MAX Europe: My Thoughts Part 1

MAX Europe is now over and I thought I would lay down some initial thoughts on the conference as a whole.

It's been a great first conference in Europe for Adobe, and it will undoubtedly get better, but there are certainly a few things they need to tackle... and I hope all of this comes across as constructive critisicm.

• It appears that a lot of the original speakers have been replaced at the last minute - this includes the talk I ended up giving on ColdFusion Server Monitoring and troubleshooting. Now, this isn't a huge problem if the replacement speaker knows their stuff - I like to think I do - but there were some sessions where the speakers had definately been put to the sword.
• Because of the numbers, lots of hotels were required, and this meant people were spread all over the place ... the furthest "MAX" hotel was a 40 minute walk. Other hotels were right across the road. Not a big deal if you've got some nice scenary or something to keep you occupied, but to dump my bag I had to walk 20 mins to and from the hotel and it was a building construction site the entire way.
• Putting "similar" talks on at the same time. There was around 8 ColdFusion talks, and on Tuesday afternoon at 4pm, four of them were scheduled against each other. This didn't just happen with CF sessions. Poor organisation.
• Introductary talks on the last day... There was an Intro to AIR talk on Wednesday, which is after other talks such as AIR APIs, Air persistant storage, AIR synchronisation. Again, poor organisation.
• The lack of intimacy.... there were 1,200+ folks at MAX Europe, and it's very hard to get time with people. This is not a problem restricted to MAX (though I imagine it was much worse at Chicago than Barcelona), but one of the things we have found with Scotch on the Rocks, is that people like intimacy as they get the chance to talk to the Product Managers, the speakers, other delegates. It's a tough one though, as Adobe have such a huge designer/developer base. Not sure if there is much you can do here.
• Power.... depending in which session room you were in, the power supplies were on the other side of the room - which meant that speakers couldn't plug their laptops in and with how often people were using their laptops their batteries were looow. Power extensions should have been provided.
• Rooms were really hot and stuffy.... or freezing cold. Maybe I'm being pinikity here but during one of the AIR talks, Mark Drew, Sean Corfield, Kev McCabe and myself were in the front row and we did nothing but yawn - absolutely nothing to do with the talk, it was just so damn warm!!!
• Food was ... poor. Having a little taste of the local cusine is a good thing - but every day, and at every evening event??? Come on. It was tapas or nothing.
• Lack of cuttlery. OK, this is fairly minor, but when you're having to use a spoon to eat food that really needs to be skewered ... well, it's a little tricky.
• Room organiser/helpers. Not sure what it was like on the first day, but certainly by end of play Tuesday (when I gave the talk) the person who was supposed to help me with my set up - even if it was just the microphone - had disappeared and was no where to be found. Thankfully I'm not entirely stupid and can take care of myself, but still , it was very unprofessional.
• Evening events were average. The band were OK, and the poker was fun but ... it was seriously nothing special. We bailed out just before 10pm (when the beer ran out) and headed off to find a little pub that did the most amazing food!!!
• Ran out of beer - nuff said.

OK ... so that's a fair sized list. However, I hope's all taken constructively. As the organiser of Scotch on the Rocks, believe me, I know how difficult conferences are too run and my own opinion is that you need to know the bad, otherwise how can you fix it.

I'll finish by saying, well done to the MAX Europe organising team for putting on a good show. Negative items aside, I thoroughly enjoyed myself, and I'll follow up by posting on the good!