Humbled To Be Apart Of The First IgniteNOLA

Posted by Chris on Jan 29, 2010 in Blog, Featured, Technology | 1 comment

The first ever IgniteNOLA is coming to New Orleans on Feb. 1st and I couldn’t be more excited, nervous, and humbled to be apart of it.  The event gets people who are passionate about a topic, any topic and gives them only 5 minutes and 20 slides to explain what they love to an audience.  At first I thought it was crazy!  How can you sum up your passion in five minutes?  But at IgniteNOLA it’s all about enlightening people with knowledge but making it quick.

This type of event is nothing new.  Its been done before in Portland, Seattle, and even Paris and now its coming to New Orleans.  The company that is sponsoring the event, Webtrends is based in Portland and they need some locals to plan and organize the event.  That’s where Adele, Ernie, and I come into the picture.  Our task:  Get speakers who were innovators in the community, create a buzz for people to come, and plan one of the best events of the year.

I’m so proud to be one of the co-planners for IgniteNOLA and to be able to say “Yes, we were the first!”  We plan on having between 250-300 people, it will be held at the beautiful Roosevelt Hotel, and it’s the hottest ticket in town as we are sold out and people are still trying to get tickets.  The Gambit even wrote about us and everybody’s talking about it.

You know when you plan something and you reach that point of hoping its a hit?  Hoping that its lives up to the hype around it?  Yea I got that feeling in the pit of my stomach and it won’t go away until Feb. 2

So again, I couldn’t be more proud of the IgniteNOLA team, couldn’t be more thankful to WebTrends for everything that its done, and couldn’t be more humbled to be apart of the first one.