{"id":363,"date":"2006-09-14T12:59:04","date_gmt":"2006-09-14T19:59:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/wp\/?p=363"},"modified":"2006-09-14T12:59:04","modified_gmt":"2006-09-14T19:59:04","slug":"sap-teched-2006-the-sdn-clubhouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2006\/09\/14\/sap-teched-2006-the-sdn-clubhouse\/","title":{"rendered":"SAP TechEd 2006: The SDN Clubhouse"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/cote\/243266976\/\" title=\"Photo Sharing\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/static.flickr.com\/95\/243266976_ea9d9af505.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" alt=\"Lazy Shot of the SDN Clubhouse\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Vendor-based developers communities are often hard to crack. The problem is that there&#8217;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 <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Abap\">SAP&#8217;s ABAP<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s really just an explanation of why I&#8217;m not incredibly familer, expierience-wise, with the SAP developer community. But, due to time and attention <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sdn.sap.com\/irj\/sdn\/weblogs?blog=\/pub\/u\/13\">Mark Finnern<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sdn.sap.com\/irj\/sdn\/weblogs?blog=\/pub\/u\/55615\">Craig Cmehil<\/a> have lavished me, I&#8217;ve built up a good gut feel for what&#8217;s going here. As I was telling #redmonk regular <a href=\"http:\/\/www.foomonkey.com\/blog\/\">foomonkey<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There&#8217;s an espresso machine (free!) in the club-house. This is even better than what&#8217;s in the press-room. As Joel might say, rock-stars don&#8217;t drink Maxwell, they drink espresso.<\/li>\n<li>Large TV&#8217;s keep cycling through the pictorial profiles &#8220;top SDN contributors&#8221; (there&#8217;s a point tracking system), both SAP employees and non-SAP employees. Craig&#8217;s of course is one of the funnier: his tagline is, &#8220;was such a great contributor that we hired him.&#8221; Community members also get little pins for things like &#8220;#1 Scripter&#8221; to attach to their badge lanyards.<\/li>\n<li>Along one wall are a series of demo-pods. These pods are manned by SAP folks &#8212; I&#8217;m guess, largely professional service\/pre-sales types &#8212; 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 &#8212; from a business perspective, moot &#8212; but it matters.<\/li>\n<li>Along another wall, there are tables, couches, and other chill-out spots <i>with power strips and network<\/i>. As someone who&#8217;s always looking for a place other than the press room to plugin and hangout (or &#8220;work&#8221; as some call it), this is awesome. Even to this day and age, conferences I&#8217;ve been too don&#8217;t cater to the need for power and &#8216;net connections.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>All of this adds up to boosting, instead of changing, what&#8217;s commonly called &#8220;the best part of conferences&#8221;: 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 latt&eacute;&#8217;s comfy chairs, and a whole gamut of folks.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;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&#8217;m wrapping up this post to go check out a short demo of RadRails. As I just over-heard someone saying, &#8220;there&#8217;s a lot of blog activity&#8230;the tone seems to be &#8216;who knew?'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So, yeah, that&#8217;s a bit <a href=\"http:\/\/globelogger.com\/item.php?id=780\">softball for those monitoring pitching-style<\/a>. But, hey, I&#8217;m more impressed with the SDN Clubhouse and the more general manifestation of the SDN community that I&#8217;m experiencing here.<\/p>\n<p><b>Disclaimer:<\/b> SAP is paying for T&amp;E.<\/p>\n<p><!-- technorati tags start --><\/p>\n<p>Tags: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/developers\" rel=\"tag\">developers<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/sap\" rel=\"tag\">sap<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/sapteched2006\" rel=\"tag\">sapteched2006<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/community\" rel=\"tag\">community<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/tag\/stallgeruch\" rel=\"tag\">stallgeruch<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- technorati tags end --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vendor-based developers communities are often hard to crack. The problem is that there&#8217;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&#8217;s ABAP. That&#8217;s really just an explanation of why I&#8217;m not incredibly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-conferences","category-enterprise-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}