How Can Chicagoland Microsoft Developers Improve Their Community?
One thing that I’ve always groused about is that all the “cool” conferences are on the coasts, almost never in the Midwest much less Chicago. My suspicion is that the people who typically organize these conventions are from the coasts themselves and have a strong aversion to spending time in flyover-land. I’ve only anecdotal evidence of this, mostly from the dearth of conventions and conferences held here in the Midwest, but also from a few tweets that I exchanged with @codinghorror and @spolsky.
The StackOverflow team had just announced their conventions with multiple dates on the coast but none in-between. I shot off a tweet to express my frustration to @codinghorror and @spolsky without really expecting a response. (tweet)
@codinghorror @spolsky Just curious, 2 DevDays on West Coast but completely ignore Midwest. Why do conventions hate Chicago?
About an hour later and much to my surprise I receive this response from @codinghorror (tweet):
@just3ws correction, conventions do not hate Chicaco, @spolsky hates Chicago
Then about a day later I got this response from @spolsky (tweet):
@just3ws just basic economics, I’m afraid. Chicago has very expensive hotels & conf. centers and relatively few programmers
It’s not surprising that a New Yorker would look down his nose at Chicago, that’s pretty much to be expected. Although I do understand his statement regarding the expense of running a convention here in Chicago. We used to have allot of cool geek conventions but they’ve pretty much all relocated to more convention friendly and more cost effective climes (GenCon being one of the bigger ones). Inter-city Rivalry aside, Joel Spolsky is a savvy and intelligent entrepreneur and developer advocate. So I do think he had to at least consider Chicago as a potential site. Could he have been convinced to hold a StackOverflow convention here if maybe he was offered some form of sponsorship from Microsoft to alleviate some of the cost? Maybe, don’t know if he tried to reach out for some green loving from the Microsoft people. What bothers me though is the statement about insufficient programmers.
I don’t have hard numbers, only my observations at this point. Thinking back to various Microsoft and community events I’ve gone to over the past nine years there never seemed to be a shortage of attendees, ever. I don’t recall ever attending a seminar that wasn’t packed to the gills, nor a conference that didn’t have a bustling and vibrant attendance. The first Visual Studio launch event I attended had to be one of the more impressive gatherings I’ve ever been to, with thousands of developers filling the Navy Pier auditorium to see and hear about the new development product from Microsoft. Thousands, plural. The next two big Microsoft launch events, if I recall correctly were held at McCormick Place. Both of those had very impressive crowds of developers spread throughout a whole wing of the center. Those were free events, so the attendant crowds aren’t entirely surprising. But they do show one thing, there IS a community of developers that exists in Chicago that ARE interested in Microsoft technologies and are HUNGRY to learn and be exposed to new and interesting technologies. Even early paid seminars I attended that were held in Schaumburg to learn about ASP.NET and C#, running about $90ish for a day of presentations, held in a movie theatre were standing room only. Probably 2-300 or so developers in attendance for the sessions I attended.
Fast forward a few years and now we have grassroots user-groups that are hosting their own self-directed meetings and conferences. I try to regularly attend Chicago Alt.NET, Lake County .NET User Group, Rockford .NET User Group and the Chicago Architects Group (last one I’ve only attended one or two meetings). Each of those groups attracts in the neighborhood of 20-30 developers per month, with little overlap in attendance. So that means there are approximately 80-120 developers attending those user groups each month. I’m not counting the Chicago .NET User Group, which from what I’ve been told is in the neighborhood of 100 developers per month by itself [citation needed]. Then let’s looks at various other Microsoft technology groups, such as Chicago Sharepoint User Group, Azure User Group, Visual Studio Team System User Group. I have no numbers on those, but the fact that they exist is significant and noteworthy. [I'm not even counting non-Microsoft-oriented events held by ThoughtWorks or ACM, much less Ruby, Linux, etc. communities.]
These user-groups have spawned a few code camps as well, two that I’ve attended, Codeapalooza and Chicago Code Camp each drew in the neighborhood of 200-300 developers [citation needed] and were free, predominately word of mouth sessions, with extremely small budgets. Still, they were able to pull in developers, but only a small portion of the community that I saw at the Microsoft events.
What does this all mean? First, there’s a passionate group of software developers in Chicagoland who are motivated enough to try to fill the content gap for their chosen platform. Second, Microsoft has the capacity to fill an arena with local developers if they are so motivated. How do we get the chocolate (Microsoft’s clout) into the peanut-butter (communities passion)? That’s what I really want to know? How can we make Chicago a destination for developer content, not just a fly-over for other conventioneers?
I think if we as a community could come together to build a case for Microsoft to further invest through a variety of ways into the Chicagoland developer community that we could become the Microsoft hub outside of Redmond.
To help get the ball rolling and start the conversation, please join me on Twitter using the hashtag #ChiTellMSFT. And the corresponding forum http://chitellmsft.uservoice.com to submit and vote on ideas to help improve the community. Register on http://www.communitymegaphone.com to advertise your user-group and events. If you’re getting together informally, use http://nerddinner.com to organize your soiree. Lastly, if you know someone who works at Microsoft or has access to a Microsoft representative, ask them for advice on how to work with together to improve our home town developers community!
If folks have any questions about Community Megaphone, please let me know, either via the Feedback link on the site, or you can also contact me through my blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/gduthie/.
Community Megaphone is a word in progress, and there are lots of things we’re working on for the future, and we’re always open to suggestions on what we can improve.
Thanks!
Erm…make that *work* in progress.
Note to self…never comment before coffee.