Jim Driscoll's Blog

Schedulebuilder Tryout - Day 1

In a previous post, I talked about how the people who run the conference were planning on having a new way to schedule and attend talks at JavaOne this year.

Well, first day is mostly done, and I think we've gotten a pretty good idea of how it's working.

My evaluation is "could be better". I've yet to see the first 3 slides of ANY talk that I've attended - and I was registered for all of them. On the other hand - I actually got in to all the talks that I wanted to see - because I was registered (and 2 of them were totally full).

So - what's the problem? Crowd control is an issue - the lines are longer, and take longer to traverse, than in previous years. Which means that crowd control is more of an issue, and was probably not planned for well enough.

Also, if you're going to stuff 1200 people into a room in 15 minutes, how many stations for reading cards would you have? Hint: More than 4.

And lastly, if you've got a real problem with getting people in quickly, doesn't it make sense to open the rooms up as soon as you can? So far, they haven't - rooms were closed until 15 minutes before the sessions started, even if the rooms were free.

So, what can be done about this? Well, it seems clear that in order for this to be successful, we're going to have to put more people on crowd control, and get more badge readers.

I know that the organizers are looking hard at this, and I suspect that we'll see improvements tomorrow. What's your experience? Please comment below.

Comments

• I might have a few comments.

  I have not had any time to think about rescheduling, which I normally do, since I get into the sessions when they have already started and I have to go as soon as I can (when the Q&A starts) to try to see the start of the next session, even if that is in the same room and I have scheduled it. Previously I could just stay and pull up the laptop to do some blogging or whatever. Now it isn't all bad that I have spent all free time in a queue since I've heard that the wireless connections have been down the whole day anyway.

  Since everybody knows that they need to get to the next session in a hurry, so they don't miss the beginning, they all start to leave the room as soon as there is a hint that the speaker is about to wrap things up. It is quite disturbing if you want to hear the Q&A and not a very polite thing to do to the speaker.

  I have no time to get a cup of much needed coffee between sessions anymore.

  But, as you said in your last blog the organizers have much experience from this and they are confident that this will work. I therefore think this is more our, the attendees, fault. We are probably not as fast with the swipes as their normal attendee, or we are below average when it comes to computer knowledge and thus are less inclined to use the very good QA-passed Schedule Builder. ;-)

  Cheers.

  Posted by: mgrev on May 16, 2006 at 11:13 PM

• I find both schedulebuilders totalt lack of understanding that people actually do find more than one session at any one time increadibly stupid. And if I were organizing the event I would use the data from schedule builder to optimize the room size, and stop all the stupid crowd control and let people flow freely; as you would expect of a comunity event. And what hapened to meeting new people and getting new ideas - well - you end up beeing stopped at the doors - as you had not scheduled the session you just learned of from the stranger you just met...

  JavaONE has got a well-deserved repotation of beeing the week of long lines - but this year is a total disaster!!

  Posted by: totto on May 17, 2006 at 05:58 AM

• I'm confused by your comment on "find more than one session at any one time". Um, what?
  Prehaps you mean the idea of "browsing" from one talk to another? You can still do that - if the second talk isn't full. So, that's unchanged from last year.

  Posted by: driscoll on May 17, 2006 at 08:46 AM

• MGrev -
  Yeah, I did make that comment about trusting the organizers. *shrug* To some degree, if people do stuff professionally, and they have significant experience, it does generally pay to assume they aren't bad at their job. And I'd say that the process wasn't a failure, or a disaster as you claim - but I will say it's not a success. Needs work.
  That said, I'm sitting in the general session, and John Gage asked who was unhappy, and only about 10% of the people raised their hands. I was suprised it was so few, honestly.
  One last comment: There's 15k-20k people at JavaOne - crowd flow and crowd control is going to be a problem, no matter what you do. If you let people "just go in", it creates other problems - like not getting into the talk at all - which means that you *still* need to leave early to make sure you get in. Ben's AJAX talk was going to be a crush, regardless, with people getting shunted to the overflow room (which also filled). The problem *I* see is that it's just not going fast enough. If they can make it faster, it's a better method. If they can't (or if it's prohibitively expensive to do it), then it's a failed experiment.
  I'm looking forward to seeing if they can speed things up today.

  
  

  Posted by: driscoll on May 17, 2006 at 09:00 AM

• I find these new arrangements are almost killing any opportunity to talk to the speakers. As a previous comment said, quite often you have to leave for the next session as soon as the Q&A starts (or earlier). Even if you don't care too much about a following session, there's no time to talk to the speaker at the front of the room and there's no space outside the room to talk either since all that space is now needed for lines. IMHO the opportunity to ask questions, either in the Q&A or afterwards, is one of the main reasons (i.e. justifications to management) for attending in person instead of just getting the materials on the web. This is being lost.

  Posted by: desperado on May 18, 2006 at 06:50 AM

• We did talk about different ways to get speakers and attendees together. We didn't come up with any good ways - you have any suggestions?

  Posted by: driscoll on May 19, 2006 at 11:24 AM

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