Noel (@noelportugal), Raymond (@yuhuaxie), Mark (@mvilrokx) and I traveled to sunny Hollywood, Florida last week to attend Kscope15 (#kscope15), the annual conference of the Oracle Development Tools User Group (@odtug).
Check out some highlights of our week.
If you read here, you probably know that this year, Noel had cooked up something new and different for the conference, a scavenger hunt.
This year was my fourth Kscope, and as we have in past years, we planned to do something fun. At the end of Kscope14, Monty Latiolais (@monty_odtug), the President of the ODTUG Board of Directors, approached us to collaborate on something cool for Kscope15.
We didn’t know what exactly, but we all wanted to do something new, something fun, something befitting of Kscope, which is always a great conference. So, we spent the next few months chatting with Crystal (@crystal_walton), Lauren (@lprezby) and Danny (@dbcapoeira) intermittently, developing ideas.
We eventually settled on a scavenger hunt, which would allow attendees to experience all the best parts of the conference, almost like a guided tour.
Once we had a list of tasks, Noel developed the game, and with Mark and Raymond pitching in, they built it over the course of a few months. Tasks were completed one of three ways, by checking in to a Raspberry Pi station via NFC, by staff confirmation, and by tweeting a picture or video with the right hashtags.
We arrived in Hollywood unsure of how many players we’d get. We didn’t do much promotion in advance, and we decided to limit the game to 500 players to ensure it didn’t get too crazy.
Over the first few days, we registered nearly 150 players, and of them, about 100 completed at least one task, both well above my conservative expectations.
During the conference, we had a core of about 10-20 dedicated players who made the game fun to watch. They jockeyed back and forth in the top spots, trolling each other on Twitter, and waiting to complete tasks to allow fleeting hope to the other players.
In the end, we had a tie that we had to break at the conference’s closing session. Here are the final standings:
- Justin Powell (@justincasefacts)
- Joe Aultman (@1708_396)
- Bjoern Rost (@brost)
- Peter Koutroubis (@PeterKoutroubis)
- Cory Dresher (@cdresche)
Congratulations winners, and thank you to everyone who played for making the game a success.
And finally an enormous thank you to ODTUG and the Kscope15 organizers for allowing us this opportunity. We’re already noodling ways to improve the game for Kscope16 in Chicago.
Stay tuned for other Kscope15 posts.
