Things were dire. Perhaps not quite as dire as The Contrarian might argue, but suboptimal. Intending to lower the barriers to participation in a series of CommunityOne events, all of the tracks were housed under a single roof. A single roof over a cavernous, uncarpeted space mottled with round tables, plastic chairs and thin, futile sound barriers.
But you know what? RedMonkOne was – again – a success, in spite of some long odds. At least as I judge such things. Thunderous easy listening last year, air raid sirens and bullhorns this year, you just can’t keep the RedMonk community down.
Because the day really was about the community, not us. Whether it’s Ian Murdock, Mårten Mickos, and Neelan Choksi stopping by to talk about open source business models, Ted Leung leading a discussion on dynamic languages (yes, Python came up), Mike Pittaro building RESTful web services, Mik Kersten talking Eclipse and Mylyn, Danese Cooper on what it’s like working for big cos, James and others leading a session on corporate Twittering, we had an excellent slate of content and sessions – venue be damned (seriously).
If you don’t buy that, just look at the scene for the 5 PM RIA discussion, which featured representatives from Adobe, Sun, Google, and pretty much everyone else that has ever contemplated offering (or killing) an RIA platform.
A couple of the sessions have notes which, when the dust settles from the show, will be posted online, but for those that missed the day, well, you missed something solid. You also missed a couple of hundred dollars worth of free beers and vodka sodas here. (For the folks that got there right at 9 as originally requested, my apologies for being late: herding people is time consuming).
Given the success of the day, some thanks are in order. First, we’d like to thank Sun for the opportunity and the venue – problematic though it may have been. It speaks well of the firm, I think, that they afford us this venue to meet with all of you. Second, I’d like to thank our sponsors Atlassian, who not only made up a t-shirt that I would actually wear, they kicked in cash to cover said beers and vodka sodas. Third, I’d like to thank everyone who came in to speak at the conference; I know many of the folks involved had literally a 45 minute window to spare durating the day, and the fact that they’d take advantage of that to speak at our track is both flattering and humbling. Hugely appreciated.
But last, and most trite, we at RedMonk would like to thank each and every one of the folks that took the time to attend a session, participate in a discussion, and make the day a success irrespective of the numerous distractions of sound and people. It would have been easy to get discouraged by the setting and abandon the effort straight out of the gate, but all of you chose to make the best of it, and did you ever. I can’t speak for any of you, but that was, to me, a day well spent. Would that I had more of those.
So thanks to everyone involved, and we hope to be back next year to see you (and we’ll get a better venue, we promise).
