Category : venue facilities

I'm freezing.

Overall, the conference was a great and very fruitful experience but the venue sucked - and I don't mean Berlin, which is one of my favourite cities!

Hello Team,
the web2.0expo is one great event and I was so excited to see it come to Berlin. The keynotes, the speakers, the sessions - they were very inspiring. Pls bear this in mind when reading the next lines:
WHERE WAS THE COLLABORATION? It felt like the American invasion! You did not hook up with the local community, with the regional industry, with the national press! If you had you would not have been fooled into the location and made the terrible mistake to let THEIR team handly any of your concerns. You mader Berlin look dreary. That is not very considerate of you. Jan Chipchase: "We need to listen!"
Pls, in the future, integrate persons from the location you are descending on into your team. Europeans actually do know how to make some great conferences. Check out: DLD Confernce.
better luck to the next location
Inga

Don't get me wrong each room and expo was nice, but way too spread out. Most conference participants camped out on the floor over lunch versus heading up to the Expo floor. The layout needed to set up better to ensure traffic through the expo floor providing benefits to the participants and vendors.

Berlin is great, but th fairground is poor. I really haven't seen such a horrible fairground ever, what a labyrinth...

Food: Only edible thing were the apples. But after 4 days of apples and a great Apple season I have had enough of Apples, doesn't mean I dislike Apple :-)
Even travelling in coach gives you better catering. I won't even talk about the coffee...

As for the technical equipment: We are showing the latest technological development and had constant problems with mikes, no reasonable sound for video, zapping computer slides ...

Since I was helping out at the Web2Open booth I often had to walk about five minutes to get from expo to the conference rooms. That was why I often decided not to listen to sessions because it was just too annoying and time-consuming to do it.

The whole room situation made it nearly impossible to meet people in a comfortable place because there simply was none available. I realised that when I found people using the Web2Open place to meet people, which is okay, but maybe a central place to meet and discuss would've also been good. Maybe you should consider having a central, yet a little more silent place for networking purposes. Because after all, that's what expos are also made for.

i`ve heard of some people having sore throat after the keynotes (including me) ;-(

I think it would have been good if everything would have been taped. I am just back from the Open Source Plone Conference in Naples (for about 350,-) and we had all sessions recorded (and I actually also streamed some of them to Second Life and ustream.tv).

It would really be cool to have recordings as with 4 tracks and the web2open it was not really easy to choose.

(we also had better food btw ;-).

The lunch ag was not good - you're in Europe. You cannot do this here.... Adapt or ...

As regards the facilities and organisation this has been very disappointing. Signposting was bad to non-existent. How about printing passes that let people at the entrance see what kind of pass you have without having to pull you over and staring at you. Why were people forced to wait outside the keynotes room until just before? Why so few seats? And why the awful lunch bags?

As a developer that doesn't drink coffee, I'm in desperate need of some good old sugar loaded, unhealthy soft drinks.
I'd even settle for some orange juice, if I could find some.

The only thing, all of this water is good for, is for more visits to the loo!

Each day I forked over my 1.75 so I would not have to drag my coat around. As I leave directly to the airport (as most of us probably) I brought my luggage in today. Shocked when I had to hand over just under €6! How can a conference that costs over €1000 charge us every day for this "service"?

I think it would be very useful to have some place where one could print a couple of pages if needed (such as flight boarding tickets).

I had to take two bags to fill me up! Poor quality and choice for a conference of this cost.