Back to the mothership...
So my readers (Hi kids!) may have noticed that I've not posted a single thing for weeks. I've been on a grand tour of Europe, trying to get a better understanding of the state of the community space in Europe. Over the last few weeks I've visited Barcelona (for TechEd Dev/IT Pro), Moscow, Paris, Reading and Amsterdam, and have met with both the local Microsoft community people and more importantly some of the user group leaders within each country. I've learned a lot, had many things confirmed and also had a few surprises - for example it appears that the way the Developer and IT Pro communities work is very different to each other in France - not unexpected - but that the same communities work exactly the other way round in Germany. Over the next couple of weeks I'll post on some of the key factors relating to the community, and I'll also talk about some of the plans I have,
As a starting point, one of the things we are working with Culminis to do is to find local volunteers to become a countries contact point. These people will get to work very closely with the local Microsoft community folk, and will be drawn from the Culminis user group leaders in that country. If this sounds like you, contact Culminis and let them know you might be interested.
By the way, I've just started to use Windows Live Writer to post blog entries. It's a free download from live.com, and from what I can see so far it's very adaptable to different blog engines, makes writing a post as easy as writing an email, and works offline (I'm currently sat in Amsterdam airport without a wireless connection, and will actually publish this when I get back to Seattle). Oh - a complete aside - I saw a billboard on the way into the airport which says that Schiphol itself employs over 50,000 people. Wow! Microsoft only employs about 80,000 worldwide!
