Community building for developers
Last week I traveled up north to the location where most of the customers of my group work. We put together 2 days of training mostly focused on new code but including some best practice stuff like rapid iteration and test driven development. The over-all response was good. People thought that the information was useful and they were eager to hear when our next event would be.
The highlight for me was a roundtable session where we suggested topics and allowed the group to have an open discussion. Some of this became a Q&A for our team and other parts were an open debate about best practice. I am happy to say that this entire roundtable session was captured on video and we will soon take note of every good idea shared in the room.
This feel this session may have done something that in all of the time I have been on this project, I am yet to see: it sparked a community. I hoped that after this event, we would all leave with a better understanding of who our team-mates are, and how we can work together to innovate. It turns out a lot of people want to innovate, I just think that they feel they are the minority. They let their urge to innovate give way to their need to just get the job done; since it seems the fight would be pointless otherwise. I hope out hour of open discussion was enough to tear down this misconception once and for all and let the ideas flow free.
We made a point to ask for feedback with some success. As we all know however, people are much more willing to share their true feelings when they are anonymous. I used SurveyMonkey.com to create a truly anonymous survey on a third party site. It turns out that we did get a lot more candid feedback but it was still all very gracious. I suppose we can count this first event as a success.