Today is opening day for many baseball teams here in the USA. All the players went through spring training to prove to the team management they are the best of the best and will help the team be successful during the year. All the players dream that in October they will be playing for the baseball championship. In many ways I see parallels with respect to Southwest Fox 2008. Each of the potential speakers have Read more…
Over the weekend, Doug updated the Southwest Fox website (www.swfox.net) to show information for this year’s conference. Simultaneously, we released this year’s call for speakers. If you think you have something to share with the VFP community, check it out at http://www.swfox.net/callforspeakers.aspx. Be sure to read the entire Call for Speakers document, as it explains our philosophy for the conference and for choosing speakers.
During the closing session of Southwest Fox 2007 we announced Southwest Fox 2008. Today I signed the conference center contracts for 2008 and 2009! So the announcement is official: Southwest Fox 2008 and 2009 will be held in Mesa, AZ at the Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center (same place as 2007). The organizers knew the conference location was not going to change based on the overall terrific service the conference center staff provided to Read more…
Happy New Year everyone. One of our questions on the evaluation form asked people to rate KOKOPELLI. One of the themes we got in the responses is “What is KOKOPELLI?” and “Where was KOKOPELLI?” Apparently we did not do a good job making the Southwest Fox schedule helper applet from Dave Aring public enough on the Web site, in our email announcements, and the RSS feed. You might not be aware that we had it Read more…
I’ve prepared the session schedule for a number of conferences, including this year’s Southwest Fox, several DevCons, and at least one GLGDW. When I prepare a conference schedule, I work with a set of rules, some of which are obvious (no speaker can give two simultaneous sessions) and some of which are not (no speaker should have sessions right before and right after lunch). The goal, of course, is to create a schedule that works Read more…
One complaint we saw a lot on the evaluations was that a room was overcrowded for one session or another. This is actually a hard problem for us to solve. Conference room layouts fall into two basic categories: those (like this year’s Southwest) where all the rooms are the same size, and those where session rooms have different sizes. Each type presents issues for scheduling, but on the whole, it’s a lot easier when all Read more…
The title says the most important thing we learned from the Southwest Fox evaluations. Most attendees were very happy with the conference. Of 92 people who filled out the overall conference portion of the evaluation booklet, 88 said they were likely to come to Southwest Fox again in the future. That’s an incredibly high number, but matches what people told us in person. Although the overall tone of the comments was positive, nothing else had Read more…
Reporting on the overall conference evaluations was both easier and harder than reporting the speaker evaluations. Easier because we needed only a single report, with no need to break things down by speaker. Harder because instead of three open-ended questions, there were 12. My first inclination was to handle the comments as I had on the speaker evaluations, with a separate cursor and detail band for each. But 12 detail bands seemed excessive. More importantly, Read more…
I posted photos Tamar and I took at Southwest Fox 2007 today. Thanks to Dave Aring (once again!) for cleaning them up and Cesar Chalom for posting a blog entry that make quick work of generating thumbnail images using the GDIPlusX code from VFPX. If you were at the conference and took any photos you’d like to share, we’d love to have them. Please email them to dhennig AT stonefield DOT com.
I didn’t expect helping to run Southwest Fox to give me a chance to learn new things about VFP. But speaker coordination was one of my responsibilities, so I took the lead in handling the evaluation data. On the plane coming home, I designed a couple of tables to hold the data and started working on data entry forms. We gave each attendee an evaluation booklet with an identical section for each time slot, plus Read more…