I’ve been a fan of the folks at Gestalt IT for a while now. I follow them on Twitter, I read the stuff they post, and I’ve always followed their Tech Field Day events with great interest.

If you’re not familiar with these events, I’ll give a brief idea here: these events bring together a group of presenters from various innovation IT product vendors and give them an audience of delegates to present to and receive frank feedback from — in the spirit of furthering open discussion. These delegates are chosen from independent bloggers and thought leaders in the particular Field Day’s topic area (Storage, Network, Virtualization, etc.).

The idea is to create a better forum for open knowledge-sharing in the technical community. The vendors get the benefit of engagement with and feedback from the delegates. The delegates get the benefit of early access to information, contacts with the vendor experts, and (hopefully) an increased audience. The intent is to cause more informative and better nuanced open discussions and knowledge sharing within the technical community at large.

All that said, I am humbled, excited, and completely thrilled to have been selected as a delegate for the upcoming Storage Field Day 7 (SFD7) event, which will be occurring 11-13 March 2015. I was actually invited to be a delegate for SFD6, but was unable to make it work (the activities of my day-job — and our customers — come first). I’m really happy  to be able to make it work this time.

The vendor presenters look interesting, too. My company (Accunet Solutions) sells at least one of them. I’m looking forward to what they have to present.

I’m also excited that I know most of the other delegates. Some I’ve actually met in-person before, but the rest I know from online. It will be great to be in the same room with them.

Expect blog posts about my SFD7 experiences. You’ll recognize them by the disclaimer paragraph at the beginning. (The vendor sponsors of the Tech Field Day events fund the delegates travel, hotel, and meals. Delegates aren’t required — or even asked — to blog about the presentations in return (although it’s certainly welcomed), but I think it’s worth being up-front about things like that.)