Thanks!

Beth Goza

• Consider having an attendee bag for next year - bethg
• Don't stop people from going to over-attended sessions. Watching video is not the same. bernardf
• Have online evaluations for the sessions, if you want people to answer them. I always forget to do it at the end and remember later in the day.
• Post the repeat sessions and session schedule changes in a centrally located spot, instead of at each door to a room. It sucks to walk all the way to a room to find out that every repeat session is about Live Data Services.
• As Bach pointed out in his keynote; my generation wants things personal, interactive and social; conferences are getting better at this (the twitter, wiki and other social tool tie-ins were fun) but they still seem tacked on; done more as a side-show for PR than to drive actual value for attendees. Making social tools more central to a conference would give attendees more visibility into the value of the conference (most likely boosting attendance in following years) as well as allow for a better feedback loop for the conference team. Some suggestions here:
  • Allow attendees to vote on what sessions they'd like to see repeated (with the understanding that not all presenters are available for repeats); there's more than a few sessions that I wanted to see repeated due to my inability to see them due to over-flow and videos just aren't the same.
  • Perhaps an IRC channel for the conference; I'm sure more than a few of us would like to hear what others think about sessions throughout the day, to catch repeats and/or plan out their schedules
  • Perhaps open up evaluations so that they are publicly viewable by all attendees online, right after people submit them (i.e. Amazon review)
  • I have a bunch more like this, but I think you get the idea...
• Longer hours for the lab and lounge areas; I didn't have much time to go through the hands-on labs because I wanted to be in the sessions. I'd personally rather have the HOL area open instead of the mash-up social thing.
• Bring extra Guitar Hero 2 controllers; they didn't stand up to stress testing very well.
• Keep the snacks out, don't let the hotel crew whisk them away. MS used to do a better job of this, but has regressed lately
• Where's the overall event evaluation? Or maybe this is it . Session evaluations are online at https://content.visitmix.com/content/evallanding.aspx, you need to be logged in to complete.
• Dress code at a conference evening event for (mostly) developers? Gotta be kidding. Brian Arbogast said "no jeans or shorts" in his Tue am talk, that's all I brought so I skipped the event.
• The evening event at Pure - it was nice until the bouncers got all intimidating at 10pm. Suddenly, as we were no longer prime customers we were treated like we were no longer welcome there. That's at least how I felt. Also it was never very clear that a photo ID was required so I had to go back to my hotel to get it.
• Have more fruit during the day. It's bad enough that we're indoors for 3 days.
• Make a better site for session videos. The upper 3/4 of the page are wasted while the session list is contained in the tiny area at the bottom.
• Make the URLs on the main site more useful. At the moment the URL is mostly visitmix.com which is not very useful.