How To Do A Conference ID Badge Correctly
So I am attending the FDG 2009 conference this week. I signed in and got my conference materials tonight at the hotel. As with most conferences there is a lanyard with your conference ID badge on it. First good sign is that ones name is on both sides. These badges always get turned around and people can never see your name. Having the name on both sides is something obvious to many people I talk to but few conferences do it. I’m only seen it at Microsoft events as far as I can remember. Humm. OK to be fair I think the print should be a little larger but its not bad.
Anyway, one of the other large hard to carry things one usually gets at a tech conference is a copy of the proceedings. It’s got all the papers and the other information the speakers submitted in one (often very large) bound book of paper. Not at FDG though! Nope. Built into a clasp in the lanyard is a small (240+ megabytes) USB flash drive with all the papers on it. Yep. Soft copy in a reusable USB drive. Smaller, less fragile and more reusable than a CD/DVD disk. Is this the way of the future? I sure hope so.
FDG 2009 is the Foundations of Digital Games conference and yes it is on a cruise ship again this year. Not next year from what I hear. It’s growing too big. Still going to be a great academic/technical conference.