The Coconut Wireless

Conference thank you

Jan 23, 2007

Feedback forms for Saturday’s NC Science Blogging Conference are starting to come in, and they’re uniformly full of praise for how well organized the event was (regardless of the coffee snafu). The feedback also includes some great ideas for improving the conference for next year.

I’m proud of what we accomplished at the conference — this event truly exemplified the BlogTogether goal of bringing people face-to-face with each other to share their experiences and insights about using weblogs. So let me publicly praise all the individuals and organizations that came to together to make this a successfull event:

Bora Zivkovic was the inspiration for the conference (as he recounts here), and his prolific blogging and linking helped us blanket the blogosphere with news about the conference. Brian Russell lent his considerable IT and conference organization experiences (he did PodcasterCon last year) — he repeatedly warned me about the need to make the wifi sign-up process as crystal clear as possible; that’s one detail I let slip too long. Paul Jones backstopped us all the way, and knew just the levers to pull for reserving the hall, the tables, the trashcans and quite a few other important details. Bora, Brian and Paul are perfect teammates.

Tom Linden lent his early support, and Neil Caudle gave us our first cash donation. Hunt Willard, Janet Stemwedel, Rosalind Reid and Jean-Claude Bradley signed on early to be discussion leaders (and were perfect when they addressed us). Adnaan Wasey, Troy Livingston and Brad Herring filled out the program nicely; each also helped us get excellent materials for the grab bag of science swag.

Rob Gluck, Elizabeth Borkowski, Igor Zbitnoff and David Kroll showed their support with cash donations. When I asked them on the eve of the conference if they would bring tea or apples or bananas, Lorraine Cramer, Josh Staiger and Dave Johnson readily agreed. Rob Zelt ferried the cinnamon rolls from Weaver Street Market. (We paid Saladelia Cafe to provide the sandwiches and salads for lunch, but they do deserve a shoutout for punctually delivering quality food.)

Will Raymond and Burt Humburg showed up early on Saturday and took charge of the registration process, efficiently handing out grab bags and t-shirts.

Seed Media Group, Blogads, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, JMP Software, BlogBurst and the Museum of Life and Science made important cash donations without which our shoestring budget wouldn’t have been able to stretch so far.

Our grab bag of science swag was very popular. RTI International rushed to print tote bags for us, and Natural History found extra bags when our registration list topped 150. These organizations donated thousands of dollars of science literature for the grab bags:

Katie Jamison of Lulu inspired Bora to the Herculean task of pulling together an anthology of the best science blogging and generously offered to comp copies to all of the anthology contributors.

And, a bevy of bloggers have contributed their thoughts, observations and insights.

If I’ve missed anyone, know that I’m deeply appreciative of all you contributed. I’ll try my best to remember over the next few days and add you to this list.

Finally, my thanks to the software vendors that provided these excellent tools with which we virtually planned this conference:

Anton Zuiker ☄