I know someone who grew up in the circus. Wire walking circus!
For me, working without a net involves closeness to the ground, but not necessarily without the potential for “things” happening.
This year Aderson Oliveira, Paul Scarlett and I came up with a new idea for DNNCon and, to a certain extent it involved working without a net. Our session was titled “Got a Question? Get and Answer!” The basic idea was that we would provide a venue where people could bring their burning DNN questions, with some assurance that they might leave with an answer.
For us, preparing for the session required pretty much no preparation – just a PowerPoint deck with a title, and short bios of ourselves.
This might be the only DNNCon session with 100% user contributed content.
We did have a backup plan: There were 6 other excellent presentations that we could attend in the event that nobody attended ours!
As it turned out, there a half dozen intrepid souls who came to hear us. (Whew!) A couple seemed to have thick notebooks full of questions … mostly about skins, as I recall. So we had some lively discussions about skins: should I build, buy, or something else? What makes a good skin? How can I tell a good skin from a not so good skin? As there were three of us, there were at least four opinions, and we did explore them. One of our other attendees was Mitchel Sellers, who added to the discussion some very useful comments regarding the impact of skins on site performance. (Thanks for sitting in, Mitchel!)
What did we learn from this? There really were people who came to DNNCon with questions, and we did have a chance to answer some of them. But maybe a session is not the best place to do something like this. For the next DNNCon (or whatever it might be called) we’re considering setting up a “DNN Help Desk,” perhaps in the area where the sponsor tables are set up. That would make the question and answers available throughout the event, not compete with other sessions, and maybe provide a better experience. What do you think?
(This is also cross-posted to the DNNCon Blog)