What Should Conferences Look Like in 2022?

Last year our President and Founder, Alex Marcy, provoked some drama on LinkedIn around the Ignition Community Conference’s Build-A-Thon.

Wanting to see some changes this year after a lot of growth at Corso, especially focused on building an inclusive, diverse, and empowering company, we brainstormed a couple of ideas for Inductive’s leadership earlier in the year. Now we figured it was time to codify what conferences should look like in 2022, and how vendors like Inductive Automation can buck the overall trend in the SCADA software marketplace where a bunch of middle-aged white dudes call all the shots and get all of the attention.

To be clear this is not us lobbying to be involved, simply to promote the idea that there are a lot of opportunities to do things differently this year, and would hope that the collective of Ignition community members could have even more exciting and interesting ideas than we are proposing below.

Tap Into the COMMUNITY

For ICC, which LITERALLY has COMMUNITY in the name, the event should grow well beyond a couple of Premier Integrators. Based on everything we have heard so far it isn’t going to simply be the defending champion from last year against the newest Top Selling Integrator of the year, but don’t know what it looks like yet.

With seemingly thousands of integration partners, and hundreds if not thousands of customers, we think it would be a cool idea to assemble some cross functional teams. Make it more about the community than just 2 dudes in silly costumes up on the stage.

This means lean on the end users and integrators to find ACTUAL problems to solve. Given that most manufacturing projects are under strict NDAs, an easy win would be to find some government sponsored groups like Wastewater treatment plants, the USDA, or even USGS to find some problems they need solved. For example, there are some interesting watershed management and monitoring projects out there that could leverage Ignition’s capabilities with MQTT to provide powerful IoT Solutions that could be directly applied to many industries.

This could have been easily accomplished with the Ignition Cross Industry Collective, although without any events in the past couple years or in the future it seems like this group is completely defunct which is sad to see.

Get some integrators, some end users, and some folks from IA to build the solutions, in the open, and release them on the Ignition Exchange. Solving actual problems will give the Exchange Resources a lot more value and help market it as a valuable resource for anyone who does anything with Ignition.

Make it about the PROCESS

Clearly the work that is done in the actual hour of the Build-A-Thon is not from scratch during the event. It is assembling pieces of projects that many folks have spent months developing, usually with a host of people on the team doing it. This is a HUGELY wasted marketing opportunity.

Instead of a couple of bizarre movie references featuring the same couple faces for 8-12 weeks, show more of the people developing the projects, how they get the work done, and how they work together. Build people’s emotional investment in the problems that are being solved and let the story arc play out over the time between now and ICC 2022.

Go through the project from idea, through design, all the way to implementation. Show how people actually use Ignition in the real world. Go through the design process and show how decisions are made, tradeoffs are weighed, and the struggles everyone encounters. It would make for a heck of an entertaining reality show.

Give people insight into how both teams operate. Show them how people think, come up with different ways to tackle the same problem, and see how different skillsets, backgrounds and worldviews influence the end result of a project.

This will give the entire community a lot of information about the myriad ways to use Ignition and how you can approach the same problem from dozens of angles, each with its own engineering costs, benefits, limitations, and results.

Focus on the EXCHANGE

Yes the Top 100 Integrator List is a competition.

Outside of that competition is not a huge part of the Ignition community. It has always been more of a collaborative ecosystem where we can work with other integrators exchanging tips and tricks to help everyone end up in a better place.

Contrast that with the fact the Build-A-Thon is set up as a competition and focuses only on 2 people which is the exact opposite of how any Ignition project is successful.

The exchange of information, ideas, and experience is the real power of Ignition and the community around it. Building more opportunity for this collaboration seems to be part of the reason people go to ICC every year. It is definitely part of the reason we have invested time into creating resources for the Ignition Exchange, participated in the Cross Industry Collective, and have poured our heart and souls into the Ignition community for over a decade.

Do What is DIFFICULT

If developing software was easy, everyone would do it. Yes, anyone can learn to write code, do projects, and be successful. It requires drive, perseverance, and the ability to solve problems.

One of the mantras at Corso Systems is to “Say Yes and Figure It Out”. This means we won’t back down from a challenge, even if we haven’t done it before. Expanding our comfort zones has helped us get to where we are, capable of working with some of the leading companies in the world, doing projects well beyond what many other integrators, some with over 10x the number of employees can accomplish.

Yes, doing a 2 person competition is easy. It is easy to pick the top selling integrators, give them free rein to pick their representative, and not ask the questions about how those people represent our industry as a whole. It is easy to come up with a cheesy marketing gimmick like making a parody of movies from the 1980’s, not questioning the representation of anyone involved with what characters they dress up as, and not using the most heavily marketed part of the conference to help bring our industry into the current year as a way to bring more diversity into our ranks.

Yes, it is difficult to make a different choice than the rest of the industry, make a statement, and stand up for what is right.

It feels even more difficult to make the same choice as everyone else and not change the world when there is ample opportunity to make it better for everyone.