Over time you learn more things and do better (DATA TLV puzzles and excitement)

        

I took the first sip from my morning coffee when the last summit session had started, somewhere around 15:00. I heavily sank to a sofa and realized that this is the first time I had a chance to sit down today. Another organizer was sitting nearby with the exact "stick a fork in me, I am done" look, staring nowhere. "Oh, I am so tired" - that was my 18-year-old nephew Sonya anchored on the other side of the sofa. She had helped us with registrations and timekeeping in classes and has absorbed all speakers' disappointment with outdated presentation equipment. "Most speakers finish before their time", she said with an exhausted look. "Very smart and intelligent people. I didn't understand anything they talked about."

I wish we knew how to make sure the summit meets everyone's expectations.

Every sponsor wants to deliver a session. The more sponsored sessions mean fewer slots for community speakers sessions. The toughest part of summit organization is selecting sessions that will enter the agenda when there are too many submissions. How do you say to someone you work with, your friend, that his session was not accepted? How to deal with sadness in their eyes? To allow more community speakers to speak, organizers open more parallel rooms. Accepted speakers will be pleased but attendees start to complain that it's hard to decide which class to attend. They feel that no matter which session they choose, they are missing something more interesting. At the same time, speakers complain that their rooms are not full. Another tremendous challenge is to figure out, how many people will show up. How can we calculate the approximate attendance when most people don't RSVP. How had Corona affected in-person events? Are people hungry for frontal meetups or have got used to learning from home? 

The more attendees you assume, the more budget you need. This triggers more sponsors and fewer community sessions. Now we have got the deadlock.

Why do we do this heavy work every year? What do we get out of it? Is that about grateful, tired and overloaded with new knowledge attendees with their hands full of free swag? 

You can't make everybody happy. Unless you are chocolate. 

Me and my cold coffee have left the venue like the captain that is the last one off the ship. People who haven't shown up were lying on a floor in a pile of tags.

It is hard to believe that more than four hundred people a few hours ago crowded the place, finally happy to meet old friends, after two years of lockdown, masks, and online meetups. Fabulous to see them talking to each other and eating ice cream. Smiling, exchanging ideas, and solving each other challenges. Drinking alcohol cocktails between sessions. Hugging each other on magnetic pictures that will find their way to the home refrigerators to remind us about the Data TLV summit, the annual Data People gathering.