FileMaker DevCon 2009 Recap: What Was Different?
by Michael Gaslowitz
Another year, another FileMaker Developer conference. For this year’s recap I decided to add a little more analysis on the conference itself, so these next three posts about the 2009 FileMaker Developer Conference will ask the following three questions:
- How was this year’s conference different from previous conferences?
- What did I get out of the sessions?
- How can next year’s conference be better?
As the title of this post may suggest, this post is about the major differences I saw at this year’s conference, and what effect, if any, they had on the overall experience.
Location, definitely not Kansas
This year the FileMaker Developer Conference was held in downtown San Francisco, a city with amazing food, culture, and public transportation. Usually the conference is held at a vacation-style resort, with 90+ temperatures and a lazy river, so the concrete jungle and temperatures that required layers was definitely different.
Weather and hotel amenities aside, some would argue that the urban setting enticed people to go off campus, and spend less time socializing with other attendees. That might be true for some, but I liked having the option of soaking up a little culture with my FileMaker, and I do not think I talked about FileMaker any more or less because of it.
Some would argue that San Francisco was an expensive place to hold a conference in this economic climate, but I did not feel like I spent any more or less than I did last year. In fact, as explained below, if you consider when the conference took place, it had the potential to be even more affordable than previous years.
Timeframe
The conference ran from Thursday, with pre-conference sessions in the morning and an early evening Keynote, through the closing sessions on Sunday afternoon.
I personally think this is much better than starting the pre-conference sessions on Sunday, holding the Keynote Monday morning, and ending the conference Wednesday afternoon. If we ignore the pre-conference sessions, which will always require you to get to the conference a day earlier, this year’s conference could have been attended in only two business days at the end of the week, compared to three business days at the beginning.
In a profession that could easily argue time is money, how can you argue with this schedule? I hope FileMaker has a Thursday through Sunday conference again next year.
FileMaker ran the show
And finally, for the first time I am aware of, FileMaker, not Advisor, ran the conference. From registration to the closing sessions it was FileMaker running the show. Why did FileMaker choose to do it themselves instead of outsourcing some of it Advisor? No idea, and I am not really concerned, because at the end of the day FileMaker did a good job. And from FileMaker’s perspective, who could argue with 1,100+ attendees?
September 7, 2009 • DevCon, FileMaker • Comments Off
