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(Long Overdue) - MESH - Wrap-Up

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Thanks to PhotoJunkie for the photo.

MESH was overall a great event.  From all reports, people felt it was a valuable use of time, although the crowd was much different than last year.  I moderated a session called "Building Communities - How & Why It Matters".  I was lucky enough to have 3 amazing speakers on the panel - Will Pate , Jordan Banks and Lionel Menchaca .  We had a really solid discussion with great audience questions.

Some folks blogged the details of the session:

After the session one of the folks in the crowd came over to talk to me.  "When are you going to get into community engagement?", he asked.  I was shocked / saddened by this.  Between TechNet, MSDN, Channel9, Port25, On10, User Groups, Forums, etc we spend A LOT of time in the community.  Heck, that is a major part of my job.  "Ya, I guess so", he said.  "But it isn't easy - you guys should do what Dell did with Ideastorm". 

I think that is good advice in 3 ways:

  • We need to get back to our roots and give people / the community more reasons to value having a relationship with us and to be loyal (like ebay has with their users)
  • We need to make it easier for people to interface with our community efforts (something we are working on as we speak)
  • We need to have a really clear place for people to give us ideas / suggestions / comments.  Personally, I love the "ideastorm" style approach.

Thanks for the feedback.

Some interesting stories from the 2 days:

  • I met with three amazing groups doing some cool work here in Canada:
  • At the speaker / sponsor thank-you dinner I was sat at a table of 10 people.  Of those ten I was the only Windows user.  That doesn't really bother me per se, but it was a interesting statistic I thought.  Most Mac folks aren't particularly militant about their views on Vista - we usually have a good conversation about why they feel one OS or the other suits their needs.  One gentlemen from Demo Fuse, was a little more direct blunt open with his feelings (not good ones) towards Windows and Microsoft.  That's ok - as a company we need to ensure that we earn the right to have him be our customer and we clearly haven't done that in his case.

Some thoughts on the conference itself - the guys organizing the event like to refer to it as the "third way" of running a conference - not quite a barcamp style un-conference and not your standard conference either.  Well, not to burst their bubble, but it isn't the "third way" - it's just a good conference. (Disclosure - we are a sponsor....)

The good:

  • The networking / people meeting was great.  Really great.
  • MARS is a good facility in a great location, so keep that for sure.
  • Most of the sessions were really great.
  • Good keynote speakers.
  • It puts Toronto on the Web 2.0 map
  • It is a critical part of keeping the Toronto community alive.
  • They treat their speakers and sponsors really well :-)

Room for improvement:

  • Web 2.0 "101" day before MESH - there seemed to be a lot of people at the event who were there to learn the basics of this new world.  Perhaps there should be a pre-conference session on the "101" basics for those folks so they can be better prepared for the main sessions.
  • The keynotes - you couldn't see from the back because everyone speaking was sitting in chairs at the front that weren't elevated above the crowd enough.
  • The energy - honestly, I thought that some of the organizing committee could have let their passion for the event come out during their time on stage.
  • Power.  run a few power cords for those not sitting on top of an outlet.
  • Bring back the community folks - a lot of the "campers" (Torcamp, Barcamp, etc) and user group folks didn't seem to be at the event like last year.

Technorati tags: MESH07, Canada, Toronto, Microsoft

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