Reflections on Scottish Summit 2023

~ sfennah

Did you make it to Scottish Summit 2023, on tour at UA92 in Manchester on 5th August?

It was another successful event from the Scottish Summit team and I was proud to be a speaker and volunteer this year and am looking forward to being involved with the organising of the 2024 event, in Aberdeen. As ever HUGE thanks to the organisers, Matt Beard, Zoe Wilson, Gemma Adair, Luke Evans, Carl Cookson, Alexio Tonderai Chandiwana, Iain Connolly and Mark Christie!

This event had too many things to highlight to fit into a traditional social media post, so you are getting a blog from me instead. It was great to meet so many people, both new faces and people I’d met before. If I didn’t get a change to say ‘hi’, sorry! I did manage to fit in many chats and a couple of video interviews as well as my session.

Collage showing (from top left going clockwise) the UA92 Entry, me presenting my session (photo credit to Thomas Stensitzki), selfie with the Welcome to Scottish Summit slide, Kevin McDonnell and his “thanks to the partners, families, cats, dogs and axolotls that let you come today” slide, with Vesa Nopanen and Michal Ziemba (photo credit Michal Ziemba), UA92 in the rain.

Location
Scottish Summit in Manchester presented so much fun confusing people with a common response being, “Sorry, did you say Manchester? Why Manchester? It’s not in Scotland!” Though, it’ll be nice to be back in Scotland next year. And if that wasn’t enough of a location curveball for you, why not try a mobile conference in 2024.

New Speakers
It was amazing to see 5 of the new speakers taking to the stage being graduates from the New Community Speaker event I ran jointly with Zoe Wilson and Luke Evans back in May at UA92 in Manchester. Congratulations to Nicholas Chang, Gary Raife, Laiyba Mahmood, Onyinye Madubuko, Katie McMillan and Adedeji Awolesi. If you are interested in joining them, check out our next workshop as part of South Coast Summit on 13th October.

Viva Explorers
It was great to see the Viva Explorers continuing to share their expertise with Viva sessions. There were also more explorers present speaking on other topics, just showcasing how the Viva Explorers really do come from many diverse technology and business backgrounds. If you are interested in Viva do not miss the Viva Days virtual event on August 12th 2023 organised by Viva Explorers from India.

My Session Slides
Whether you made it to my session or not, here is a link to the slides, you can find older presentations from conferences via my linktr.ee
SF_SecureMeetingsTeamsPremium.pptx

Next Year
To keep up to date with news from the event, do follow Scottish Summit on socials or via the web site

Up Next
Next for me is Metaverse One, and doing some paid work, it can’t be all conferences!

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