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  • Post-mortem of Flash Platform Code Camp Wellington... 1
    Entry posted Sep 23 by TheRealAgentK, tagged Design, Development, Interactive Experience, Rich Internet Apps in Camp Blog public

    Before I start with this post-mortem post of New Zealand's first Flash Platform Code Camp, let me just take few seconds of your reading time to put this post in context. I'm Kai (@AgentK on Twitter) and together with Campbell (@campbell on Twitter) I run the Flex User Group in New Zealand. 

    Knowing John Koch from Adobe's community team, I toyed with the idea of running a Flash Camp in Wellington for quite a while and we started to take action earlier this year, looking into a September 2009 date.

    The event happened last Saturday (19/09/2009) and John asked me to write a post on how it went, lessons learnt and just in general to share some ideas. I wouldn't particularly think we've done everything right and/or we had a special and/or different camp, but I like to think that it went really well - overall.

    The community:

    In Wellington, we have a reasonably government-driven IT economy (we're the capital of NZ) - the other major field are rather boutique shops or small startups dealing with RIA, Web etc. User Group meetings in Wellington attract depending on speaker, topic and time of the year between 5 and 30 attendees.

    Setup:

    NZ'ers are not particularly keen on corporate-ish events. We rather have a nice carpet to sit on, good pizza and excellent espresso. With those constraints, a cinema or hotel etc. was not an option to go for as the venue. Other people might consider me insane, but I would have happily spent more money on a good coffee supply during the day than on a posh venue :-)

    That in mind, we went for a very informal venue and decided to just apply KISS. I'm a pilot and we booked the viewing lounge of the Aero Club I fly at - which is (handy enough) right next to Wellington Int'l airport so that it was a 10 minute walk to the event for people coming from other parts of NZ - mainly Auckland. Not posh, but functional and we had a little kitchen attached to the room etc. The venue as we've booked it fits about 50 people.

    Pre-Camp workshop (day 0):

    A friend of mine (Justin McLean from Sydney) is involved with Arduino hardware and RIA-development - basically tinkering with all sorts of stuff. From the funds we received from Adobe we were able to help with Justin's flight from Australia to New Zealand, he donated his time for free and we offered a Pre-Camp full-day workshop on hooking hardware into Flex applications. The workshop was not free but cost NZD 150 (about USD 90-100) per attendee. For that they got a full Arduino set, resistors, thermal resistors, a multimeter and all sorts of other stuff they could take home afterwards. 

    Due to the nature of the workshop it was limited to 10 attendees (ended up having 9). People loved it - and it was awesome to see for instance Greg Dove (core member of the Flex Degrafa team) controlling visual Degrafa elements on the screen using a potentiometer in his hand.

    Venue for this workshop was the board room of a local Adobe partner in the CBD of Wellington - so no further cost involved. 

    Overall: very easy to organise, the presenter donated his time, a local shop the venue and Adobe helped with the flight cost -> result: some aspect of Flex that _MOST_ people would have never had dealt with before and that's just awesome.

    Camp day:

    For this first event the idea was to get one room, a bunch of speakers and sessions and cap it at 50-ish attendees to see if and how that works for our community. In the end we had to cap registration after a week because it was booked out; maintained a waiting list for the time being. The latter was a good idea because during the registration cut-off and the event the odd person dropped out and we could offer WL'ed folks a spot at the event.

    For the next event, we'd be trying to get a second room at the venue and open it for 75-80 people, having seen how fast people registered and how keen they've been on being upgraded from waiting list to full ticket, we're very confident we could have easily reached that number by continuing to advertise and put the word out more.

    We wanted to create a very informal event for techies. As I've mentioned above: good food and good coffee (proper Espresso, not the usual "conference-coffee") was essential. The lesson learnt here (and I can't stress that enough): Get professionals to do it. Out coffee and lunch was provided from a cafe nearby, they even brought a mobile coffee cart in because they're been keen to put their brand out there for supplying tech events with their stuff. Very recommended, it takes away so much work, stress and hassle from the organisers. As the major decision makers of our camp are vegetarian, we decided to purely offer vegetarian food (which worked surprisingly well given that we're in New Zealand) and the fact that there was no complaint (but just one person asking if there's just veggie stuff) proves the point that to cater for the least common denominator works well if the quality of the food is good.

    On the day, we had 50-ish attendees, each was provided with an event bag (containing a 2 GB USB key from Adobe Australia - loaded with Flex/Flash Builder, Flex SDKs, libraries and framework .swcs etc. - and other sponsor swag). Also, everyone got an event T-shirt - people could register their preferred size in advance until about 2 weeks to the event. People were absolutely happy with the bag (eco shopping bag) and they loved the T-shirt. We particularly went for good quality T-shirts and a very stylish design so that people didn't see it as "another conference t-shirt for gardening". We also offered fitted Girl-T-shirts which was HIGHLY appreciated by each and every female attendee.

    Agenda:

    09:00am - 09:15am

    		 HelloWorld.as and housekeeping - Kai Koenig
    09:15am - 10:00am Keynote: The Flash Platform and the Degrafa framework - Greg Dove
    COFFEE BREAK  

    10:30am - 11:15am

    		 Back to the Files (Flash & Files) - Ross Phillips
    11:15am - 11:45am Remoting and Messaging with Flex - Stefan Saasen
    11:45am - 12:15pm Flexing your Nintendo Wii using the WiiFlash Server - Kai Koenig
    LUNCH  
    01:00pm - 02:00pm I didn't know Flash can do that: Connecting Arduino Hardware to RIAs - Justin McLean
    02:00pm - 02:15pm The pros and cons of Flex with(in) Facebook - Scott Kitney
    02:15pm - 02:30pm From .psd to .swf in 5 minutes with Flash Catalyst - Diane Sieger
    02:30pm - 02:45pm i18n and l10n with Flex - Tanya Gray
    COFFEE BREAK  
    03:15pm - 03:45pm Using (and abusing :) Metadata in ActionScript 3 - Campbell Anderson
    03:45pm - 04:00pm F2: An Enterprise Flex Framework to rival Cairngorm - Scott Kitney
    04:00pm - 04:15pm Mariner - 3D Marine Modelling in Flash - Dan Bishop
    04:15pm - 04:45pm Mashups with Flex - Implementing a search browser for DigitalNZ in an afternoon - Marielle Lange
    04:45pm - 05:00pm Closure, Raffles, Goodies, everyone goes home happy

    As you can see, the agenda was totally mixed and provided a variety of topics. All speakers besides Justin were NZ-locals, Greg, Campbell and Tanya even having come over from Auckland for the day/weekend. I'm super happy that 3 of 11 speakers are female (as sad as it is that I have to point it out, would love to have had more) and across the genders we had a good bunch of people who never presented at a public event or conference before - the camp is a very nice "safe environment" to get people into that.

    You might also notice that our session slots vary in length. That's deliberate because when we put the agenda together we basically defined the start, end and breaks and let people decide what they want to present on and for how long. We used a pbworks.com workspace/wiki for that and it basically just happened - people made use of it and put together an agenda that needed just minimal tweeking afterwards.

    Lunch entertainment:

    At lunch time, there was an offering from the Aero Club for a plane/airfield tour that about 20 people jumped on, two lucky folks actually even ended up getting a free scenic flight as "human load" in the back - for the purpose of a type rating check flight in a Piper PA-28.

    A few more random thoughts that might help other people:

    1. If in doubt - start small. There's nothing wrong with planning a comfy, small and most likely workable event for 50 people. Your first camp doesn't have to have 250 attendees. Next year's can be larger.

    2. Get a steering group - get people to help you. Setup a Google group, meet in person, 
    come up with a budget (and stick to it) and distribute tasks. Speaking of budget - our main items were: Venue, Coffee, Lunch, Snacks and Softdrinks, T-Shirts and bags

    3. Think about the necessity to have a legal entity. I ran everything through my own company - we might change that for our next camp and setup an incorporated society or something. The larger your camp is, the less you'd want to be personally liable for crazy things going wrong imho.

    4. Use web 2.0 tools: We used Eventbrite for registration and attendee management, Twitter (@fpcodecampnz), Facebook and the good old email. Worked great.

    5. If your camp is free for attendees: Communicate well and communicate often. We sent out an attendee newsletter at least every 10 days to make sure everyone is and stays aware of the event. You can send out a newsletter for every tiny new feature, "new session", "new sponsors" etc... It helps people to not forget your event.

    6. Check the venue's projector. I didn't. It was 800x600 - not a major drama, but I learned from that :)

    7. Get local sponsors. If you're reading this, you'll prob. have found out that Adobe is supporting camps. But get more support from local development/training shops. We got O'Reilly to send us a few books to give away. We got software to raffle off from various vendors. Be aware that if you're doing the first-time camp in your city, people might be careful to commit funding to you - I think we "sold" sponsorship for too cheap and we'll prob. ask for a bit more money from local companies to become a sponsor next year.

    For anyone interested - the camp wiki is: http://wellington.flashplatformcodecamp.co.nz/

    Any questions, feel free to ask and/or leave comments

    Kai




  • Flash Camps and Flex Camps – what are they?

    Rating5.0

    Entry posted Apr 09 by JohnKoch, tagged Design, Development, Interactive Experience, Mobile, Rich Internet Apps in Camp Blog public

    Here are some observations to help clarify what Flash Camps and Flex Camps are all about.

    Flash Camps are…

    • celebrations of the talents of the local community. They showcase the skills of local developers and designers to inspire and train the attendees. Adobe speakers also participate in Camps when its possible.
    • events that expose people to Adobe technology. This is done using many creative approaches, such as demos, hands-on trainings, and team coding sessions to just name a few.
    • events that raise awareness of the local Adobe community and introduce attendees to the local user groups.
    • events that feature information on any of the products that are part of the Adobe Flash Platform.

    Flash Camps are not…

    • sales and marketing opportunities for Adobe or any other company.
    • user group meetings. One of the objectives of Camps is to introduce new people to the local Adobe community. The attendees would hopefully plan to attend local user group meetings after the Camp is over.
    • Adobe-run events. Camps are run by a community leader who agrees to own the organization of the event. Adobe is ready to assist the event organizer with advice on organizing the event, promotion help and financial support.
    • only large events. Proposals for Camps with a large number of attendees as well as proposals for smaller Camps are considered for support by Adobe.

     

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