Quote: I hope we get to meet some more of the Lantica team at the conference (Ray without his reaper mask for one), It would be a pleasure to buy him and the others a drink.
Better make it a soda.
Ray will indeed be at the conference. It will be his first. Erika will be there. She is one of the speakers. I will be there. Most of the Lanticans will be there. Many of them as speakers. We also have a couple of Sesame experts (non-Lanticans) coming as speakers as well.
Lantica marketing runs the sign-up web site. So I have no idea which of you from the forum we'll be seeing. But I hope to meet or greet all of the regulars here (even the lurkers should come and "de-lurk").
For those of you that are unfamiliar with the history behind this event: The Sesame Users Conference is the continuation of the Q&A Users Conference (an annual event sponsored by the Q&A Users Group and The Quick Answer since the days of DOS). The planners put together a set of speakers across three days, usually divided into general interest (the first two days) and a "Master's Seminar" (the third day). Between speakers and in the evenings, breaks, and whenever they can, the attendees get together, share techniques, socialize a bit, and corner the programmers (to get us to tell you the sort of stuff that software companies are never "allowed" to tell you).
The last purely Q&A conference was in Washington D.C. It was my first. Erika made me go. I had no real interest in Q&A (I thought it was something of a "DOS relic"). It wasn't a big conference, but it was amazingly enthusiastic. I thought beforehand that the days of software users conferences were pretty much over (killed by microsoft's dominance). But upon seeing the innovation and creativity that people were bringing to the table - I was convinced that a product that is not like MSOffice stood a good chance of being appreciated by a sizeable minority.
The big celebrity at that conference was Andreas Gobel, the team leader for the development of Q&A 5.0. Andreas and I ducked into a corner and talked tech. It was his first Q&A conference also, and he was also amazed. We talked a lot about what was good (and bad) about Q&A. I think we both had our first inklings about Sesame at that conference.
Andreas, as most of you know, is one of the primary contributors to Sesame. He is also a member of this forum.
The next conference (in SoCal a couple of years later) was the one where Lantica announced its existence and announced Sesame. Again, the sense of community and the sharing of information (Lantica leaks information like a love-drunk spy) was the primary focus of the conference. If the Washington conference convinced us to write Sesame, the SoCal conference decided what kind of company Lantica would be. Much of the development model (user-centric) we employ was determined at that conference.
I really can't say what I will come away with from this next conference. It is always a surprise. When Andreas went to the conference in Washington, he was stunned by the things the users had done with Q&A - much of which he didn't even know was possible. Lantica can provide the bricks and boards, hammers and circular saws, but it is the conference attendees that build the houses. And, in a circle, by seeing those houses, Lantica discovers what we need to do next.
Over and beyond all of that, the most wonderful thing that seems to happen at the conference is the conversations among the users. The person sitting on your right has just solved the problem you are just about to face, and the person on your left is just dying to learn the technique you just invented.
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2004 Sesame Users Conference (Read 9975 times)
