As someone that has been hanging out in the SAP world for a good number of years now, it has been interesting to see the growth and expansion of the community. Look at SCN - what was started as a website has grown into a real world community. Nothing provides a better example of that than the explosion of SAP Community Days around the world.
Community Day Australia
This upcomming weekend (Sunday June 15th) I get the opportunity to participate in the latest SAP Community Day. This one will take place in Australia as part of the Mastering SAP Technologies Conference. So if you are already planning to attending the conference (which takes place at the Hotel Conrad - Gold Coast, Australia) be sure to join us at the Community Day. If you aren't attending in person, we will still have some opportunities for you to see what took place - but more on that in a minute.
Although Mark Finnnern won't be able to be in attendance for this particular Community Day, we wanted to keep close to the Unconference Spirt that Mark has implanted so well into the TechEd Community Days. So after a short kick off, we will go right into the Speed Networking that Mark is so famous for. This will give people a chance to get to know each other and hopefully spark some nice, on the spot Birds of a Feather session ideas.
Birds of a Feather
We also already have 3 Birds of a Feather sessions submitted via the WIKI. Check out the page here for more details. But don't worry, there is room for several more BOF. If you have an idea please add it to the WIKI. However we will have a whiteboard at the the Community Day so in the best spirit of Unconference we can add sessions right up until the last minute.
How you can join in (without having to fly to Australia)
Now we all obviously can't drop what we are doing and hop down to Australia for the weekend to join into the fun of the Community Day. However we don't want to leave out community members in other parts of the world. To that end I'm going to try a couple of different things to share the Community Day Australia experience with the world.
First I'm going to take plenty of pictures. I will get those pictures uploaded to Flickr just as soon as I can. You will be able to find them in the SDN and BPX Flickr Groups.
Next I will do my best to live blog the event via Twitter. Now given the stability of Twitter lately, the chances that the website will actually be up is not a given. But with a little luck, Twitter will hold out over the weekend. You can follow my twitter stream here. I will also start an EventTrack item for the Community Day once I arrive.
Finally, I was very impressed by the quality of the SAP Developer Challange Demo Jam 2008 Webcast from the developer challenge demo jam the other night. It has encouraged me to give Ustream a try. I'm going to bring my camera equipment and will try to setup something that can run unmanned as I will be busy participating in the day and not running the camera. Given the time difference to Australia and the fact that the event takes place on Sunday, I'm not sure how many viewers I will get. Then again, I'm not sure I can even get the thing running on site. So this avenue is probably the most questionable. If I can get everything setup and the quality of the stream is good, I will post the URL to this blog on Saturday or Sunday morning. At the least, I can record the video and post it at a later date.
Update: Sunday June 15th.
We will live stream the Community Day on Kyte.tv in the SDN Channel:
http://www.kyte.tv/ch/9638-sap-developer-network
