We’ve opened up registration and the call for speakers for SQLSaturday Orlando, to be held October 30th at the Orlando Marriott Lake Mary. In-person!
We weren’t able to get a space commitment from our partners at the local college, so we pivoted to looking at hotels and found that meeting space in October was being rapidly booked as things get closer to normal here in Florida. Hotels are great because it simplifies the logistics, but the trade off is that the only thing that’s free is the water! We can make it work though. I’ll try to write a bunch more about hotel space and post it on SQLSat soon.
Since we no longer have the SQLSaturday tools it’s a mashup this year. The site set up on SQLSaturday.com isn’t bad, you submit a request that gets turned into a yaml file and there are a lot of things you can turn on or off. For a landing page it’s usable, but for now that’s all it. Registration is via Eventbrite (upgrade to professional if you want to add custom questions, ticket types, and the wait list option). Sessions will be collected via Sessionize, though I don’t yet know if we’ll post the schedule directly to SQLSat or to a separate page. The sponsor plan is hosted on our blog with payment links to PayPal. As far as tools, things I really miss:
- Auto announcement to the world wide speaker list (Steve is working on that)
- Ditto for the sponsor list
- The sponsor management tools. It’s not super hard to create paypal links for various sponsor levels, but then you have to keep track of that, find the logo manually, and all the rest.
- Raffle tickets! We’ll have to build something for this based on the download of attendee information from Eventbrite.
As of now we don’t have plans for pre-cons. We’ll see how things come together, but I think we’ll probably try to keep things simpler than usual this year and just focus on delivering a great day on Saturday.
Masks aren’t required in Florida and I’m guessing won’t be in October. Masks will be optional at the event, but it’s hard not to think that some people will still be hesitant about going to a big event whether vaccinated or not – and that’s ok. We’re guessing attendance will be down slightly from average, but we’ve seen a decent amount of interest in resuming in-person events over the last month and I’m hoping that gets better as we head into October.