I'm a couple weeks last posting this, but wanted to get my notes down anyway for future use. The goal of the event was 300 attendees, my guess (unconfirmed) was about 100 actual attendees, this due primarily to the hurricane that had just visited the area and having the location of the event change only 2 days prior to the event. The people I saw at the event were having their usual good time so on that level it was a success. Overall I thought the event suffered some from the change in leadership of the Jax .Net Group that happened last year and there is a learning curve to these events!

• Event leadership did a good job keeping everyone updated as to go/no-go as far as the storm. Can't stress enough that daily updates - even without a storm - are critical the week prior to the event

• The planned location cancelled two days prior to the event due to the storm, leaving them with the choice of rescheduling the event (which I think I preferred as an option) or moving to an alternate location. Due to financial commitments for the after event party cancelling wasn't a viable option so they moved about 12 miles to a church. No good answers here, you just do the best you can when conditions suck.

• Check in went smoothly, all attendees received a tshirt.

• Session locations were a mess. Due to the location change plan A was to poll those who arrived on Sat and set room assignments based on popularity, this plan was eventually discarded as too time consuming and new rooms were mapped to old rooms. It was a confusing layout and a great bit of ingenuity was to have someone lead groups to each room at the start of each hour - nice save.

• Sponsors were pretty much ignored until lunch time. This was a combination of not having a good traffic flow (usually you want sponsors between check-in and breakfast/lunch) and the event stuff just trying to make everything else happen due to the location change. Unavoidable, but can't stress enough that you need someone tasked with looking after sponsors and sponsor interests.

• I left prior to the close out session, but the plan was to give away all the books/prizes at one time. What we've seen at SQLSaturday is that this doesn't scale well, may have worked out ok with the smaller crowd - in my view prize tickets/prize desk that lets winners redeem during the day is a better solution.

• The event raised more than $12k. Good money, but once you get beyond $4k or so I think it would be nice to make sure members/attendees get some view of where/how that money is being spent. Here in Orlando if we can raise a surplus we plan to use it to support bringing in out of town speakers during the year.

• One other thing they tried and then abandoned was having attendees vote on which sessions should be on the schedule. I love the idea, but implementing it makes life challenging. It's the job of the event team to come up with a balanced schedule and the attendees/registrants may not help you achieve that. I know that's a confusing statement, but these are meant to be general community events - you don't want all beginners or all expert sessions or you leave out a large bit of the community.

Somewhat harshly, this is the 2nd year that the Jax event has been so-so, compared to the Orlando/S Fla/Tampa Code Camps. I hope the Jax team will take a look at those other events in Fla and their own recent experiences to make next years event first class again.