I just hit jackpot!
I never thought it would be so simple but it has happened...
Let's start at the beginning.
We have organized several events now and one question or remark that kept popping up from the attendees was that there was a lack of .Net awareness. They are totally right, up until this point we haven't seen anything that even mentioned the name .Net. And that's strange because I see the attendees ask for these topics but when receiving the session proposals, in all this time I have never seen anything pass by that would discuss .Net, so it is not like I'm deliberately NOT putting any .Net stuff on the conference agenda. I do have a background in Java / Ruby so perhaps you could 'sabotage' ;-)
As a company with an open mind, open for all cultures, I do embrace these .Net questions I received. I think about two weeks ago I took a first initiative, I needed to find an easier way to get feedback or ideas from the attendees or people who were interested in joining. You could set up a forum, but then I would end up reading posts all day long, manually keeping track of what people were suggesting or what I thought they were suggesting... nightmare!
A while ago I read about the 90-9-1 rule which talks about participation inequality. I'll come back to this 90-9-1 rule in another post but the main idea behind is that 90% of the people are lurkers / voyeurs and no would not commit to doing anything, 9% would from time to time give it some thought and commit a little bit but for them it is really low priority, than there is the 1%, those are the folks you need to kick start a community, to drive the community. So what I needed was a tool that supported this culture of 90-9-1, meet agileminds.ideascale.com/. This web 2.0 community portal will allow creators to add ideas quickly and give the lurkers an easy overview of what is happening within the community and lower the participation barrier by giving them the ability to vote for an idea by a single click. There are lots of studies on this behavior, it is truly applicable to anything in the world they say, it just gets very visible when dealing with tangible content on the internet. But more on that in later post!
So I asked the attendees from our last event - Agile Acceptance Testing Days - to give the community portal a try. Immediately you could see the 90-9-1 rule in action :-) Anyway, I did help destiny a bit by already suggesting a topic called 'More .Net awareness', it got about 9 votes out of the 85 people who joined us at the Agile Acceptance Testing Days. So that's actually not a bad sign because looking at the profiles of the attendees there were not that many people with a .Net background.
Alright, that gave me an initial idea, now let's do something with that. Yesterday I gave Microsoft Belgium a call because I want to sit down with them and discuss the idea of an Agile .Net Conference. As everyone, contacting Microsoft Belgium for the first time it got confronted with several phone menus after which I ended up with those phone operators who can only redirect you... or that I thought. Instead of getting me in touch with someone from marketing or business development they asked me for all my contact details.Next they would sent me an email, that email would contain a link to a form, I needed to fill in that form, someone from Microsoft would read it and decide who was the right person to get back to me. So I did, I gave all my details, waited 15 minutes before the email came in, opened the web form which and started to fill it in.
Where is the 'I just want to have a talk to see if we can do a cool conference' button? You could ask many cool things at Microsoft but NOT what I wanted. so ok, I gave it a spin and took the one that seemed to be somewhere in the neighborhood of what I wanted. Had to go true a couple of boring disclaimers and so on...
Then it happened!
I knew Microsoft had a lot of money but that it would be so easy for me to let Microsoft buy AGILEMinds, I had no idea!
There it is, the select option that would change my life
It was tempting but no thanks :-)
Anyway, I'll keep you posted on the Agile .Net story and I do hope to hear from Microsoft soon.
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