BOFs

This is my first time to attend this particular conference for university and college user support service people. Lots of people who run help desks or who manage students. I do neither, which may be a good reason to create a poster session or paper topic for next year where it’ll be held in Edmonton Canada.

They mentioned at the opening session, “For those here for the first time, you don’t have to go to every session. For those who’ve been here a lot, you have to go to at least one session.” That’s how conferences go. Newbies overeagerly fatigue themselves at attending too many sessions and the ones who go every year tend to hang out with folks outside of the sessions. They encouraged the veterans to take a newbie under their wing and make them feel welcome.

Today I’m going to do a mixed bag. Attend a session in the morning, volunteer an hour in the email/documentation room, then lead a Birds of a Feather session, otherwise known as BOF. BOFs are informal talk sessions about various spontaneously proposed topics. People post their topic and people can sign up for them.

I’m facilitating the one called, “Wine taste crawl collaboration.” The idea is to start at Wine from the Heart at 3pm and make it down to Taste of Monterey before 6pm and try to hit up two other tasting rooms in between. Then if people want, they can walk back to the hotel, or get an early start at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. All the tasting places are walking distance from each other and are quite reasonably priced. $5 for general, $10 for reserve tastings.

OK, so my BOF has nothing to do with computers exactly, but I’m going to declare that 1) I’m a newb, 2) one of the conference veteran mentors encouraged me to do it and 3) this falls under the “networking beyond barriers” a way for people to meet each other. My conference mentor lead a pub crawl BOF once at another conference. I’m just following a good idea. I somehow find really good mentors.