User Group or Conference - or Both?

The California/Hawaii/Nevada User Group Conference. Is it a User Group meeting or a Conference? Well, in a way it is both. It is a Conference made up of all the User Groups within the CA/HI/NV/Pacific Islands Region of ESRI. Once a year this conference comes together to invite all the GIS users from these various User Groups. Many people say that this conference is "like the User Conference used to be - smaller, more technical, more personal". Big is good too, the annual User Conference in San Diego is a huge success with it's 15,000 plus attendees and hundreds of choices of things to see and do. But this more personal setting is also nice. The conference wrapped up on Friday Feb 8, 2008 up in Sacramento. It was a busy week, but every person I asked said they had a great time. Opening talks from Jack Dangermond and then Gov Jim Geringer were both fantastic. I heard a number of people mention that these talks got them fired up to get back to work with energy to try new things - the fire was back. That's great! From there we started three days of User Presentations and Technical Sessions. The User Presentations were very interesting - I know, I sat through all of them! There is a lot of fantastic work being done out there and these presentations are a great way to get a feel for a little of it. I was pleasantly surprised at how many of the talks were on ArcGIS Server based projects. Seeing all the User Presentations was great, except that it meant I had to miss all the Technical Sessions. I was very interested in a few of these - all given by ESRI Staff from the CA/HI/NV Regional office. Next year we will be back in Sacramento again. Keep a look out for the announcement. I mainly wanted to post about this to let folks know that we are going to be posting the slides from the User and Technical Presentations in a few weeks. We are also going to see about posting Jack's and Gov Geringer's presentations too. So keep an eye open here - in about three weeks I'll post back the URL.