On Friday, Dan Rumney made some important announcements on the preDevCamp blog that I’d like to expand upon.
Meet your new organizing team
To fill in for whurley‘s and Giovanni‘s unfortunate departures, Greg Stevenson and myself will be stepping in to help co-ordinate the various preDevCamp events around the globe. Greg has already been hosting some webOS training sessions (pre-preDevCamps, if you will), and will be invaluable bringing this knowledge to the community. And while I’ve helped plan a barcamp or two, I’m positively giddy for the chance to help build a stronger community and facilitate knowledge transfer on such a massive scale. Combined with Dan’s experience bringing preDevCamp where it is today, I think we’re going to make a wonderful team.
New target date: August 8th
The second major announcement is regarding preDevCamp’s target date. Several cities have expressed concern about organizing events on such short notice and without guarantee that the SDK will be available. Palm hears our cries about the SDK loud and clear, but there’s a lot more involved than just making sure everyone has a copy of the software. We still don’t have a confirmed SDK release date, but I’m very optimistic that pushing the date back to August 8th will give Palm time to finalize these issues. And while August is later than the expectation that was originally set, it’s still only 9 weeks after the launch of the phone (recall that the iPhone SDK was released 9 MONTHS later). Also, 9 weeks is the same amount of time it takes to make kittens. Coincidence? I think not.
More content coming soon
Momentum since the phone’s announcement has ebbed due to a lack of developer-related news, but now that the cone of silence is being lifted we can start featuring content created by Palm and other preDevCamp members. The goal here is to provide maximum visibility to emerging community leaders and create a repository of reusable presentations, therefore lowering the barrier to entry for someone interested in talking about webOS but might not be sure where to begin. Plus, I plan on releasing a series of articles on how to recruit developers in your community, how to sell the event to sponsors, and share other experience I’ve gathered on how to host a successful conference. Now that we have a target to shoot for, expect to see a lot more activity on the preDevCamp blog!
What you can do
Some cities are still moving forward with June 13th events, and my personal opinion on this is kudos to you for getting a head start. There’s a lot of learning to be done in the next few months, so I encourage you to use this time to help create our public knowledge base. Write a blog post on something you’ve learned. Record a presentation and upload it to the preDevCamp slideshare group. Get to know other developers and provide feedback for each other. And don’t forget to keep your city’s preDevCamp blog updated!
Learning as publicly as possible will show the world that the preDevCamp community is leading the way to webOS enlightenment. Are you ready? Let’s begin.