Thursday, April 23, 2009

Ignite Minneapolis: great energy, but would the people in the back kindly STFU

Last night I went to the first event of, hopefully a long series, Ignite Minneapolis.

The event features a series of presentations that all follow a strict format of 15 seconds per slide for 20 slides, or a 5 minute presentation. Here's a video feed from the presentations last night. The topics were all over the board, but all of them were interesting. While the presentations were going on a projector was showing twitter comments in real time. I thought it was pretty amusing to see some of the speakers react to their hecklers. They seemed to take it all in good spirit.

There was a great showing of people. I'd say they were a bit overbooked for the space--the only problem of the evening was the disrupting noise of the conversations by the couple hundred people in the back of the room. In the future, I'd love to see a designated conversation area that's in a physically separated space from the presentations. Minnedemo did this well at Intermedia Arts.

The conversations at the event were half the draw for me. I had a chance to meet an attorney and an epidemiology student. I learned that attorneys are still in a process of transitioning from a paper document based system of doing business to electronically doing their business. I learned from the epidemiology student that, from a statistical standpoint, the spread of biological diseases shares the same characteristics as the spread of computer viruses.

It was also a chance to say hi to my neighbor Ben. We live about 4 houses from each other, but I swear we see each other more at these events than we do in the neighborhood.

In all, I thought the event was a tremendous success. It's hard to lose when Surly beer is provided free. I'm going to keep an eye out for the next Ignite event in Minneapolis. I'll try and get some of my non-technical friends to come along too.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Overbooked is an understatement. Most of the people there had no interest in the actual event and just wanted to get a little free booze and stand around talking while trying to look cool. FAILURE. The event would have been way better had they been more selective with their invite list instead of letting in any Tom, Dick, or Douche bag.