Smallworld Americas Users Conference #swuc

The 2010 Smallworld Americas Users Conference is coming up soon (September 8-11, 2010). You can read more about it here. An important thing to note is that the order as well as the start day are different compared to previous North American Smallworld Users Conferences:

• Training sessions occur on Wednesday and Thursday (September 8 and 9)
• The opening Cocktail Reception and first Technology Showcase Exhibition is on Thursday night.
• Opening session and workshops start on Friday morning and finish on Saturday afternoon.

So this year there is 1 less day of workshops than in other recent North American Smallworld Users Conference. So now there is no excuse for anyone to leave early :)

Twitter alert!!! If you will be sending tweets about/from the conference, I suggest that you use the hash tag #swuc

Here is why I will be using Twitter at the conference:

• coordinating information technical meetups. (Kind of like an informal unconference)
• provide commentary about workshops. Hopefully if enough other people send tweets, I can find out what is happening in workshops that I am unable to attend
• reach out to new attendees and international guests. The Smallworld Users Conference is a great way to network and get caught up with friends and colleagues from years gone by. Unfortunately, if you are new to the Smallworld community in North America you might find it more difficult to access this great network. Using a well-known channel such as Twitter will allow anyone to post questions/answers related to the conference during the conference.

I'm curious to see how this will take. I have had great experiences with this kind of approach at other conferences. I imagine there could be benefits to the Smallworld Conference attendees as well.

See you in September!