I finally found the time to add all my community sessions to a public repo on GitHub, so that the slides is easily accessible for everyone in PDF format. It’s been quite a trip down memory lane, as the full list contains 88 sessions delivered in the last 12 years. I hope I found them all, but might have lost one or more presentations.
My first ever public session was about SQL Server Denali and Project Crescent (PowerView) on June 7th 2011 at the Danish SQL Server User Group. This was back in the days before Power BI as we know it today. My focus in my first speaking years was on PowerView, Power Pivot, BI in SharePoint, Excel Services and PerformancePoint Services. Most of the sessions was delivered at user groups in my home town Aarhus and then Copenhagen as second.
I have presented 20 sessions at Microsoft BI Professionals (MsBIP) – the community I founded in 2011. Most of them in the first years as I lacked a network to get other speakers engaged. This has thankfully changed a lot, and many of the speakers on MsBIP has afterwards got the MVP title. I was my self nominated a couple of times in the past 10 years, but had to wait until 2019 before I finally was welcomed into the MVP award program. At that point I had delivered 41 sessions, organized 60 community meetings and been at the board for many major conferences.
2019 was also the year my speaking really took of with 17 sessions at 10 different locations. My traveling this year was a little extreme with presentation in Ljubljana, Brussels, Mechelen, Utrecht, Atlanta, Amsterdam, Devon and Reykjavik. And of course also Aarhus and Copenhagen 😁
And then the pandemic hit us, which meant that most of my sessions in 2020 was online. A new experience that let me “visit” different user groups around the world. It was also the year where I started the Power BI Quiz and hosted 23 shows, that is not part of this statistics. I continued with additional 11 shows streamed on YouTube in 2021 before I extended the format to also bring it as a session to user groups and conferences.
My speaking engagement in 2021 and 2022 hasn’t really reached up to the highlight of 2019. Partly because the long run “online presentation style” isn’t so appealing and then I put a lot of energy into organizing the Power BI Next Step conference – giving others the possibility to speak. Later this year I have the big pleasure to present at the 15 years anniversary of dataMinds Connect and hope to also be selected to speak at other conferences.