MCT Summit 2009 Brazil – Community in Action
A couple of years ago, my team organized an MCT Summit in Brazil—and we haven’t been back since.
It hasn’t been for a lack of trying, but for one reason (limited enrollments) or another (limited budgets), we haven’t been able to make the event fly since our first visit.
Enter MCT/MCP/MVP Emilio Mansur and the very active MCT Brasil user group, and everything changed.
Here’s Emilio’s inspiring report from the just-completed MCT Summit 2009:
The MCT Summit 2009 in Brazil was the most successful event I organized in my life.
We were [originally] planning to have about 50 people in the event.
I’m leader of a User Group called “MCT Brasil” with about 200 MCTs. I was working only with them to divulge the event. In the beginning we had very few people registered. We heard bad things like “why you are wasting time and energy in this event? It will fail”. But the number of people that believed in the dream started to grow.
After 50 registered MCTs, we started to consider that the event will really happen and started to work even more motivated inviting more MCTs in Brazil.
Brazil is a big and expensive country. We created a website and started to put information about cheap hotels and announcements of some promos we had from air companies. The "official" website is www.mctsummit.com.br
The event was this weekend. We had more than 100 MCTs from many parts of the country. MCTs were really motivated due to the fact that they had the feeling that they’re making history and they understand that each one was a piece of the event as a whole.
Some speakers were MS employees and some were MVPs and MCTs. All of them were really fantastic.
We took a lot of pictures, recorded some videos (I’ll make subtitles for you), shared ideas and experiences. Some MCTs had dreams came true just because they are in the Microsoft building, talking to Microsoft employees.
For me, as a Microsoft vendor for UGSS (User Group Support Service), it was one the best opportunities I could have to meet a good number of User Group Leaders and a fabulous number of speakers since I was talking with the best trainers in the world.
I invited all MCTs to be speakers in User Group events and I had some minutes to talk about the support associations for User Groups (Culminis, Ineta and PASS), and of course, I had a lot of positive conversations with a dozen of UG Leaders.
A Windows Live Group was created to be the central point for pictures and videos: http://mctbrasil.groups.live.com/
Feel free to join us and take a look in the pictures.
Closing notes:
- we had more than 50 new members in MCT Brasil User Group
- more than 100 MCTs in the event
- MCTs from US and Chile!!
- Courseware Library: less than 5 MCTs heard about it. Now I think you'll receive more content from Brazil
- Some MCTs said to me that this event was better than TechEd Brazil!
Thank you for all of you who had any kind of involvement (even a positive thinking) in this event!
Obrigado to you, Emilio, and to all of the MCTs and local Microsoft staff who made this event happen. It’s exciting and inspiring to see what this community is capable of when we work together!
