An idea born at the last OpenForce Europe became reality last week. The first ever European DNN Professionals conference was held. Conferences are not just a place to learn but also networking events. For those of us that are 100% in DNN the emphasis during the OpenForce events is on the latter. I don’t want to play down the value of the presentations, but the ‘hard core’ DNN group that is there is there to either present or to ‘hang out with the guys’ (where were the DNN gals by the way?).
So as we were ‘hanging out’ we discovered we all were a touch frustrated at the format of OpenForce. Most importantly we felt we did not have enough time to hang out together without the distractions of such a big event. Not just to chill but also to crack a couple of tough issues that were difficult to advance in the usual dislocated manner that we work. If you take the issue of content localization, for instance, there are many stakeholders and many different (commercial) solutions that each serve their own purpose. The main reason the issue does not advance is that it is hard to get everyone to listen to each other’s take on this and come to some sort of common denominator for an approach. This takes an awful lot of time if you do it in forums, chats and conference calls. Having the opportunity to tackle this in a workshop would be much more productive.
Conference Venue: Tête-de-Ran, Switzerland
Especially Philipp Becker (Portal Fabrik), Benjamin Hermann (ITM Consulting) and myself felt it was time to do something that would complement existing structures. And as skiing enthusiasts we also saw a good excuse to get together in the mountains and spend some downtime together on the slopes. So we set about creating a network called the European DotNetNuke Professionals which was to harvest those individuals in Europe that deal with DotNetNuke professionally. And one of the first goals of this network was to organize a live event that would contrast with OpenForce in that it would be for pro’s only, informal and geared towards workshops rather than dissemination of knowledge through presentations. This event took place from the 11th to the 13th of February, here in Tête-de-Ran where Bring2mind is based.
About 23 people attended the conference from Switzerland, Germany, France, Holland, Belgium, the UK, Austria and Spain. This is quite a decent Euro-mix for our try-out and exceeded our expectations. DNN Core team members present included Erik van Ballegoij, Sebastian Leupold and Vicenç Masanas. As you would expect, ‘localization’, or how the framework supports non-English speaking regions, was one of the more important areas of discussion. Most of the DNN players in this field were there and we were fortunate to have a number of people there that had a long track record making multilingual DNN sites. These people happen to be not very visible in the international DNN zone and it was great to have their input. Their experience was very valuable.
But the meeting was not limited to this or we might as well have called it the first ‘DNN content localization conference’. There were workshops on e-Commerce (which also struggles with US dominance in technical solutions) and marketing as well. The latter workshop focused on how we as a network can amplify what we do and can become more than the sum of the constituent parts.
As the conference drew to a close we presented our findings to each other, evaluated the event and discussed how to go from here. It was very encouraging to hear that most everyone’s expectations of the event were met and everyone found it a big success. The enthusiasm led to ambitious targets being set for the future. Whether these will all materialize remains to be seen. Certainly I felt that more had been accomplished in a few days of workshops than years of forum discussions and OpenForce events. Our network has been energized and we leave knowing each other a lot better. This builds trust and harmony and ultimately creates a better foundation for cooperation. Something that in Europe is always challenging due to language barriers.
The venue, as mentioned before, was Tête-de-Ran in Switzerland. This place is pretty remote and the amount of snow we’ve had this winter made it even more isolated than it already is. The hotel offered us just about the right size of accommodation for the event. We had 3 rooms at our disposal of which one was large enough to hold the whole group for plenary presentations.
As host I focused more on the ‘extracurricular’ activities. This included a nightly snowshoes hike (headlamps to guide us) over the mountains to a restaurant for a fondue and then back again. The fresh snow added to a magical experience. I have to make special mention of Vicenç who made a great effort to plow his way through an amount of snow he had never ever seen in his entire life (he repeated this every 10 minutes or so: “I’ve never seen so much snow in my life. Next time we go to Barcelona”). Kudos to all. It was very much an event with friends as well as them being ‘colleagues’ or sorts. And I hope we can do it again.
