Geek Dinner
Never thought I’d ever attend something called a Geek Dinner, but after doing the test at http://www.innergeek.us/geek.html it appears I do qualify. I went with low expectations after attending Feb’s 27 dinner which wasn’t networky enough for my liking. Joe had put a lot of effort into organising it though so there had to be some value. Which there was…
Highlights:
- met some interesting people
- bumped into some people I hadn’t seen for a long time
- drank some nice wine
- better organised than the 27 dinner
Lowlights:
- almost all of the talks over-ran their allocated time. I think we need to do this Oscar-style. When there’s a minute to go we start playing some background music, which gets progressively louder. When speakers still don’t get the hint we have some nice looking ladies who escort you gently away from the microphone and back to your seat.
- lots of wireless people, talking about stuff I don’t really care about, and/or don’t understand
- mostly stuck at one table for the duration of the evening, which made really meeting more than the 6 others at your table a little difficult. How we make people swap tables between courses?
All in all, a good job. Well done Joe!
Tags: GeekDinner
March 30th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Musical chairs could be fun (-:
Maybe a longer mingling session before and after, keeping the food part shorter. The name tags were a good start to promote networking I think. We could ask people to put a small intro about who they are and what they do on the wiki.. maybe even with a photo.. that way you can figure out your list of people to target before the event.
Henk also commented on the length of the talks. We could do this in two ways.. 1) be strict about the time but give enough time, 2) set short time slots but let it run over as people ask questions.
I think this dinner ran with number 2. We can test the other option.
March 30th, 2007 at 9:53 am
I think the intro idea for the wiki is great. Maybe just a one sentence bio, and the company you work for.
I’m all for short time slots, but it was clear that some people handn’t prepared for a 5min or 3min slot. Jeremy and Jonathan got pretty close - as long as people are trying to keep it short then I don’t think there’s a problem
March 30th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Swapping seats makes the dinner and billing part of things pretty hard, but I’m sure we can come up with an enterprising way to deal with that. For example, having everyone carry a number about, and having to use that when ordering drinks and food. And some way for the dinner and drinks people to find them if they move…
Sorry I never got around to meeting you, Nick - I was quite keen to talk to you on your efforts to find Ruby and Rails people. (I promise not to suggest trying Python…)
Neil
March 30th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Nic, can you give us a full-post RSS feed for Planet GeekDinner, at the moment, only the summary of your posts appears.
March 31st, 2007 at 9:31 am
Actually, I have a simple idea - we don’t have the food find the people, we have the people find the food.
April 1st, 2007 at 7:06 am
Stefano, if i knew how to do that, then I would