History of the DHITS Picnic

Around noon on Thursday, the final day of the inaugural Defense Health Information Technology Symposium (DHITS) in 2013, all the vendors and industry partners who had graciously provided a full week of evening networking events packed up and headed home. Since government sessions remained to the end of that day, this left most attendees lost and somewhat confused since there was no schedule of social events for the evening.

How to proceed?

The people divided into two camps: The first ventured back into Orlando - alone and without a plan. The second group was more frugal and decided instead to remain within the relative safety of the Caribe Royal compound. They pooled together all remaining rations they had squirreled away in their rooms and met at the base of one of the towers. As others walked by - they too were invited to join and brought what they had - and so began the DHITS Picnic.

Over the years the picnic has gown up somewhat, mainly in the form of (mild) sponsorship in order to provide food and most importantly, avoid cleanup duties. In general, the Picnic remains a largely unstructured event with no real agenda and follows the  guiding principle of, "just be cool".