Monday: September 13th, 2021

7am – Exhibit Hall open

• Matt Graney, our Operations and Sales Support Manager, and I met at the office bright and early to gather our conference materials and head into the convention center to set up our booth. When we first got there we had to check in for the conference and (bonus) we got our convention backpacks and accompanying gear for the week. We found our booth and immediately switched up the look. Rather than having one table with two chairs behind (not too inviting) we set two tables on either side of the booth with T.V. ‘s showing off our product lines as well as our new banners for Blyncsy to encourage all to come hear more about us.

8:30am – Opening General Session 

• The conference kicked off with an opening keynote from Bill Panos, director of the North Dakota Department of Transportation, and the new president of the Western Association of State Highway Transportation Officials or WASHTO. His speech focused around Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as the focus of the conference. With nearly $2 trillion being proposed for The American Jobs Plan it’s critical that we at Blyncsy go into the mindset of those using resources to support all communities. Innovative ways technology can be used to improve infrastructure are a large focus for our push around Blyncsy. How can we ensure all communities have access to safe and reliable travel?

1pm – Exhibitor Time

• With a break from speeches and breakout sessions all are encouraged to walk around the convention center and get to know more about the companies that are changing the way Departments of Transportation think and operate. We got many chances to talk to members of DOT’s from all WASHTO member states (Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming).

2:30 pm – Breakout sessions

• During breakout sessions I attended “Managing Infrastructure Assets in a PostPandemic Environment”. This session was quite informative and even spent the majority of the time asking members of DOT’s how they went about managing their workloads during and after the pandemic. All information that we at Blyncsy can take back and work into our development pipeline to ensure we are doing all we can to develop the correct features in Blyncsy that will enable our DOT users to better satisfy their job requirements.

5pm – Cocktail Hour

• Mark, our Chief Executive Officer, Matt, and I all attended the cocktail hour at the end of the day as another opportunity to discuss Blyncsy and hear about ways members of DOTs might require our machine learning models on top of crowd sourced images to simplify their workflows. This included drink tickets were just a nice plus.