Thingmonk Thank Yous.

So Thingmonk 2017 went very well indeed. Delegates were happy, speakers were happy, and sponsors were happy too. Some thank yous are definitely in order.

This year my colleague Fintan Ryan took on primary responsibility for curating Thingmonk and acted as compère throughout. He did a bang up job. The program was excellent, and Fintan hosted proceedings with charm. Meanwhile I did an excellent job… of getting out of the way.

Our production and catering manager, Saffron Governor, my smarter, more talented sister, again excelled herself. Her background in theatre production and high-end hospitality really paid off again. Rag and Bone Coffee did a stellar job of keeping the community caffeinated for 2 days.. Our lunchtime caterers – Fennec & Parsley and Arepa & Co made delicious food to sustain us.

At the bar Rob Lowe has helped us out at the last few RedMonk events and has now progressed from barkeep to drinks curator and planner. We went hyperlocal this time, with some excellent beverages from Hackney Brewery and Redchurch Brewery.

The evening social event and curry, sponsored by Pivotal, was lovely. Shoreditch Spicery do a great job, and who knew onion bhaji went so well with Pimms? Folks chatted into the night.

Running an event with high production values like Thingmonk requires significant resources. Thanks to our sponsors for making it so. IBM took the lead, with Microsoft Azure, the aforementioned Pivotal and Red Hat all in major sponsor slots. Confluent covered the coffee. InfluxDB sponsored video (watch this space folks, they’re coming soon and the talks were great!). OpenSensors.io and YLD joined us with local community sponsorships.

Day One we partnered with the Eclipse Foundation for a morning of talks about the organisation’s work fostering IoT projects. While the Apache Software Foundation has done a great job of attracting Big Data and NoSQL projects, Eclipse looks like the home of IoT standardisation.

This time around we took our diversity scholarship program to a new level, which makes me very proud. We couldn’t have done it without Salesforce sponsorship. Bybreen Samuels did an amazing job of making our scholars feel welcome.

Tomorrow I will be publishing on the speakers and their talks.

The photo above is Dr Lucy Rogers, Maker and friend of RedMonk.