Conferences or Meetups

[sundermannc]

Hello!

A little over a year ago, I posted a topic wondering about Meetups or Conferences. I only got one response (which I used that advice to go to Google Cloud Next this past April!)  However, I know this community has grown since that time, so I thought I'd post my question again.  So, here I am, asking again, same message:

Back in December of 2016, I was part of one of the many iterations of Google communities called Cloud Connect. They had a meetup in Sunnyvale, California at the Google Tech Corners campus.  I attended this, and was there with other K12 and Higher Ed Google Admins.  The networking was great, the sessions were informative...  And I stayed an extra day and rented a mountain bike, so that was pretty great too.

Does anyone know if anything like this exists these days?  This was obviously in the BC era (Before COVID), so I'm wondering what kinds of these things exist these days. I have some professional development money that I'd like to use to travel to a conference of some sort, and something like this could certainly be worth my time again.

Alternatively...  Do any of you know of any other worthwhile Google Meetups/Conferences that happen anywhere in the country?  Bonus points if it's somewhere south in the winter months. lol

[llennon]

We used to put on an admin conference in the Wisconsin Dells. Covid kind of put the skids to that. I have often thought about reviving it. Wish I had the confidence in "in pserson" events any more. Any thoughts?

[sundermannc]

I think what was meaningful to me about the 2016 meetup was that it was physically at Google headquarters, where we literally got to mingle with Googlers...  And they weren't just Googlers, they were K-12 SPECIFIC GOOGLERS.  We got to see and hear from people on the product teams, and we were able to give meaningful feedback directly to them, as well as see unreleased features that were coming within 6 months and give feedback about them.

Maybe those kind of events just don't exist anymore in a post COVID world where people work from home more, and maybe Tech Corners and the Google Headquarters has simply changed where they don't host events like this. Or maybe the event needs to be tagged onto a broader industry-based event like Google NEXT.

I've been encouraged to check out a couple Ed Tech conferences, 
FETC - Florida Ed Tech https://www.fetc.org/ and
TCEA - Texas Ed Tech https://convention.tcea.org/
But those are clearly education focused, rather than "tech" focused, though they do have some tech threads.

In reality, I'm not even quite sure what kind of event or sessions I'm looking for.  Google NEXT was great, but was heavily developer focused. Of course, it's great to "get out of town" for a while, but if I'm going to spend the time away from my desk (and family...), I want to make sure it's meaningful and useful to me.

[icrew]

For me, I’ve not been to Next since COVID. I’m not sure if I’ll go back—it’s so very huge, and it increasingly feels like a GCP conference with a tiny bit of Workspace tacked on as a complete afterthought…which is just about exactly the inverse of my job priorities….

[alexgrutza]

Brainstorm is still on generally speaking, maybe not Google specific, been to it I think once or twice back in 2013-2015 somewhere around there. 

[icrew]

Well, for higher ed, there’s always the Educause annual conference—see https://events.educause.edu/annual-conference

[Bill_Gibson]

fwiw, I had a good experience with BrainStorm for EDU technical folks.
Not explicitly Google topics.
Not heavily vendor influenced, and not tech coach focused.
https://brainstormk20.com/