As a new Traker, I expected that in time I would be going to conferences and presenting what ID your IP and IP Vault are to people new to Traklight, but I didn’t expect for it to be so soon. Nonetheless, duty called for me to be present. Knowing that I usually psych myself out way too much and still am able to perform most of the time, I thought it’ll be fine. Plus, I thought it’d be cool to see what other people are creating and innovating (I wonder how many times people said “innovating†that day).
Going in to set up for the day at the AZ Innovation Summit was interesting because I haven’t seen the large Traklight poster before and it was a 2-person effort to put it all the way up. Soon after I finished meticulously arranging the stickers into a smiley face and the pens into a T shape, I went around the hall looking at other exhibitors’s booths, of which I noticed many were based around STEM education. Many of the attendees were also educators or worked at an educational/academic institution.
Initially this threw me off because Traklight was mostly indirectly related to the companies in the large hall, though I could still find a connection if I tried. Traklight would be useful to the exhibitors by getting them informed about their own intellectual property. Just by telling them about the mere existence of ID your IP and the IP Vault, we’ve struck a chord with them and reminded them about the actions they should take towards protecting their IP. Intellectual property isn’t necessarily discussed casually (unless you’re a Traker!) so just this moment was worth it for the exhibitors and attendees we spoke to.
The ebb and flow of the festival definitely depended upon there being a presentation or not. Many people were there to hear Logan LaPlante talk about hackschooling, the Innovation Challenge winners’ panel discussion, and other interesting attractions at the exhibitor’s booths (and let’s be real, free & delicious breakfast food is a great attraction).
Overall I talked to people I would have never really gotten the chance to talk to, and the fact that they were even interested was amazing because IP isn’t always a hot topic. I have to give a round of applause for another Traker here, Emily, because she really had her speech down the whole time, while I presented it well about half the time. I realized that in order to talk to anyone about Traklight, I had to find a way to connect what their background is, their concerns, their views on IP, and such. This was a good first time experience for me.
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