Vendor-based developers communities are often hard to crack. The problem is that there's the high-entry fee of figuring out the proprietary technology, all the way from the purposes and layout of the of the system down to thing like custom languages, such as SAP's ABAP.
That's really just an explanation of why I'm not incredibly familer, expierience-wise, with the SAP developer community. But, due to time and attention Mark Finnern and Craig Cmehil have lavished me, I've built up a good gut feel for what's going here. As I was telling #redmonk regular foomonkey this just now, SDN seems like a well run community and, undoubtedly, the SDN club-house is a model for the conference presence. As a few examples:
There's an espresso machine (free!) in the club-house. This is even better than what's in the press-room. As Joel might say, rock-stars don't drink Maxwell, they drink espresso.
Large TV's keep cycling through the pictorial profiles "top SDN contributors" (there's a point tracking system), both SAP employees and non-SAP employees. Craig's of course is one of the funnier: his tagline is, "was such a great contributor that we hired him." Community members also get little pins for things like "#1 Scripter" to attach to their badge lanyards.
Along one wall are a series of demo-pods. These pods are manned by SAP folks -- I'm guess, largely professional service/pre-sales types -- that will talk to you on the myriad of SAP technologies. Usually, like at JavaOne, these are on the expo floor, which changes the dynamic into more of a salesy feel than a community feel. THe difference is subtle and -- from a business perspective, moot -- but it matters.
Along another wall, there are tables, couches, and other chill-out spots with power strips and network. As someone who's always looking for a place other than the press room to plugin and hangout (or "work" as some call it), this is awesome. Even to this day and age, conferences I've been too don't cater to the need for power and 'net connections.
All of this adds up to boosting, instead of changing, what's commonly called "the best part of conferences": talking with people in the hallway. That is, instead of having to grab people in the hallway, you can hangout in the SDN Clubhouse with free latté's comfy chairs, and a whole gamut of folks.
There's stil the tough nut to crack of the closed nature of the community that I opened with; on the other hand, as a slight fissure in that, I'm wrapping up this post to go check out a short demo of RadRails. As I just over-heard someone saying, "there's a lot of blog activity...the tone seems to be 'who knew?'"
So, yeah, that's a bit softball for those monitoring pitching-style. But, hey, I'm more impressed with the SDN Clubhouse and the more general manifestation of the SDN community that I'm experiencing here.
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