Hi folks,

We are in Las Vegas this week for the TechMecca conference and I sit hear in my hotel room getting ready for day 2.

The conference, for us thus far, has been great. Running into alot of familiar faces and meeting many new ones. Sometimes when we setup a booth at these conferences it can be a bit of a beating sitting around your booth and only talking to a person every 10 minutes but this one has been non-stop and fun! I’m here with my Dad and Mom who are helping out with the booth and Dad helped one of our partners with a session yesterday morning which he did great. I went to a couple of sessions yesterday that were pretty good. One was about ‘What every banking CEO needs to know about Information Security’ and the other was about ‘Mobile Banking.’ Both were pretty high level but considering the audience, was probably the right move. I also did my presentation on the Web and the video (if it turned out well enough) will be available online in the next couple days.

Anyway, just wanted to post about Day 1 for our readers. After the nice things the TechMecca folks had to say about my session they asked me to join in another moderated panel session today about ‘FI to FI’ collaboration. Should be fun!

We try to have some fun at the Garland Group when the guys are around and Friday’s are time for our ongoing MSPT (mandatory spontaneous PIG tournament). We all really suck but it’s fun.

UPDATE: I totally got owned this week, Heath took home the Cup. Have a good weekend!

So ever since Mark and I got back from BarCampBankSeattle and discovered what a ‘BarCamp’ is all about I have been wanting to do something similar within our company. To have a creative/idea session of sorts… We were finally able to most of us in the office, Roz called in from New Mexico via video Skype, and have our first internal barcamp of sorts yesterday.

First off, a little background, Barcamps are defined as:

an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants

So despite our limited experience and no major plan for the meeting we decided to try it ourselves. We wanted it to be a very open, creative space so we carved out a couple of hours and brought in lunch and off we went!

The limited plan we DID have went like this:

- 2 hours session
- 15 minute per topic
- Whoever comes up with the topic starts the conversation
- Come hungry!

So I was initially thinking it might be hard to figure out topics to discuss, but boy was I wrong, people starting writing and yelling ideas out and we just started writing everything down. We honed it in to 9 topics (but based on our time we had to trim it down to 7, we’re chatty I guess)

7 Meeting Topics

1. E-Reviews
2. Spreadsheet Standards
3. New Hire Process
4. Reporting
5. Benefits / Perks – Company Retreat – Office Space
6. Marketing
7. Banktastic.com

Couple of the guys got real fancy and started filling out a ‘Mind Map’ for the meetings, heres some fuzzy pics of there handy work.

We went through each of these topics in pretty good detail with some topics probably needing more time but we tried to stay on task. Asking everyone’s opinions of how it went afterwards it seemed the consensus was that it was a good idea and when is the next one? I’m hoping that we have these at least every 2-3 months and give everyone a chance to have say or buy-in with where our company is heading. Only possible improvements we could all see for ourselves was maybe lengthier sessions per topic, and to make sure Gary doesn’t write on the white board with a permanent marker. (Sorry Gary, couldn’t resist!)

I am probably beginning to sound like a broken record but we really do have a great group of people and I’m thankful they want to be apart of the growing of our company.