EclipseCon: Best In Show

One of the hardest things in preparing for EclipseCon is trying to figure out which talks will be the most popular.  Inevitably there are talks that are so popular that we have to turn away attendees (pesky fire marshals).

This year, our hope is to pick one talk that was 'Full and Overflowing' that was rated well by the audience.  We would then bring the presenters back up on the stage for the final Main Stage presentation on Thursday at 14:30.

Despite all our efforts to build good empirical evidence, I still place a huge value on word of mouth.  If you happen to attend a talk that was really great (that wasn't a keynote or a Main Stage), give me a shout and let me know which talk you would like to see as best in show and it was great.

You can leave a comment or tweet to #eclipsecon-bis

EclipseCon: Tuesday, The Social Mind

A big thanks to Clay Shirky and Jeff Atwood for their keynote about on-line communities.  I think that the mixture of research (Shirky) and programmer experience (Atwood) made for a good message for the EclipseCon community.

If you would like to get the general context have a look at Mark Cappel's live blog. 

It is really fun to watch smart people, that are effective communicators, discuss a subject that they are passionate about.  But why trust me when we have empirical evidence as to the quality.

From the feedback system, we had approximately 400 people attending the session.  (approximate due to people coming and going during the session).  Of those 400 people we had the following feedback:

+1  237   99.2%
 0  None   0.0%
-1  2      0.8% 

60% of the attendees responding.

EclipseCon: Day 1

I would like to thank all of the tutorial presenters that put in the time to come up with the four hour tutorials.  It takes a lot of work to come up with 4 hours of quality information, and it looks like all of the EclipseCon presenters put in the time.

Looking across all of the talks:
81% of the votes were +1
15% of the votes were neutral
 4% of the votes were -1

I am still grinding on the numbers but I am pleased with how things went.

I am also pleased with the number of people that provided feedback on the talks.  I am still analyzing the best way to use the RFID information, but it looks like between 62% and 87% of the people that stayed in the session provided feed back on the talk.  Thanks, your feedback is awesome.

Finally, congratulations to Igor Novakovic for winning the first iPod from Innovent Solutions.  Make sure you provide your feedback, and you too could win an iPod.

See you today.

Make your own schedule take 2

After spending a little while using the new 'My Conference' feature on the Eclipsecon site (see Karl's previous blog post to catch up on the details), it was clear to me we needed to add at least one new feature. The detail pages for each talk needed the magic check box (this was also one of the first feature requests on Karl's post as well!).

So, this morning I refactored the code a bit, and now you can add/remove talks from your personal conference schedule on the details page as well as from the list of all talks.

Now I have to decide which of the many interesting talks I am going to be attending this year. See you next week in sunny California.

Win Fabulous Prizes

Yesterday, I posted about the ways you can provide feedback when at EclipseCon.  As you can see, it is really easy to vote.  Just a quick:

+1 I liked the presentation
-1 I dis-liked it the presentation
 0 The presentation was not bad, but not particularly good either

There are three really good reasons why you should vote:

• To acknowledge the hard work that goes into a great presentation
• To encourage someone that needs to do a little more work
• To provide guidance for future conference organizers 

So easy and so effective, I would expect to see 100% voting on all of the talks.  

But I know how people love to win prizes, so I wanted to provide one four more reasons that you should vote on every talk that you attend.  We have four random drawings that will be drawn from the pool of email and paper ballots (need to have email address to be eligible).

We have three iPod Nanos that my company, Innovent Solutions , has donated to the conference.  The iPods will be announced on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning.  All you need to do is vote on the talks to be eligible.

On Thursday afternoon we will have one final price that has been donated by Actuate and the Birt-Exchange.  You can win a BIRT ROCKS light up t-shirt.  

You must be present to win the prizes.  

So provide feedback on the talks you attend, because it is courteous and proper thing to do.  Or vote because you can win prizes.  Just make sure you vote.

Sun Microsystems -- EclipseCon Gold Sponsor Highlight

I am very pleased to announce that Sun is a Gold Sponsor of EclipseCon 2009! Sun will be showing off their Eclipse support for Solaris, Glassfish and JavaFX.

There is a lot of really cool stuff to see, so be sure to check them out in the Exhibit hall!

It's not too late to register and save! Thank's to Sun's sponsorship of EclipseCon, attendees can receive a 10% discount using coupon code SUN10!

- Don

CISCO - Big Thanks to our EclipseCon 2009 Hardware Sponsor!

CISCO is the EclipseCon 2009 hardware sponsor and are helping the Eclipse Ecosystem in a great way. Our current network hardware is constrained to 100Mbit speeds -- but thanks to CISCO we'll be able to stepup up to Gbit speeds soon enough -- with redundancy to boot!

Thanks CISCO!

- Don