A quick look through the Birds of a Feather voting area (for the IT Pro Conference) shows a lot of sessions that appear to be sponsored by vendors. I wonder if they will turn into a sustained marketing pitch.
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March 28th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Hi Hunter! I am one of the co-chairs of the Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) track at TechEd, and have been volunteering on that for the past several years. Everyone (except for Microsoft employees) is invited to submit proposals for BOFs, and we encourage you to do so, too. We work hard at getting the word out to conference attendees, non-Microsoft presenters, and vendors.
I can tell you that we’ve had some outstanding BOFs moderated by vendors in the past. They often deal with the same issues faced by the rest of us, and they can be real catalysts for good discussion.
I absolutely agree with you, and we have heard loud and clear from past conferences, that BOFs are not appropriate for marketing products or services. Nor are they presentations or lectures. We communicate that to all of our moderators. Okay, sometimes those old presentation and marketing habits are hard to break, and that’s where you, the good old community, come in. If you are ever attending a BOF session and the moderator is pitching a product or delivering a presentation, call him or her on it. Be polite, but be firm. You can say that all of you came to discuss the subject together, and you’d like to hear what other people in the room think about the subject.
I think it’s fine for the moderator, or anyone else in the room, to say that they have a commercial involvement in the topic, and spend 60 seconds saying what that is. It can provide some context and validation for the conversation. If you feel like you’re getting a marketing pitch, chances are other people are feeling the same way, so speak right up. And, of course, we want to know about your experiences — good, bad, or otherwise — in the evals as well.
I do want to be completely clear: vendors don’t provide sponsorship for BOF sessions they moderate. They are volunteering just like all of the other moderators, hosts, and our track chairs. (We do have some sponsorship opportunities, let’s see if we can get some cool swag like books for BOF attendees, but that is completely and totally separate from session selection.)
We are still accepting proposals for BOF sessions through April 6. For TechEd IT Pro 2008, propose a session at https://www.msteched.com/itpro/submitbof.aspx; and for the Developer side of the house, visit https://www.msteched.com/dev/submitbof.aspx.
Thanks for caring about having high quality BOFs at TechEd. We’ll see you there.
Cheers,
Stuart
March 28th, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Stuart – Thanks for the post! I appreciate the work you all put into the BoF sessions. Last year we had a great session for IT in Healthcare that was vendor agnostic. Thanks again for shedding some light on things.
March 28th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Sure thing. It certainly helps for us to know what questions people have about the BOFs, so thanks for raising the concern.
One small correction: BOF proposals are being accepted through Wednesday, April 2 (not the 6th as I stated, I was looking at out-of-date info ). And voting on proposed sessions continues through Monday, April 7.
Cheers,
Stuart