BCOUG Tech Day 19 – It’s a Wrap

This year we organized the 2nd ever BCOUG Tech Day. Last year we (the BCOUG board) decided to try and go for a full day conference for the first time and it was a success. You can read my post about it here. So it was quite obvious that we would organize another one this year.

As you might know, organizing a conference is a lot of work, but with a great board we did it, and quite well (I think).
It started a while ago with the CfP, and we got an amazing list of sessions. I know many of the people who submitted sessions, and unfortunately we had to turn some of them down. After the voting (each board member scores each session anonymously and then we meet and go over the results), the list of speakers and sessions we ended up with was VERY impressive. Our keynote speaker was Steven Feuerstein, and the other speakers (ordered alphabetically) were: Carlos Sierra, Charles Kim, Franky Weber Faust, Karen Lopez, Michelle Hardwick, Rene Antunez, Scott Spendolini and Simon Pane. If you know these speakers you are probably aware of their reputation. Steven and Carlos are Oracle ACE Director Alumni (as Oracle employees cannot be part of the Oracle ACE program), Charles, Michelle and Scott are Oracle ACE Directors, Franky, Rene and Simon are Oracle ACEs and Karen is Microsoft MVP. This was the first time our OUG had a Microsoft MVP speaker (and it even started a funny “one of these things is not like the others” thread on twitter). Also, note that no speaker was really local, we had 2 from other parts of Canada, 5 from various places in the USA, one from Mexico and one from Brazil. Some of them took a few days before/after the conference and wandered in the area, and it was the perfect weather to do that. It was a true honor to have such an excellent and diverse list of speakers.
This year we also decided to have a speaker dinner the night before the conference. This is quite a common thing to do in conferences, and it was great fun to meet the speakers, have a nice dinner and just chat.
Another thing we did this year was to contact universities in our area and invite students to participate. We got a few, and one left a comment saying that the technical level of the sessions was too high for students with no real experience in the field. Having students attend was an excellent experience and we will do our best to be more “student friendly” next year.
One last exciting thing was that we got a free ticket to KScope through ODTUG’s affiliation program and we decided to raffle it between the attendees! I really hope to see the winner joining me and Adrian at KScope this year.
I would like to thank everyone that made this event possible this year: BCOUG board, the speakers, our sponsors (Nutanix, Quest, Viscosity NA, Insum and CGI) and all of our members.
See you next year.