two pennorth - feel free to shoot me down in flames if you > will. "Ah am Jean-George, ze fighter pilot and ah alwez go down in flams!" :o) -- Bye now, Obnoxio "... no bill is required as no value was provided." -- Christine Normile -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by OpenProtect(http://www.openprotect.com), and is believed to be clean.