On the first day of MacIT, it’s traditional for the members of the advisory board to say what they’re looking forward to.  Arek Dreyer went first, and he cited the hallway track as the thing that he’s most looking forward to.  He’s right: even at a conference with the most amazing content, the hallway track is often one of the most useful tracks at a conference¹.  It’s a huge miss when conference organizers forget about the importance of the hallway track.

This afternoon, I got to be a part of the hallway track in action.  I was talking to another member of the advisory board and one of the MacIT speakers.  Someone came up to us, and asked what we knew about network security.  She referenced a question that she had asked during the security talk this morning.  None of us are network experts, nor are we security experts, but we’ve all picked up bits and pieces over the years.  She explained her situation as we looked at her error logs.

We came up with a plan of attack, both short-term to address the issue that she found, and long-term to address the likely root cause of the problem.  We talked about how to figure out what levers to pull within her organization to make it possible to do the long-term fixes.  We shared our own war stories about our own experiences with issues and figuring out exactly what dance is needed to get something done.  And we reassured her: yes, she really did have an issue, and yes, her issue is resolvable.

This is why I love the hallway track.  None of us had the complete answer.  Together, we were able to talk through her problem, brainstorm ideas for how to address it, and come up with what felt like the right way to address it in her environment with her team.  We worked together, came up with some potential solutions, and identified more resources that she can use back home when she doesn’t conveniently run into people in the hallway.  We all learned something in the process, and we helped out a member of our community.

That is the power of the hallway track.

I spent most of this morning on one of my tasks as a member of the MacIT advisory board: reviewing submissions.  It’s a hard task: there’s a lot of great submissions, and there’s not room for all of them.  Complicating matters is the need to select not only great individual sessions, but a group of sessions that will come together and somehow create a cohesive conference.

Work is ongoing, so those who submitted ideas will be notified in the coming weeks.  I hope to see all of you in Santa Clara, CA, on July 14-16.

Great advice from Sarah Mei about how to approach writing conference proposals, including this:

If you relentlessly focus on answering “Why?”, your proposal will get more interest, more attendees, and better reviews.

I especially like that she takes a real example and breaks down ways to improve it.  If you’re thinking about what you’ll submit to MacIT 2015, reading this will help you get into a frame of mind to create a great proposal.