At Desert Code Camp this past Saturday, a bunch of community evangelists and community members got together (about 20) to talk about ways to improve the Arizona technology community. Here is a synopsis of what we talked about.
Desert Code Camp
For future Desert Code Camps, it would be nice to have a central place for the PowerPoint® slides and code samples. There are too many locations to get the content. In most cases, you will not know where to get the content unless you show up to the session.
In addition, at future code camps, attendees should receive a flyer or handout about the different users groups in the area plus upcoming events.
Meeting and Events
Announcements
One of the biggest problems we seem to have is getting the word out for meetings or events. There are a few reasons for this, multiple calendars, multiple technologies, and community evangelists that do not know other community evangelists outside of their discipline. There were three decisions that way made to hopefully alleviate this issue.
- The Google calendar at AZGroups.org would be used to display all technology / business events in the state. If you do not have access to this calendar contact Scott Cate or myself to arrange access.
- All event organizers will forward event information to at least 3 other community evangelist who will in turn forward the event information to 3 other community evangelist.
- We will look into the way the Arizona Tech Council handles this, they send out monthly emails.
- We will look into getting our events listed on the AZIPA mailing list.
Locations
We talked about possible locations of potential bigger future events and user group meetings. The following places were brought up as candidates.
For conferences, the Desert Willow Conference center (near the Buttes in Tempe). This also could potentially serve as a future location of Desert Code Camp.
For user group meetings, Boulders on Broadway was mentioned as good place for small user groups meetings (if you do not mind the occasional noise).
Increase Attendance
We talked about ways to increase attendance at user group meetings and events. Most of the attendees said we need to get quality speakers but could not come up with a way to attract quality speakers. We also talked about looking into ways of getting talented speakers to speaker at more events / meetings and share their vast knowledge.
As a side note, some one brought up recording events to make them available to people who are not able to attend. Most though that by having the events recorded would decrease the attendance.
Action Items
Although no one person was handed out any action items from the open forum there are a few action items that need to be done by all to keep the Arizona technology community growing.
- Constant communication between the community evangelists. I suggest a mailing of the community evangelist, or potentially a monthly or quarterly meeting of community evangelist like we had a Desert Code Camp.
- Evangelize you own events and the events of others.
- Potentially create a site that list the user groups (of all technologies in Arizona) that can be searched.
- Look into having “Unconferences” in between the Desert Code Camps, one quarter we have a code camp, the next quarter we have an unconference, the a code camp, etc.
Closing
In closing, I would like to thank the wide variety of attendees from a wide array of technologies and disciplines that attended. I also would like to commend everyone one that participated and shared their thoughts in an open, honest and respectably way.
If you have any comments and/or suggestions feel free to leave a comment or send me an email via the contact me page.
This Saturday, June 13th, 2009, is the next Desert Code Camp. While I am co teaching on session on “Write your first desktop .net app (or, Write you own Twitter Client for .net)” with Saul Mora, I am heading up two community based sessions. the first session is open to the “general public” and is titled “Open forum with Community Leaders”. The intend of this session is to provide an open forum between the community members of Phoenix and the community leaders of Phoenix. So if you are a community leader, or are attending Desert Code Camp, stop by the session and share you thoughts and feedback on the technology community in Phoenix. The second session is a “private invite only” session for the community leaders of ALL TECHNOLOGIES in the Phoenix area. In this session, I want to get the community leaders together to talk about ways we can improve the technology community in Phoenix. If you are interested in this session, please contact me jguadagno [ at ] sevdnug.org, I will forward you the room and time information once it is scheduled.