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The Results of Forum 2005, by Walt Hultgren
Here are some summary statistics from Informix User Forum 2005 held in Atlanta.
The event was held at the Store Support Center of The Home Depot, who was a Premier Sponsor. IBM and the IIUG were also Premier sponsors. There were 11 Exhibitor Sponsors.
There were 34 technical sessions, plus the keynote by Paul Rivot and the breakfast Q&A session with Bruce Weed. 6 of the 34 sessions were presentations by Exhibitor Sponsors.
There were approximately 180 attendees from 26 U.S. states and 8 different countries. Approximately 50 people were from the Atlanta metro area, with the rest traveling in from outside the area.
Most attendees were senior technical people, with some having management responsibilities. The energy remained high throughout the conference. The last technical sessions, which ended at 5:30 PM on Friday, were well attended. We received a total of 650-700 session evaluation sheets and 56 conference evaluation sheets. Looking at the scores individually across all categories and all evaluation sheets, over 50% received a Superior rating and 94% received Superior or Good.
The conference was promoted directly through IIUG e-mail blasts, e-mail to the WAIUG (Washington, DC) and SEIUG (Atlanta) membership, and postings to comp.databases.informix. The announcement for the December Chat with the Informix Lab announced that session at the conference. I'm not familiar with what else might have occurred within IBM.
As mentioned, the December Chat was broadcast live from the Forum. There were around 50 Forum attendees in the session audience, plus 89 dial-in callers on the teleconference.
Approximately 150 attendees registered through the Forum Web site. The rest were loaded by us for various reasons. The Web registrants were asked to indicate other conferences they attended or were planning to attend, among them being IDUG/IIUG 2005 in Denver, IBM DM 2005 in Orlando, and IDUG/IIUG 2006 in Tampa. 41 people checked one or more of those boxes. This indicates to me that out of the total of 180, there were well over 100 people at the Forum who could not have been reached face to face in any other venue.
This Forum started out as a regional conference, but grew into something a bit more through a collection of fortunate circumstances, not the least of which were the various kinds of support from our three big sponsors and a significant amount of volunteer work. While this model may not generalize to all conferences, I think it does demonstrate that there is a way to put on a conference that doesn't have an entry fee so high as to exclude a number of people whom you would otherwise want to attend.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to let me know.
Thanks, Walt Hultgren,
Program Chair, Informix User Forum 2005 |
