My Take on #NFD12 Heading Into #TFD12 and #NFD13

Networking Field Day 12 marked my first attendance as a delegate to a Tech Field Day event. I honestly didn’t know what to expect from being “on the inside”. I had viewed many of the previous events online, both live and in review. I had been to many Cisco Live (#CLUS) events (8 straight years) and so thought I was prepared for the technical information overload.

In the Field Day environs, though, the content for me was substantially different, being a good bit outside of my normal, day-to-day experiences. Some of the presentations involved some novel ideas dealing with newly emerging pain points in the industry.

As a result, you could (and we did) very easily have a start up from Silicon Valley that just came out of stealth making a presentation in order to convince you of (among other things):

1. The gravity and importance of the problem they are trying to solve
2. Their technology they’ve developed to uniquely address that problem

Launch countdown on hold

Not truly knowing what was coming, I began the event with a technical conference approach: consume and absorb all the information, taking copious amounts of detailed notes in the process.  Under that model, though, much of the information tends to be just a newer generation of existing experiences or products.  The challenge is merely the volume of information and not necessarily the evolution of ideas.

Understanding/comprehension, relevance and perspective would typically form in discussions at the conference, on the trip home, or while reminiscing with colleagues back at the ranch.

I won’t lie - it took me the better part of the first morning to truly understand a new approach was needed in order to better participate in and benefit from the event.  And … I had to develop it fast.

Smacking the launch timer

To start with, for #NFD12, I had to quickly discard my notion of taking detailed notes. From one perspective - an extraordinary amount of very cool technologies and architectures - it was very easy to stay focused on the presentations. From another perspective - what the heck did they just say? what did they say yesterday? - it was extremely hard because detail oriented is core for me.  As I internally munge the content, it isn’t unusual to miss a key detail.

What ended up working pretty well for me was taking a step back and realizing something that probably should have been obviously to me going into #NFD12.  Simply put myself in the position of having the problems being highlighted by each vendor and, based on my past and current roles, analyze the architectures and solutions in the light of possibly buying the product.  Does it, can it, will it ever do what they say it will do and does it really solve a problem I might realistically have.

Achieving orbit

In the end, the conference approach ultimately was grounded in the goals of attendance: trying to drive me to become something of an SME on the issues, technologies, and products. That goal was rather unrealistic - especially for my first Field Day event.

After those adjustments, I felt a great deal more relaxed during the event.  I enjoyed the presentations much more.  I engaged more with my fellow delegates and had great off-camera conversations with them.

Post-launch assessment

For the next events - Tech Field Day 12/#TFD12 and Networking Field Day 13/#NFD13 in November 2016 - I am seriously contemplating using pen and paper for any small amount of note taking that might be required.  The open editor for notes simply didn’t prove useful.

Besides, once the videos went online at #NFD12, I was able to take much better, detailed notes because I had seen the material once already and I had the convenience of pause and rewind functions.  So, other than live tweeting and side conversations, going full electronic was not all that helpful.