IT Unconference 2018 Draws Lively In-Person and Remote Crowd

Over 420 Stanford IT professionals came together in person, as well as over 50 online, for the eighth annual IT Unconference (ITUC).

This year, there were 39 proposed topics, ranging from “Cloud Security,” “Become an IT Champion,” “S-Reality COP, Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality,” to “How to Build UX Into Your Team’s Process.”

To view all topics and notes from each session, visit the Sessions page on the IT Unconference website. You can also check out photos from the day in the IT Unconference 2018 album (photo credit: Stacy Lee).

New bar set with 10 Lightning Talks

The event also set a new record with 10 Lightning Talks, five-minute presentations where presenters quickly shared their ideas and passions about a specific topic.

This year’s lightning talks included:

• Slack more than that, more than chat (Greg Mercer, senior software engineer, Graduate School of Business)
• IDEAL IT: IDEAL for the IT Community at Stanford (Dani Aivazian, organizational effectiveness specialist, University IT)
• Rebuilding the Service Desk Call Center with AWS Connect (Andrew Blaner, Brandon Paris, Teresa Vasquez, School of Medicine - Information Resource and Technology)
• Authority Manager and Tableau integration (Jim Chen, business system analyst, University Registrar)
• Happy Birthday Distributed and Remote workers CoP (Shannon Santanocito, system and data analyst, Computer Resource Consulting and Tori Hu, project management specialist, Humanities and Sciences Dean’s Office)
• Demystifying “Design Thinking”: A jargon free guide to focusing on your users (Megan Miller, service design manager, Improvement, Analytics & Innovation Services)
• Saas-ational: Automation and Machine Learning without code (Brad Immanuel, senior director, End User Experience)
• Integrating React.js with Stanford SSO (William Morrow, research analytics consultant, Graduate School of Business)
• Data Practitioners COP (Doug Hoppe, organizational insight analyst, HR solutions)
• Get Personal! Insights into Stanford Students (Beth McCullough, director of learning environment integration, Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning)

The virtual experience

Over 50 remote participants — 20 more than last year — attended the Unconference sessions via Zoom video conferencing.

Stanford Web Services Project Manager Anna Watt shared her experience as a remote participant and session facilitator.

“I'm really grateful for the team of Unconference organizers who worked hard to get Zoom participation for the second year in a row,” Anna said. “This year, I was able to facilitate a session as a speaker entirely remotely with some help from two people also facilitating in the room. As a remote worker, it was an incredible experience to be able to participate in that way!”

Learn more

To learn more about the sessions, lightning talks and review session notes, visit the 2018 Stanford IT Unconference website.