Community done right...
I just heard about a great community event held in Croatia. For those of you wondering what you might do in your user group, you might be able to get a few ideas from this.
MSCommunity CodeCamp 2007 – Another INETA successful event!
Quick facts
- Date: 29.09.2007
- Venue: Microsoft offices, Zagreb, Croatia
- Attendees: 60 (attendees traveled in from Slovenia, Bosnia and several towns from Croatia: Split, Osijek, Rijeka, Dubrovnik…)
- Sessions: 7
- Speakers: 7 (5 MVP’s, 2 newly promoted community speakers)
- Event duration: 10h during one day (Saturday)
- Contributors: 11
- Prizes: 25
Overview
Ending the summer, starting the new business season - MSCommunity under the hat of INETA and Microsoft had organized another great Code Camp event in Zagreb, Croatia!
With over 60 people in attendance, we’ve gathered both local Croatian and guest speakers from Slovenia on a nice Saturday day at Microsoft offices. During the 7 sessions in a lengthy 10 hour day our five MVP speakers and several guest speakers covered the recent technologies, architecture and development topics.
Speakers such as Tomislav Bronzin, Dejan Sarka, Miha Markič, Dean Vitner and Marko Čulo made this day really special and provided us with top quality content in a form of great sessions and some more than interesting discussions! Along with our MVP’s one of our goals this year was also to promote new speakers – a goal which we’ve reached successfully by enrolling two new great speakers which in turns made this event even better with their perfectly prepared sessions!
Judging by the feedback from the more than interested community, this was one of the best community events in Croatia, with some attendees even commenting that it had the best content that a community event in Croatia has ever seen! We’ve really proud that the community recognized our effort and responded in a such great number of attendees - thinking it’s a Saturday sunny day, and Croatia is not a big country, having some 60 visitors drive in from Dubrovnik, Split, Rijeka, Osijek and other cities was really impressing!
Organizing the event this year was made easier by having great support from our contributors - companies and associations such as Microsoft, INETA, Telerik, JetBrains, SourceGear, RedGate, NETMedia, LLBLGen Pro, DevExpress, CodeSmithTools and Algebra which had donated both the funds to organize the event and rich prizes in the form of swag and software licenses – note that at the end of the event we’ve organized a rich raffle game in which we gave away some 25 product licenses to the lucky attendees.
For the next year plans are to capitalize on the efforts done this year, to write several documents covering most important procedures, check lists and such items which will help us and other communities to organize a Code Camp even on a higher level and even with less “snags”!
Along with the organization plans, for the next Code Camp we hope to again include regional communities (Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria …) to make this event even more enjoyable!
Here are some of the key people involved: -
