Attending conferences and meeting new people can be both overwhelming and unresultful at the same time.
Especially if you travel alone. Especially if you attend for the first time. Especially if it is a tech conference. Especially if you are a great and fun person, but a little shy.
I'd like to use this platform and this topic to help people connect before the actual event and thus break the ice a little bit.
You can greet each other and share a little bit of personal info about you, to let other people relate to you
Let me kick this off then.
I'm Taras Kaduk, attending rstudio::conf for the first time this year. I'm fairly new to R (have been learning it for about 2 years, and working in R for less than a year). I work in moving / logistics industry, and based in Jacksonville FL (I'm originally from Ukraine, living in Jacksonville now, also lived in Seattle, WA)
I've been to San Diego before, and would like to spend more time in the city when time permits. I arrive to San Diego on Jan 30, and ready to hang right away (Well, that, or help out prepare for the conference if any volunteering is needed). Let me know if you'd like to connect!
@taras FYI in previous conferences, RStudio released a mobile app for the conference, where you can register as an attendee, fill in some info about yourself, and there was a chat feature. Some people were using that to coordinate rides/dinner/etc. They might do that again for this conference
At rstudio::conf 2018 we are going to have "Birds of a Feather" break out sessions. We are trying to identify 10 areas to include. We also don't want the discussions to clash with any talks in the schedule so we might have it during breakfasts, lunches, and dinners...any thoughts?
I was also interested in some simple informal hang before / after conference. Get together for a few beers, walk / bike through the city... San Diego is a gorgeous place and has a lot to offer. Exploring the city with a good company is twice as good!
@ross_gayler This year the app is hard wired for the conference. Our intention is to add polish to the experience. Last year we'd used https://attendify.com and it seemed to provide a pretty good experience for a small amount of money.
This is a great idea! Do any of these apps identify potential people you may know via connections (linkedin/facebook etc)
If not, perhaps someone could make a shiny app that would help identify friends of friends etc It might be an improvement on looking at a simple list of attendees..
For those of us who use it, a twitter list could be helpful as well. I'm trying to figure out how to search for Twitter lists right now, but, if one doesn't already exist, I'd be happy to take that on.
I started a list that's just rstudioconf18, but I think that can easily be changed. By started I mean it is woefully incomplete, and I'll fill it out later. For conference hashtags, I tend to think shorter is better, just because of character limits, but conf organizers often make explicit which one they prefer, so
(Well, that, or help out prepare for the conference if any volunteering is needed). Let me know if you'd like to connect!
It might be an improvement on looking at a simple list of attendees..
