I noticed just now that Kae blogged about our participation at the Irish Web Technologies Conference.
As Kae mentioned, this was the first time that we represented the Irish PHP Users Group at any such conference and we learnt a lot – from the mundane to the slightly more insightful.
- Bring at least two [long] extension leads along rather than assume there will be power sockets nearby!
- Have Group business cards to give out – a few times we had to resort to writing the website address and contact/mailing list details of the Group onto scraps of paper; obviously not the best impression to give.
- Building on this, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to prepare some form of flyer that could be used to raise awareness of what the Group, and PHP in general, is about – a more substantial take away reminder as it were.
- And on top of this we need to raise awareness of the Group: I got speaking with David Ennis from TechWest in Galway and discovered that until today he had no idea that there was a national users group for php developers. We need to work on making ourselves known. David had some good ideas about this including having regional talks every 3 months or so. We reminded each other that the PHPLondon Conference was on today and for us to hold something similar there’s a lot of baby steps that we’d need to do before we can consider holding something similar.
It was a good day and I’m sure the next time we participate in a conference we’ll come better prepared.
