If you do know what Twitter is then you may have heard about the Twestival. They were and are networking events held in various cities like San Francisco, New York, and Vancouver. Click here to read what it is all about.
I attended the one in Vancouver on Thursday February 12th. My first impression was, "this looks very unorganized," and it didn't get much better then that. There was only one person collecting tickets and he had no information about what was in store. He pretty much let us loose to mingle amongst ourselves, which seemed more like a speed dating event then it did a social networking event.
However, I did meet some interesting people who all came to the Twestival for different reasons.
One person I met really put the illusiveness of the Twestival in perspective.
The event clearly stated that the price of the ticket went to charity, Charity Water, that is.
Apparently, the ticket sales (and a lousy 6% of bar sales) went to a company (or something) that built water wells in Africa.
This interesting person I met, named Sunny, worked for a water drilling company that goes to developing nations and drill water wells for them. Sunny told me that he found out about the event in the newspaper and he wanted to come and network with someone from Charity Water or from another non-profit. Unfortunately, that did not happen. When I finally did inquire about what Charity Water was,
"They, like, build wells in Africa," is what the person selling raffle tickets said.
Sunny informed me that "building wells in Africa," is not a sufficient answer for a few reasons.
1) Different regions in Africa require different tools, therefore different costs.
2) There are several countries in Africa that are highly unstable, therefore many companies are unable to do any relief work there because of the hostile environment (meaning, people that need help the most are left behind).
3) The average price to build ONE well ranges anywhere between $20,000-$100,000 to build depending on the physical geography, the cost of materials, labour, etc.
These are thing that should have been told to us at the event, or at least made available to those intereseted.
Not only was NO One there from Charity Water, but no one even knew what Charity Water did. There was no explanation about how they were connected, or even how Twestival was connected with Twitter. All-in-all, I did meet some interesting people, but I was not impressed with the event for these reasons:
- Very unorganized: No explanation to what the Twestival was, no explanation to what Charity Water was, and no explanation to their connection.
- No one explained Twitter's role in the event, is it a twitter event, a twestival event? I still don't know.
- No one seemed to be working there, it was very hard to find anyone who knew anything about the event.
- The only people that were available were the extremely persistent servers who were so desperate to make sales they basically stalked their customers. Plus, the restaurant (Elixer) and the hotel (Opus) seemed annoyed to host the event.
I don't want to place too much blame on servers, this is merely a side note. Oh, and just a disclaimer, I was once a server in a bar so I totally understand the pressure to sell drinks and make good tips. But sometimes, no means no.
On a scale from one to five, I give the whole event a 1.5. I didn't find out anything new but I did meet a couple people who made the time pass pleasently. Wish I could have said the same thing about the manager of Elixer, what a jerk.
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