The 2nd BCS CMSG Conference was a great success and very enjoyable. Being second time around and having it in the same location (Homerton college Cambridge) was a definite plus for making the organisation easier (very important consideration for something being organised by volunteers!).
We were very pleased with the quality of presentations and speakers – a definite advance on the previous conference, partly in that we had more choice from which to select papers. We also had a good representation from overseas: US, Europe and even Australia.
The general feedback was very positive. People particularly enjoyed the networking possibilities in terms of the conference being residential and there being quite a bit of time in the evenings for chats over a Pimms/beer/wine. We asked specifically about running the event in London next time but the general feeling was against this. The advantages of allowing more people to attend and perhaps for parts of days or specific presentations were outweighed by the lack of networking opportunities that would inevitably occur as people split up to different hotels or went back to their offices etc.
There was a very nice feeling throughout the event, and I think we have generated more buzz that will feed into increased attendance next time (we were just under 100 people not including vendor staff).
The 3 streams (large scale systems, service management/ITIL and commercial software development) seemed to work fairly well. It certainly seemed like people mixed and matched.
We did discuss running the event on an annual basis rather than every 2 years, but the problem is the lead time and amount of work that goes in to it would put a real strain on the committee. Thus our current intentions are to run a rather bigger 1 day event next year with space for an exhibition, and then the 2 day residential conference again in 2007.
The papers (or most of them) have now been uploaded to the web site and are available for people to look at. Rather fewer papers and more slides this time than last which makes for less information if you weren’t there which is a shame.
Meanwhile we are having discussions about the future events for the BCS CMSG and our October event has a theme and title “Resistance is Futile – Satisfy your Compliance Auditor!” around corporate governance, Sarbanes Oxley, software asset management etc. Suggestions welcome for future events – probably via the BCS CMSG forum on CMCrossroads.
