I put comments similar to yours on my Lotusphere end-of-conference survey every year. You know, the one that you have to submit as a ransom payment for your conference t-shirt. Why not a t-shirt AND a DVD with the presentation slides PLUS the Lotusphere video that they shoot every year with the attendees' interviews, etc. But no more black t-shirts. I thought the t-shirt design/color (white) last year was really nice.

Yes, or at least accessible on a website all year, or preferably forever until we move to another medium instead of the internet

Why a DVD? At the UKLUG this year we gave away the conference materials on a USB thumb drive and it was a great success.

And IBM's cost for a USB thumb drive to hold presentation PDFs can't be much more than the sandals we'll be getting in our welcome pack (or whatever it is they needed our shoe size for).

At EntwicklerCamp in Germany in February they gave us USB thumb drive with the presentations. Very nice USBs, I might add, and I appreciated it much more than a pair of sandals. So, yes, I'll amend that to say DVD or USB. Honestly, whatever they give us would be better than nothing.

USB Sticks for 6,000 Plus attendees? who then will whine because the sessions are not up to date or missing information? Just give us a link to a zip file on a site other than the Lotusphere Off-Line mess.

Think about what you are asking. I hate to be cynical, but IBM has trouble giving access to downloads of its core products to its customers on Partnerworld. Do you really think they can/will maintain links to a site as "non-essential" as this? I'd far rather have a copy of whatever I can.

Burning the presentations to some media storage medium closer to the event is better because many of the presentations can have last minute edits either by the presenter or IBM itself. However they distribute them, the two weeks past the event site closing is getting old, especially when you have to spend a long time creating a cross-index from session IDs to titles so that what you have is actually usable.

If they force a download, would it kill them to package in the ZIP files a PDF with a file index? (e.g. ID101 - "What's new in the Lotus Client version <x>"); then it would be searchable and save significant time looking for the correct file.

Or put them up on a Quickr place accessible right from a week before through to next Lotusphere....

you really want to put Quickr through that kind of load testing?;-)

Please not PDF. My computer doesn't have a program which can read PDF file format. I would prefer ODF or HTML, since it works on any computer. Quickr site would be good too, then I don't need any programs on my computer.

They can't use ODF because too many presenters object to the ease with which the content can be stolen. The could use HTML, but I think they have found PDF to be by far the most popular and accessible option which still offers some protection for the content.

@11 Mika - You do not have Acrobat Reader?

@13 - I don't. I use Foxit... :O

@11 - So if you don't have any programs on your computer, how can you read ODF or HTML?

This would be far better than my normal practice. For the folks back home, at the end of LS for the last couple of years, I've taken the customize Journal db that Mr. Langhinrichs and The Turtle Partnership provide ( { Link } ) and modify it to allow me to attach the presentations to. Then I individually attach them.

Hey, maybe we'll be getting those flash drives after all. It looks like the sandals are a no go. I just received this e-mail from Lotusphere registration:

"During your conference registration process, you were asked for your shoe
size. We wanted to inform you that a small change has been made to one of
our sponsorship deliverables and we will not be distributing
sandals/footwear at the Conference."

What's so hard about doing this? When I attended Lotus Developer 2007 from The View, every attendee got a cd with the pdf's of all sessions and democode bundled in a Notesdatabase.
Yes, it can be spread around. Yes, non-attendees can take a look at it. In practice, if you weren't in a session, it's often not that easy to pick it up without some context (so being there is necessary to get the most out of it).

I would add, the actual presentations themselves. They sell them for not much a fee. One would think that if they just added $20 to the Lotusphere admission price they could include it for everyone.

This would be a great sponsorship oppty - get someone to pay for the USBs and/or DVDs if cost is the issue.