Sadly, we missed both of these presentations due to being preoccupied with the technical "challenges" we faced in running our labs, but that's another story. So what was the impact of this reinvention of the conference? Overall it seems to have been a great success and the attendee feedback was very positive. Perhaps more importantly there was a significant increase in the number of attendees, reversing the gradual decline that had been occurring over recent years. The idea of "free" certainly seems to resonate with the IBM i crowd!
As to our own sessions, Jon's PHP introductory session was a full house and his session on open-source options for IBM i also drew a large crowd, as did Susan's sessions on MySQL and the DB2 connection. It has taken a while for people to grasp the idea that there's good free software available, but lately the adoption rate seems to be growing steadily. From CRM to Wikis to portals, the advent of PHP on our favorite platform is opening a lot of doors.
The TUG organizers learned a lot from this initial foray into a new format and venue, we look forward to seeing what they come up with next year. Indeed they aren't the only user group following this route. In July we'll be speaking at the Ocean User Group's annual conference at National University in Costa Mesa, Calif. We always enjoy our visits with this lively group of folks and hope to see some of our readers there.
From TUG TEC we went (almost) directly to the annual Canadian Association of Magician's convention in Kitchener, which is about an hour west of where we live. We've been involved with the organization for a few years and this year were co-opted into running the bar on the first evening. Any of you who think that computer folks stay up late at night drinking and swapping tips and stories should see magicians at play. We had to close the bar at 1:30 a.m. and many of the attendees simply moved into the hotel lounge areas and continued their discussions. Maybe we're getting too old for this, but we were quite happy to finally crawl into bed at 2:30 a.m. Between TUG TEC and CAM, we only averaged about five hours of sleep a night for a week; to say we've been moving in slow-motion since we returned home is to put it mildly. Hopefully we'll wake up soon.
This week COMMON is celebrating its 50th anniversary in Orlando. It seems very strange not to be there, particularly when things pop up on Facebook from friends who are at the event. Hopefully the conference will be a financial success and COMMON can begin to focus more on rediscovering itself and less on simply reacting. Perhaps we'll have a better idea of where the organization is headed when the results of the board elections are known later this week. There are some excellent candidates--people who really care about the IBM community and are willing to work to make COMMON what it should and could be. We've voted for our choices; hopefully our candidates will be elected and the organization can move ahead. If your company is a member of COMMON, find out if anyone has voted yet. If not, act fast ... voting closes at 5 p.m. (CST) tomorrow, May 5.
One last thought to ponder: for any of you interested in learning about Rational Developer for Power (the successor to WDSC and RDi), we're working with IBM in Montreal to conduct a proof-of-technology workshop in Montreal from June 1st to 3rd. You can find the details here. If you've never visited Montreal, here's a way to combine education with a visit with a fabulous "European" city--all without leaving North America!
Jon, Susan: I've been to Montréal. And I've been to Europe. In my opinion, although it's certainly a nice place to visit, Montréal is very much a North American city.
Posted by: Hans Boldt | May 04, 2010 at 06:25 PM