NYS Forum IT Greening Work Group
Meeting Minutes

5/21/2009 9:00 a.m.

The IT Greening Work Group met at NYSERDA headquarters at 17 Columbia Circle, Albany at 9:00 a.m. May 21, 2009. In attendance were: Susan Andrews, Rebecca Buchner, Christian Grieco, Barry Pardee, and Peter Hilton. Taking part by phone were Gina Smith and Carter Yepsen.

The second annual IT Greening conference was held on April 30. 362 people registered to attend and there were 219 attendees, setting the Forum record for the highest no-show rate. A survey was sent to those registrants who did not attend and the prevailing reason given for not attending was work-related issues.

Comments on the conference were distributed with the agenda and these were discussed. In addition to those comments it was suggested that devoting the morning to keynotes may dissuade people who are interested in getting to the sessions. Alternatives mentioned included having only one keynote or having one keynote in the morning and one in the afternoon.

It was brought up again that some companies' presentations were not as vendor neutral as they should have been. Next year we want to target neutral vendors and SME's. More case studies should be sought out and companies that present may be able to bring customers willing to act as case studies but not everyone is willing to share their information. For next year we will probably want to specify that we are looking for SMEs in the call for presenters.

Alternatives to a single one day conference were discussed including:
multiple half-day sessions
webinars
regional conferences.

If we are going to have a one-day conference next year we need to start the preparations for that soon so we could start figuring out how to do marketing, start arranging for keynotes, look for session presenters earlier, etc. To help decide on a format, for the next meeting we should try to find examples of possible case studies and examples of people who would be good presenters for webinars.

The next meeting is scheduled for Thursday June 18 at 10:00 at the NYSERDA offices. Usually, meetings are planned for the second Thursday of each month at 9:00 so please take special note of the change for the June meeting.