FailED
TechED 08 was my first TechED, so I only have accounts from others of how previous years have gone down, however it was pretty easy to see that this year was far from smooth sailing. I think the key point to remember in this rant is that the cheapest of tickets were over AUD$1000, which doesn’t include flights and accommodation. When you are paying those sort of amounts, there are certain expectations about the general experience of the event.
Tech Fails
- The network was fail. Wifi often wouldn’t connect at all, when it did the net connection was incredibly flakey, so many ran to wired connections only to find they occasionally died too!
- RFID is a wonderful idea, but this was clearly a horrible implementation. I heard accounts (on day one) of the RFID counter detecting 6 people in a room of 50. The only time I saw the "in-room-RFID-stats" working (for lack of a better word), it had people leave the room dozens of times…while sitting or standing in the middle of the room.
Food Fails
Food is probably one of the hardest parts of such a large scale event to get right, but TechED 08 was a shining example of how to stick your foot in your mouth.
- Some food was served cold, despite clearly meant to be served hot (best example that springs to mind was the Fried Chicken at the closing party) – this wasn’t a matter of how long it’d been sitting out in the room, the tray was replaced right in front of me!
- Drinks were a rare resource to come across, you could see some thinking "he who controls the
spicedrink, controls theuniverseTechED". Okay, perhaps a little over dramatic, but the point remains. While there were drinks fridges posted all over the centre, they were emptied by the end of the first session of the day and seemingly only partially restocked overnight.Similarly, there were water coolers everywhere but they too were often emptied, rarely switched on, and perhaps the worst offense of all was that there was no cups to pour water into! Delegates were given water bottles (with their backpacks upon registration), but speakers, staff and exhibitors were not. I managed to score a drink bottle by asking the helpdesk where I could find a cup to pour the water into.
The few times juice and water was poured into small plastic cups, they were guarded until the ‘official’ commencement of the meal time (morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea or dinner that is) – people were turned away, "15 minutes and then you can have one". Eventually the guards resorted to putting teatowels over all the cups so people wouldn’t notice that they weren’t out there.
Misc Fails
- [TechED UNI Student Day] Ms Megabyte was the wrong sort of ‘personality/celebrity’ to be presenting to uni students – I do realise she’s very accomplished in her own right, but she just didn’t suit the audience. I’m not sure many there knew who she was, and I’d hazard a guess that not many watch the TODAY show (heck, the majority of students I know aren’t even awake at that time!)
- Early bird pricing was apparently available up until registration for the opening party – yeah this is a minor point, but it is still silly that it was allowed to happen.
- The closing party was destined to fail before it officially started by requiring bags to be cloaked, that is no bags were allowed into the party, and from what I could see there was no prior notice about this. I’ll put that a bit more into context, ~3000 attendees (I think?), comprised of mostly geeks (and we all love our gadgets) going to a technical conference where having a laptop isn’t a bad idea, who were all given a large backpack when registering. Assuming not everybody still carried their bags on Thursday, I’ll say half, that is still ~1500 bags that needed to be checked in. It was an incredibly long, slow moving line.
Many laughed and left, not wanting to leave thousands of dollars of gadgets (laptops, cameras, etc) in the hands of strangers.
This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy TechED, because I honestly had a blast, but I didn’t pay for it and I was there for other reasons. During the event and throughout the blogosphere I’ve noticed I’m not the only one to complain, so hopefully the right people will be reading all the comments they can to make TechED 09 sensational.
