I bet some of you were wondering why I am not going to any events for the most part in June and July (aside from volunteering at SPS Chicago).  Well I basically have no life for the next 2 months.  We are approaching the 11th hour of SharePoint Saturday New York City.  The event is slated to have 350 to 400 attendees.  This is second year in a row I’ve helped run it with Jason Gallicchio.  It’s amazingly crazy how much effort this event requires versus Kansas City.  It’s literally 2x the volume of attendees, speakers, and sponsors plus don’t even get me started about volunteers.  So here is a bit of the break down…

We have 30 volunteers+ that Tasha Scott from the Hampton Roads Area will be managing the day of the event to do things like timing the speakers, handing out food, making sure people don’t walk into the event that did not sign up until we get a count for fire code, registering people, watching the sharpees, watching the prizes, making sure attendees get to the right place,  opening and closing the partition in the big room, moving chairs, moving furniture, etc…Then there is Jason, Greg, and I who will be making sure that the speakers, sponsors, and everything is going smoothly in the background.  We need to make sure that everything is setup properly and in the right spot.  We also need to make sure signs are printed, schedules are created, bags are stuffed with sponsor material.  Plus we need to send out emails to sponsors reminding them to send us the right information to post on the site for charity sessions, send us boxes with material to stuff bags, and we need to make sure that Michael Lotter gets there information for invoicing.  We also need to check that Michael has invoiced everyone and who has paid, because we can’t order anything for the event without money.  Once people have paid we need to setup food orders, speaker and volunteer dinners, buy prizes, buy bags, buy speakers/volunteer/organizer shirts, etc…During this process we need all the abstracts from speakers, all the bios, pictures, shirt sizes, and other items so we can create schedules and order items.  We also need to keep track of who is attending the dinner the night before for volunteers and speakers and make sure we don’t hit capacity.  Then there is attendee tracking and making sure that we don’t hit too many attendees.  We need to make sure that attendees know where to go and what to do.  We have to make all kinds of random supply lists during this process and keep on track with a variety of lists and emails plus conference calls.  All in all it’s a lot of work and I am trying to keep track of it all the top so that we don’t duplicate anything or miss anything.  So basically all in all if you don’t see me around for another month don’t worry I do exist.

Right now if you look at what I’m doing I am traveling every Monday morning and Thursday night back and forth to Washington DC from New Jersey.  Every night I am working on organizational stuff for SharePoint Saturday New York City.  Every Tuesday night we are running an event conference call.  Every weekend I am either with family or my boyfriend and cat trying hard not to touch the event.  So all my time is pretty much work, event, and family/boyfriend.  I have 0 bandwidth for anything in the community.  If you compound that with my severe allergy problems in DC and a doctor’s appointment every month plus a new med once a week I’m lucky I am still standing and walking.  So basically once July 30th hits hopefully Jason Gallicchio, Greg Hurlman, and myself will be able to breathe a little easier.  If I forget to do this thank you Greg and Jason.  Thank you Tom Daly.  Thank you Michael Lotter.  Thank you Tasha Scott.  Thank you Kevin Griffin.  Thank you all the volunteers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees who will and have made this event a success.  Hopefully, we have enough time until next year to regroup, recharge, and make the event grow bigger in a different venue.  Awesome job everyone we sole out within 3 days of registration and we still have several weeks to go.  Right now the waitlist is at 49 people with room to grow.  If you attend the event thank all these guys I mentioned above for making it possible.  It’s going to be awesome I know it but I probably won’t remember half of it due to the blur of things that we will all be taking care of the day of the event.  Catch you all in the end of July/Early August where I will attempt to post something useful and clever and possibly while wearing a fez.