Rethinking MAX BOFs
"BOF" stands for "Birds of a Feather", and MAX BOF sessions are informal meetings on a variety of subjects. Unlike core MAX sessions, BOFs are usually not driven by Adobe and the MAX team. Rather, the community defines topics of interest, and MAX provides facilities and publicity to drive attendance. Most BOFs are focused around core products and technologies, but many are on other topics. Again, BOFs are driven by the community.We've hosted BOFs for a long time, ever since Allaire DevCon days. But over the years BOFs have evolved ...
- Year ago we added "Meet the Team" sessions, free-form open discussions like BOFs, but giving MAX attendees a chance to face product teams and ask, comment, criticize, suggest, and more. The "Meet the Team" sessions have become so popular and well attended that BOF attendance has suffered as a result.
- Then, as the number of products represented at MAX grew, so did the number of "Meet the Team" sessions. This resulted in fewer available rooms for BOFs, and thus fewer BOFs, despite growing attendance and greater attendee diversity.
- And on top of all that, the BOF schedules have had to change. We used to have BOFs on two nights and at two time slots each night. But in recent years we had to scale back to one night to accommodate the expanded MAX schedule. And last year the one night of BOFs started later, again because of MAX scheduling, which caused the second time slot to run way past 10:00pm, and that hurt BOF participation even more.
Lunch time is a full hour in the middle of the day, well, in the middle of all three days, actually. There are no sessions scheduled during lunch time, and just about every MAX attendee is in the lunch room. So what if we moved BOFs to lunch time? We'd have the big open seating area we usually have, but would also have part of the room sectioned off, round lunch tables in each, and signage designating what group is eating lunch together where. Attendees could get their lunch, head to a specific area, and then meet and chat while eating. The atmosphere would be easy and relaxed, attendees would get fed, and we could accommodate lots more BOFs over the three days of MAX. We'd leave the "Meet the Team" sessions as they are, in the evening, but move all BOFs to lunch time.
We've not hammered out all of the details yet, this is a work in progress. Still, we're interested in your thoughts on the dilemma and the proposed solution.
Labels: Adobe MAX, Birds of a Feather, BOF
posted by Ben Forta at
4:55 PM
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