Another great BPM conference: as with last year, I was impressed with the quality of the papers and the amount of interesting research going on.
The logistics here have also been excellent: everything well organized and executed, including someone in a “BPM2009 team” shirt meeting a group of us at the bus stop the first day to take us to the registration. The student volunteers ran the logistics on campus, including everything from staffing the coffee breaks to excellent signage everywhere we went. I haven’t discussed my usual conference complaint, wifi, since I’m on a university campus and the wifi rocks. It would be nice to have a few more power points around, but with my netbook’s 6-hour battery life, that’s much less of an issue than it used to be; since today is a short day, I didn’t even bring along a power cable.
This is primarily an academic conference, taking place on a university campus, which is much different than the usual commercial conference. Most attendees are staying in or near the historic city center, and the campus is a bit outside the center, but they provide us with a bus pass so that we can take advantage of the excellent transit system: easy to navigate even if you don’t speak German.
We had a very corporate-style reception dinner Monday night at BellaVista, a fancy rooftop restaurant with a great view of the cathedral; upscale food, and alcohol still flowing at 1am when I left, and last night we had the conference dinner at Stadthaus; also great food and wine. These dinner events were funded by the contributions of the conference sponsors: BizAgi, IBM, Metastorm, IDS Scheer and inubit. During the day at the university, however, we had lunch in the student cafeteria, which is really quite terrible. Short of catering in something else, this is the only real alternative considering our distance from town; maybe what they saved on lunch went into the bar tab at the two dinners.
Next year the conference moves to North America for the first time, where it will be hosted by Stevens Institute in Hoboken, New Jersey on September 13-16. It’s already on my calendar.