Thoughts on the future of the SCNotty awards

[TomCenens]

Introduction

There were a lot of great comments in the blog “The SCNotty awards at SAP TechED Madrid 2011 - Announcing the winners” which helped me out to create this blog.

The SCNotty awards offer a fun way to introduce yourself to the SAP Community and they have been around for some time now. Co-hosting the SCNotty award show was a fun experience and it certainly was something creative and lucrative to do.

SCN 2.0 and the vision for the SCNotties

We all know the new SCN is coming soon and it will bring a brand new platform for the community members which will fuel the community even more than is already the case. With this new platform , new possibilities will come and that’s exactly where Jim Spath sees possibilities (ref blog comments The SCNotty awards at SAP TechED Madrid 2011 - Announcing the winners).

I don’t exactly know what his vision is but what I would like to see is that you can see all the videos created by a community member through that community members profile page and perhaps through a more centralized repository. Whether or not the videos can be stored at SAP is another question but if there is a proper integration with something like YouTube it could also work out fine.

This would mean community member can stack up small videos that introduce themselves or aspects of themselves and share them with other community members which makes it more easy to connect. It doesn’t always have to be very serious either because some aspects of a person are not related to business and that’s fine. We live in an age where you don’t have two identities, you have one identity and that identity flows through your own life as well as your work.

Sharing and tagging

What I would also love to see is the possibility to also share pictures and tag people (much like Facebook has that option). This way we can share pictures of SAP TechED or other SAP related events  or activities and find them back through a community members profile as well. It would also mean the content (video, pictures) would bounce into your stream of relevant content.

API

There is an idea on SAP Idea Place to open up SCN 2.0 and I think it’s a great idea, it’s also feasible although it will take some time for SAP to create the necessary ruling around what is possible and what is not since you don’t want to have people pulling down the community website through insane operations that abuse the API in some way. If the possibilities to do more around the SCNotties aren't there yet in SCN 2.0, the API can most likely offer a solution.

Put the SCNotties on the calendar!

I was missing the SCNotty awards event in my SAP TechED calendar. It would be really useful that community members can actually add the event in advance to their calender and by doing so they can be provided with the correct place, time and a reminder of the event.

Public area please

I also agree with the comment that Matthias Steiner made that the SCNotties should be hosted in a more public area at SAP TechED. This was something which didn’t seem to be possible at SAP TechED 2011 in Madrid and which made it more of a SAP Mentor get together than anything else. On top of that the room was located next to the executives lounge (they must have wondered where the rap beat was coming from during the show). Needless to say it wasn’t exactly the best location to get more people into the room.

We had actually first planned to go out and fetch attendees by going out dressed up as rappers and then perform in one of the halls using a megaphone. The group was then going to hand out SCN flags made out of chopsticks and SCN stickers to get the crowd to follow but that wasn't really allowed in the end (I wonder why because the idea was brilliant).

Broadcasting anyone?

What about placing a few screens here and there in the SAP TechED halls and place some SCNotty award entries in between other content or just loop SCNotty award entrieson those screens the whole day. That would grab more people's attention right? Well I guess that will probably take some time but it could happen, why not.

Community members stepping up

A few community members stepped up for which we are all grateful but most of them were already close friends of the SAPMentor wolfpack. Still they deserve all the credit for stepping up and creating art because their videos were just amazing. For next year I hope to see more community members step up and create something.

I do have to state that at some SAP TechED's (Bangalore for example) there were much more entries for the SCNotty awards compared to SAP TechED EMEA. It would be great to have as many entries at the next SAP TechED EMEA in 2012.

Question on being active on SCN

I have received a number of questions around being active on SCN, does it really add value and do you still do any work during the day so I decided to write a blog about putting yourself out there to answer some of those questions and to attempt to get more community members to check out the SCNotty awards and make them see the importance of participating.

Let's close this down in style

To close it down in style I want to share the rap lyrics that were created for the SCNotty awards at SAP TechED Madrid 2011:

We come from the bottom
We rise to the top
 
Come see the SCNotty show
This is the next stop

That's what we are here for
That's whats up
 
If you wanna know what it's all about
Lift your *** up and follow the crowd
 
I'm MC Gali and I'm MC Tom
together at TechED we are the bomb

Come down the red carpet and meet the stars
its the best show from here to Mars

Outro

Gali and me performed the rap twice and it never came out exactly like it was written but that's fine because we had so much fun performing that it will be something we will always remember and that's what matters.

It was a remarkable event, community members getting together to honor those who had stepped up and created a SCNotty award video entry. I look forward to the next chapter of the story of the SCNotty awards.