90 Minds Community

This looks an awful lot like Sage Summit - right down to keynote speakers and pricing. I also heard that this conference is one of the main reasons that Sleeter sold out. Tough to compete against the publisher offering a conference at essentially the same time as your flagship event. http://www.intuit.com/company/press-room/press-releases/2015/Revolutionary_QuickBooks_Connect_Returns_in_November/

Your editorial sounds like it would it would be a bad idea for 90 Minds to compete with Summit. A 90 Minds customer event would obviously be different from a Sage event. Are you suggesting a move away from @PeterWolf's bad idea or stick with your good idea?

Does chik fila compete with KFC? Different slants on one view. A 90 Minds customer conference would be different than Sage Summit. If members see the value in it, they need to let the admin board know so it can get in motion. Or let's keep doing the same old same old (assuming it's still working for everyone?).

@PeterWolf I am interested in helping. I think taking a hard look at whether and how we could pull off a pilot users conference is a worthy investment of my time.

@BrianRice I still think including customers in a conference is an idea 90 Minds should pursue. The info on Intuit was more about why I had heard Sleeter sold their business (they are still actively running it). The Admin team has scheduled two days before Summit to discuss different ideas for the coming year. I know adding customers to a conference is one. We have retained Marty Rotblatt who is an association management expert to facilitate the discussion and keep us moving discussing important topics. Ultimately as a group we have members with different ideas about where the group should head. - Stay as-is --- pure Sage -- just keep plugging away on Socialcast as we do now - Expand into other products - Keep conference as-is - Expand conference to include non-members or customers - Types of member benefits we can offer - web presence, subcontracting, 90 Minds member brand etc One of the important decisions we need to make is -- Looking down the road 5 years - why does 90 Minds exist? - Are we a Socialcast/Q&A group that pools resources to answer each others questions - Do we exist to provide resources for members to run their business / diversify / etc - Are we a group that has an annual event (or two) - Who qualifies as membership I think we all sense that Sage is in a constant state of change and that will impact the product(s) we work with which will in return cause many of our members to change (add products, retire, merge, sell their customers). So long story short - stay tuned. We've been deliberately holding off on proposing some change until we can meet at Summit.

I'm an advocate of change but fully support deliberation. We are all appreciative of the work that the Admin Team puts in and, like @JerryNorman, I am individually open to lending a hand. From the perspective that I've taken to this point, I do think it is smart to look at an alternative-to and contrasting-style-of Summit end-user event. </standing by until the post-Summit returns have been evaluated>

I'm of the same mind as @JerryNorman and would like to contribute in any way I can to help make this happen.