VMworld Session Reject Club

VMworld Session Reject Club 1st RULE: You do talk about Reject Club.

Today VMware has sent out notifications to VMworld 2012 session submitters, with a yay or nay email. Of course, this sparked a lot of conversation on Twitter, and Scott Lowe published a blog post proposing a VMworld Unconference, and exploring several options:

1. A physical “unconference”
2. A virtual “unconference”
3. A series of 10-minute “flash talks” at VMworld 2012

I essence I agree with Scott, a combo of #2 and #3 would be great. #2 for people not attending VMworld, #3 for people attending, if VMware allows it.

I remember discussing this same topic with Mike Laverick during Tech Field Day #6 in Boston last year, and I´m glad to see several other people discussing the possibility of doing something along the lines of #2.

I really love seeing #3 being something that might actually happen, considering it´s something we discussed with Hal Rottenberg in vSoup #23: Better Late Than Never.

The idea wash´t just the flash talk, but also to get them recorded on VMware TV, and streamed live. That adds some additional merit to it, even if it´s only a 10 minute session.

Hopefully there will be enough interest in this, to actually make it happen. After all, the virtualization community lives and breathes content and idea sharing, this is just an extension of it.

Option #1 seems like a lot of effort, and might be very costly unless someone offers to sponsor the event itself, and even if that´s a possibility getting people to physically attend such a conference might prove very difficult.

A physical un-conference might be a good idea for those traveling regardless if their session was accepted or not, but for those unfortunate enough that their VMworld attendance was hinging on session approval, attending such an event seems improbable.

People are already having trouble convincing their management that attending VMworld is worth the cost, imagine trying to convince them that you need to go to a un-conference for “the rejects”?

Don´t get me wrong, I understand that there has to be a lot of rejected sessions and only a selected few gets selected. I believe that is fair, and my intention is not to criticize VMware for it. If anything, looking at the list of “rejects” it speaks volumes about the sessions that was indeed selected.

My congratulations goes out to everyone who got through the eye of the needle, and at the same time it´s very interesting to see that people who submitted rejected sessions still plan on making the most of it. Obviously there is a lot of good ideas out there, waiting to get exposed to the world.

Of course, a #v0dgeball game between those who got rejected and those who got accepted is a great idea too!