We just closed the door on the first Geeks and God conference and the planning has already started for the next conference. We are riding the wave of excitement and energy into planning the future of Geeks and God. The first planning meeting is this coming Friday!
I am looking for your help to make the next conference even more of a success than the first. If you have any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions regarding the next Geeks and God conference please comment on them here before Friday.
Ideas for the next conference
First off, I have to say that you guys did a brilliant job and I will be attending until we are at Web 20.0.
Second, I have a ton of ideas; however, I will only give you a few (not to overwhelm you :) )
1) Re-engineering of the Audio/Video recordings (I would love to help with that)
2) You need more breakout sessions
a) Installation, configuration and make live for beginners
b) Session for people that know the basics of drupal, but don't know anything about programming
c) Themeing, views and modules session
d) Uber geek programming session (PHP, DB stuff)
e) Session just for pastors and their tech person
f) Basic administration
g) Advanced administration
h) ...and everything else you did in the past conference
I truly think you should have a full day conference with a lot of break out session and philosophy
BTW... We need more SWAG (i.e. t-shirts, stickers, etc...)
we should use: http://www.startupschwag.com/
I know the lady that runs it... I am sure she will give us a good deal :)
By Friday???
Whoa. You guys are moving fast!
I'm hoping to catch the other person from our church that came to the conference and record an audio comment - maybe by tomorrow night - to send in response to G&G #92.
Either way, I'll try to have some thoughts to you by Friday.
Micah
The conference was awesome.
The conference was awesome. So, I spent the last few days wondering, "What made it awesome?"
First, I think the content and the presenters of the content were great. I think one of the things you guys did really well was to convey your passion and excitement about what you were sharing. Not the typical monotone and boring speaker. You also did as a good a job as can be expected in presenting the material in an "average joe" way and technical enough to keep the geeks awake. The other thing that I really liked was the ability to ask both Matt and Bob any and all questions that I had. Never did I feel that either one of them was bothered by all my pestering questions and anyone else's questions. And the other big thing for me was the fellowship that we got to share. Hearing what others were doing and going through was encouraging and made me feel more a part of the "bigger church." The conversations shared during meal times and free times were really enjoyable. It was also great that we could talk "geek" and also talk God.
So, for the next conference, I suggest three things.
Those are my few initial thoughts. Once again, I had an awesome time and look forward to doing it again.
From One Level to the Next
Hey Matt et al, I'm wondering if a "Coding For Dummies" would be a helpful addition to another conference. Focus on moving individuals from Drupal Users to Drupal Themers. It just might fill the gap between Drupal Newbies and Uber Geeky folks.
Something like an hour or two that would cover all the HTML, CSS, PHP stuff beyond the real basics.
Walking through the construction of a page.tpl.php file might be the perfect kind of example to use - just spend a good chunk of time on that, start to "finish", for those of us who haven't done it before.
Sound good?
Carl