CloudCamp Regional Organizers

Thursday, December 17th, 2009
by dnielsen

2010 has been a wonderful year for CloudCamp and I’m very happy to have played an important role in bringing the unconference format to so many cities. Of course I’m not alone in this effort, Reuven has been a force of nature in spreading the word; the UK organizers (Chris Purrington, Alexis Richardson, Christine Gupta, Phil Huber, Simon Wardley and many others) have done a great job in London and beyond; Tom Leyden in Europe; Samuel Yeats & George Reese in ANZ and Sam Charrington, John Willis & Jesse Silver in the US. But as the central organizer & facilitator for most of the rest of the world, it has taken a significant amount of my time and effort.

Fortunately, as a developer community consultant, I have some flexibility in my hours and even get consulting leads through my CloudCamp efforts. But the amount of work to organize so many CloudCamps has become overwhelming. I’m just not able to keep up with all of you. And for CloudCamp to scale, something has got to be done.

So I began talking with a organizers about distributing the load. From the first CloudCamp in Belgium, Tom Leyden has been acting on my behalf on the Continent of Europe, and others have volunteered to do the same in their part of the world. In particular Prem Sanker in India, Alex Ng in Singapore, and more recently Ben Kepes in New Zealand and Yosu Cadilla in Spain. I’m sure there are others who would like to help if they just knew how.

So with that in mind, I’d like to announce a new Regional Organizers program. Tom Leyden, Prem Sanker, Alex Ng, Ben Kepes & Yosu Cadilla are now official CloudCamp Regional Organizers and will be taking over my role as central organizers in their regions. Of course I will still be involved and hope to continue facilitating CloudCamps, but these trusted regional organizers will be empowered to do most of what I normally would do. In the long run, I hope that each of these regions can act on their own, just as the UK region has done since the beginning.

As for my role, I’m not going anywhere. I will be working with these organizers on a weekly basis to coordinate our activities. And I will continue working to bring CloudCamp to more regions and conferences throughout the world and online.

So please join me and the rest of CloudCamp in welcoming Tom, Prem, Alex, Ben and Yosu as they join UK team as CloudCamp Regional Organizers.