First of all I believe this conference was a great success. I had a blast, and everyone I spoke to had a great time too. That means a lot to me, that we were able to run this huge conference with only a few minor hiccups (very few of which were visible).
Let’s talk numbers. At least 147 people attended this conference. That’s based on registrations minus cancellations and people who never picked up their name tag. There were at least a few more walk-ins – one of the benefits of doing this on a college campus with a lively TCG club. We had 26 sessions with 23 unique presentations, including both first time, repeat, and veteran presenters. We raised the collective level of the judge program by 8: 7 new L1s were certified, and one judge, Andrew Blizzard, passed his L2 test.
I’d like to thank a number of people who contributed to making that happen, but before I do any of that, I need to recognize those who have come before. The Northeast last few conferences have also been quite large, especially last year’s conferences in Philadelphia and Amherst. The techniques that people like Joe Hughto, CJ Stambaugh
, and Paul Baranay
developed while organizing those conferences are the techniques that I’ve stolen, refined, and hope to pass on to whoever comes next. Each of these conferences involves a lot of work, but they would be absolutely unachievable without all of the techniques that previous organizers have developed.
Now, the people who made this one happen. First, The original proposal is credited to Ian Marcellana, Dan Huber
, and Chris Strachan
who approached me with his idea at the Philadelphia judge conference. We talked about it over a few months, and decided after the Amherst conference to make an official proposal. Paul Baranay
signed on at this point as a co-organizer with Ian and myself, and Shawn Doherty
gave his approval. Throughout the process we also got a lot of advice and tools from Joe Hughto
. Another Stevens student, Matt Lagarenne
, was instrumental in some of the technical prep, especially the streaming setup, and in securing Wi-Fi access for our attendees. Four Room Leads – Brogan King
, Sam Nathanson
, Nate Lawrence
, and Matt Braddock
– helped to keep their rooms running on time and supported their presenters. Two judges – James Eveland
and Joshua Gang
– prepared and tested a number of candidates for Level 1. John Brian McCarthy assisted with photographing. Rick Salamin
, in addition to providing the printed judge name tags, provided some other admin assistance during the day. Another person of note was Jenn Dery
, who, despite being from a different region, and not being responsible for testing, took the initiative to donate some packs of Judge card sleeves for all the new L1s. This made for a nice token of congratulations.
One piece of criticism we saw in the feedback forms was about the multiple tracks: “there wasn’t a time machine so I could attend them all”. Well, anonymous attendee, that’s where you’re wrong! Over the next week, I will be editing the recordings of the talks and uploading the slides and the videos to somewhere. The videos will go to YouTube, and I’m still thinking about where to host the slides. The stream archive will be available here, as soon as YouTube finishes processing it. Regardless, check back and we’ll link to the individual talks as well. The second project for the next few weeks is to get all the paper feedback forms typed up, anonymize all the feedback, and get it to the presenters.
We hope to use that to make our future conferences better, and we’ll be talking internally about how to do that. If you have any feedback for us that didn’t make it into the form, you can feel free to send us an email at nejudgeconference@gmail.com. It will be shared with the organizers, the RC, and future conference organizers.
Anyway, we could not be more happy about how the conference went, and I’m glad we had the Room Leads helping out and keeping all of the technology in line. I’m going to be staring at Adobe Premiere Pro for the next couple hours, but we’ll be back with some more info on the other side of that!