Learning at LSU - SQLSaturday #17

(posted by Steve Jones)

I attended SQLSaturday #17 in Baton Rouge this past weekend. It was the 4th event that I've been to like this, and I think it was an amazing success. I posted a few notes at my SQLServerCentral blog, and you can read some raw thoughts there. However, I had a few more logistical items that I wanted to add here.

1. Timing - This event was put together in basically 2 months by Patrick LeBlanc and the Baton Rouge SQL Server user group. They rushed few a few things, but for the most part I think this was amazing and it really goes to show what a few dedicated people can accomplish. I think there were 4 or 5 main people that got things done, but Patrick led the way.

2. Venue - The venue was at the LSU campus, and all of the events I've been to used college campuses. I think this is an outstanding idea for anyone that wants to put one together. LSU has a strong alumni group, and a number of the organizers had attended the school. I highly recommend that you use local colleges and check with your membership to see if you have alumni in your group.

3. Local Sponsors - We have a few national sponsors for the events, but a lot of work was put in by a local consutling company. They do some regional work, but they not only had a couple people manning the booth they set up, but they also volunteered for setup, takedown, and at the after party. One of their people helped with printing and organizing little things as well. It's worth a call to local consulting and staffing companies to see if they want to help.

4. Closing things down - There seem to be tons of prizes at the end of the day to giveaway, often 30, 40, or more books. At this event there everyone gathered in the main lecture room, about 110-120 people, and numbers were drawn out of a box. Actually they had a web page displaying things, but that went too slow. Two suggestions here:
- Make sure that you test your method and it moves quickly
- Put the table with books somewhere that you can queue people up in a line to pick out their book. Everyone wants to win, but they also want to get done.

5. Get user counts - They missed counts in the rooms, and so of the 202 people attending, we don't know how many went to which session. We would like to enhance this site to include that feedback, but it would be great to get some numbers from other events to help groups plan room sizes for sessions.

6. Give more prizes for evals - There was a drawing for an iPod Nano at the end from the session evals. I'd suggest that you give away 5 or 6 prizes, maybe one for every slot or track and one large one. It gets people to stay and also fill out more evals.

Overall it was a great event, and ran as smoothly as the ones I've seen planned for 6 months. I asked the group to write a few blog posts about the experiences, so look for them soon.