Community Day took place on Monday September 8th 2008 (a day before TechEd kicks off), and it was my 2nd participation to this event. As I met a couple of friends for breakfast, I was pleased and surprised about the perceptible increase in the number of people present this year compared to last year.

Community Day Introduction

Mark Finnern (Chief Community Evangelist) jumpstarted the event with a harmonica solo improvisation - Dylan or Van Morrison touch Mark? ;-) check it out on YouTube. We soon attempted to imitate Mark as all attendees were given a harmonica, but we were definitely not as ready as Mark! We still had some fun with it for a couple of minutes...

Mark then introduced the Community Day schedule, and made a couple of comments regarding SAP community milestones / accomplishments:

• SDN and BPX members have broken the 2.5M contribution points (check the current total on the SAP SCN home page lower right corner). This means that 100K Euro will be donated to the U.N. World Food Programme (Thanks SAP)
• Continuous expansion of the SDN and BPX communities in terms of membership, quality of content, partnership, and external industry recognition

Since I had to prepare for my presentation (sorry Mark but my machine is kind of slow to boot these days), I left a bit before the end of Mark's introduction.

Presenting & Attending Sessions

I had the opportunity to co-present with Sean Doyle (SAP Labs - Advanced Prototyping & Development Lead) a session about Composition on Grails (CoG). The Venetian / Palazzo conference center being quite large, we first had to find the room we were scheduled to present (Thanks Aslan for all your help throughout the week)...

After a tricky laptop / projector setup, the session went well as we were able to describe the technology components (Groovy/Grails/CoG), and demonstrated how flexible the framework is for prototyping and building small / medium size applications.

Overall, we really enjoyed the opportunity to demonstrate the CoG framework, and discuss with attendees its capabilities.

I was able to attend other sessions presented throughout the day and engage with the different presenters on many topics (i.e. WebDynPro's future, BO Flash based dashboards, docupediA, Flex Data Services, etc.).
In general, it was difficult for other presenters to compete with the hands-on track that Thomas Jung, Rich Heilman, Dan McWeeney, and Ed Herrmann put together.
Kudos to them for preparing this dynamic and comprehensive track!

Jimmy Wales Q&A & Keynote

I really enjoyed Jimmy Wales Q&A session, and later his keynote.

Jimmy clearly described how an open collaborative process can actually foster interest and lead to an active community as Wikipedia demonstrates.
The guiding principles of his different endeavors could be summarized in the following terms:

• Openness and privacy for information and knowledge access
• Transparency of a clearly established collaborative process (i.e. information creation, review, publishing, editing, etc.)
• Quality of the product(s) created can be supported by a core team with specific focus, and ultimately by the extended Community

As a follower of the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) concept, I would recommend reading Brian Bischof's summary blog if you are interested in more details about Jimmy's keynote, or you can watch the replay of the keynote here.

Conclusion

This is now my 2nd Community Day participation, and it has been a great experience to meet many experts, community members, and also be able to present a session.

As a separate pre-conference event with many sessions directly produced by members of the community (kudos again to all the SAP Mentors), it definitely provides a more informal and direct information exchange forum than the TechEd conference can achieve with its 6,000+ attendance.

I want to thank Mark Finnern, Craig Cmehil, Marilyn Pratt, Aslan Noghre-kar, and the rest of the Community Evangelist team for planning, and managing this community-building event. It was exciting to meet new people involved in the SAP ecosystem, and to connect with many fellow SAP Mentors.

If you did not attend Community Day this year, there is always next year... In the meantime you can check out the videos of the event on YouTube!