JonSpenceley

Working at FreshBooks means I get the chance to experience some pretty awesome events. Having attended MeshU last year, I decided to step it up a notch this year and volunteer for the main event – Mesh 2011.

The conference had some pretty amazing speakers lined up, but I was most looking forward to having the chance to work behind the scenes. I love event management, and all of the set-up that goes with it, so stuffing loot bags and setting up tables was definitely good times.

Once we had packed over 700 swag bags, fluffed 20 Fatboy Beanbags and made sure that all the folks in the Village were set up with everything they needed, we volunteers had the chance to attend any of the panels we wanted, and I took advantage of this whenever possible.

My highlights were:

• Gabe Zichermann’s Marketing Keynote on gamification was absolutely enthralling. He’s a great speaker, and hearing video games talked about as intelligent ways of encouraging users, and helping them satisfy product goals was completely worth it. I’ve been a gamer all my life, and I like to consider myself reasonably intelligent, so knowing that game principles can be worked into product design and delivery to enhance user experience is extremely gratifying.
• How to deal with a changing workforce, and how do companies drive collaboration and creative thinking? with Dan Debow, Laura Croucher & Charles Plant was extremely interesting, if only to help validate how we hire people at FreshBooks. Charles Plant said something along the lines of “Hire for attitude, train for skills,” and I could not agree more.
• How to Build and Nurture an Online Community with Zoë Siskos was just plain fun. I met Zoë at a bowling tournament (FreshBooks vs. Homestars) earlier in the year, and her talk was great. Full of awesome examples, and lots of audience input. Providing front-line support for her talk was part of my volunteer duties, and running the microphone around so the audience could participate was a good workout.

All in all, I learned a ton, met some amazing people, and got a Mesh 2011 Volunteer badge to proudly hang from my desk. Here’s some more visual highlights:

Tags: events, MESH, volunteering

This entry was posted on Monday, May 30th, 2011 at 6:52 am and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.