Yesterday I hosted a small event in Diegem, Brussels. Paul Foster from the UK, Lori Grosland from Germany, Benjamin Gauthey from France, Barbora Zychova from the Czech Republic and me have put our minds together to discuss a few topics.
Benjamin gave a Microsoft Popfly demo and told us about his experiences and close contact with the developers. He gave us tips to do demos and mashups ourselves. You can expect a few experiments to appear on the blog here soon.
Paul explained how he reached out to communities and measured results in the UK, how to tie as many Live services as possible to a campaign or event, to maximize impact and to create a push towards the Live platform. He also talked about the Lego League which he is very enthusiastic about. Lego League introduces children around the world to the fun and experience of solving real-world problems by applying math, science, and technology.
I explained how Second Life works, what it is and what Microsoft is doing there.
I set up a demo-time for Media Center, by one of the local vendors. Joffrey Vaassen showed off the goodies and changes in the interface, the new satellite receiver, the things that were going to be included in the new release (NDA stuff, sorry). He explained us things about iptv and so on. During this session, everyone could ask questions about the integration, compatibility, differences with older versions… and so on. Pretty cool stuff is coming, I can tell you that :-)
The last hours Paul, Benjamin and I gave tips and tricks and best practices to Lori and Barbora. We explained about the role of EE, about commitments, about what to pay attention to, which aliases to subscribe to, why you should also set up an English blog next to the one you have in your local language… Lori and Barbora are pretty new to the role (newer than I am, at least) and they have a very interesting background. Barbora has been working as a presenter/journalist for the past 12 years, both for Australian as for a Czech television station called Prima. She had her own shows and everything. I think we can learn a lot from her experiences. Lori came from Adobe, and she has a pretty techy background… she loves developer tools and creating things, so I think she’ll be coming up with cool stuff to demo soon.
We decided we needed server space, so we would have a location where we, European EE’s could store presentations and demos so we would have an shared archive to tap from. We will, for each other, translate the presentations to English if they are in our own language, so they become portable and locally implementable, which could save a lot of work.
In the evening we had a team dinner at a cozy local restaurant next to the MS building, we had a great time, got to know each other and know about each other’s specialities. We got close enough to know that we could ask each other anything whenever help is needed, and that was exactly the purpose of this small summit. Yey.
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