Closer to home, The Data Power Hour rolls up in Leeds on 22nd Oct! I am a really proud of coming up with this concept, and when it was piloted in Manchester it got rave reviews. I wanted to come up with something different for the community other than the usual format of two speakers in a night. I also wanted this to coincide with the fact that Manchester had become PASS Chapter. So how does it work....

Well, there is a 1 hour session on a given topic as you would expect at most local events. In Leeds we will be looking at indexing. The second hour is the Power Hour itself. Here the attendees perform a 1 hour lab with mentoring from experienced user group attendees. This runs in small groups, in Manchester we had five groups of four people plus a mentor. We then finished the evening with a summary of what had been done and then asked each group to share what the key learning point of the evening.

I would be very happy to share the format with other Chapters/User Groups. Indeed, I am currently syncing up with James Rowland Jones to see if there is an opportunity to make use of the material across the PASS organisation. Just to be clear, PASS has not endorsed this in any way, I am working with James to see how this can scale to more Chapters Globally and be put in touch with the relevant people within the organisation

The type of feedback I received in Manchester was....

• "It was great to be able to put into practise the concepts of the first talk within the same event"
• "The mentors gave really good comments as to what was being done"
• "This is the most engaging user group we have had yet"

I can't stress enough the value that the mentors bring to this. I gets a number of Manchester Chapters attendees who always want to help more with the Chapter. The Power Hour provides the perfect opportunity to make use of enthusiastic Chapter attendees who want to help and share knowledge.

So I am looking forward to the second running of this in Leeds, and I will be reaching out to Chapter/User Group leaders in the UK and Europe to see if they will let this event run at their locations in 2014/15

So you heard the Data Power Hour here first!

And I hope it takes flight!

Thanks

Chris

http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/testas/archive/2014/09/26/the-data-power-hour-a-more-engaging-community-expereince.aspx