The Moth

Planning for Tech Ed 2007 has started. As one of the largest dev conferences, in each timeslot there is a lot of choice and attendees sometimes make the wrong choice (and then score the session badly of course because it wasn't what they wanted). This is a genuine problem with technical events and is not specific to Tech Ed.

Dave is looking for ideas on how to improve the session descriptions and has some radical propositions for changes. Go give him your feedback.

In my opinion, no amount of shortcuts is going to tell me what the session is going to be like other than the abstract. I really don't understand why people don't read the abstracts carefully before going into a session. If everybody read the 7 line paragraph and made their decision based on that, then we could work on speakers writing accurate abstracts. As an example consider my session description here. After the session, one of the delegates came up to me and said, "I enjoyed your session but was a little disappointed as I was expecting you to cover what was coming in Orcas for Vista development". At first I was baffled why he would think that, but then I guessed what happened: the guy read the title and nothing else. Again, please read my abstract and see if it was not clear what the session was about. There is an argument here for better titles, but how can you capture a 75' session in 7 words?

If you are one of the delegates that do not read abstracts and just turns up at sessions based on the title alone, let us know why and maybe tell us what is it we can do to incentivise you to read those abstracts.