Keith Shirley

Peter Heary (aka. CroppyBoy1798) has made a new video of Carlow Past and present available online.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVdtJTNcrok

For those of you that did not see them in the previous post – he has old photos of Carlow and takes new photos from the same place and angle. In the video he merges the two so you can see how things have changed.

I never seem to manage to guess where the old photos are taken. The videos are well worth a look – and take a lot of time I’m sure.

Yesterday we ran our second Bizcamp – this time in the Guiness storehouse. The event was a great success and I’d like to say a big thanks to all the speakers for donating their time and of course the sponsors for their money.

At one of the last timeslots of the day we had our own session to discuss what we did to organise the event and to show where the money went. We had some very useful feedback from the attandents as well. Normally at these events I’d have a big list of things that I think could have been done better – this time it’s more a list of things we can do to make it a little different.

Of the 499 registered attendants we had 291 people turn up. We probably had a few more come in without registering. Feedback from a number of people was that for a free event this was good – that a 50% dropoff rate is normal. I find it disappointing – and really unfair if people registered with no real intention of going. It basically meant

• We had loads of people that couldn’t come because we had closed the registration.
• We had 120 portions of lunch wasted – money that could have been used for other things
• It reduces the effectiveness of the event

At the review meeting suggestions were made that a number of people registered only with the intention of having their name listed. I suspect they are right. It means that we will have to limit what people can write – and will have extra work next time to try and verify registrations. Keep in mind that this work is voluntary.

We also had one no-show for the speakers – that’s twice as annoying. We had circa 70 people who wished to speak and only 40 time slots. Considering the talk was on time management there were a lot of jokes about the speaker not having the time etc etc. A phone call would have been nice – we could have slotted someone else in or at least warning the attendees so they could go to other sessions.

I hope this post is not coming across as a whinge. The event went really well – we had great comments from people on how much they learned and the contacts they made. I’m certainly glad I did it.