The Power BI Shootout is a competition where a number of contestants each gives a live 10 minute Power BI demo in front of an audience. The demo can be awesome M code, magic DAX and/or spectacular Visuals. The goal is to make the most impression and thereby winning the votes from the audience and a judge committee.
The concept was first introduced at the Data and BI Data Summit in Dublin in April 2018 under the title “Visualisation Shootout!” with Markus Ehrenmüller-Jensen (@MEhrenmueller) as the host and James Dales (@jamesdales) winning the competition. He presented his own very very impressive Icon Map custom visual. It was a really fun session with a lot of energy, but it lacked some interaction with the audience, as there was only votes from the judge committee. I copied and “optimized” the concept and then organized the first “real” Power BI Shootout as part of the Community Night at Intelligence Cloud Conference in Copenhagen in May 2018. Chris Webb took a very clear victory with his “Talking to the death” theater performance involving various noise and light effects. Next up was the Power BI World Tour in Copenhagen in September 2018, where the Shootout was the final session of the conference. After being second at the Intelligence Cloud Conference, Erik Svensen (@donsvensen) took the victory. The judge committee this time was three PMs from Microsoft (Adam Saxton, Kasper de Jonge and Saswata Acharya).
Tomorrow April 9th 2019 we will hold the third Shootout – again in Copenhagen and one more time as part of the Community Night at Intelligence Cloud Conference. We have Jan Mulkens (@JanMulkens), Markus Ehrenmüller-Jensen (@MEhrenmueller), Reza Rad (@Rad_Reza) and Kristoffer West (@KristofferWest) as the contestants. Marco Russo (@marcorus), Christian Wade (@_christianWade) and Lars Andersen as the judges and finally we have Matthew Roche (@SQLAllFather) as the host.
The four contestants will be judged in these categories:
- Innovative use of features.
- Fun factor – can you make the audience laugh?
- Wow effect – blown away!
- Simple, yet powerful.
After all the contestants have been on stage., the audience voting is collected with a simple Kahoot mobile quiz. One question per category where the audience can vote on their favorite between the four contestants. The votes are subsequently converted to 3, 2, 1 and 0 point. While the audience voting takes place the judges agree on their votes – again 3, 2, 1 and 0 point in each category.
The votes are announced in the format of the Eurovision Song Contest. Technical its a Power BI dashboard with a streaming dataset where the votes magical gets updated and finally the winner is found and crowned
