As noted already in March, we have decided to open up the MySQL Developer Meeting for selected members of the MySQL User Community, i.e. for MySQL users who have a need of interacting with our developers. In Sorrento 2006, Prag 2005 or Malta 2004, we had similar developer meetings — but the external representation amounted to one (1) customer presentation.

In Heidelberg (one bus shuttle hour from Frankfurt airport), we’ll do things differently.

Some key points:

1. Community Days are concentrated to Thursday 20.9.2007 and Friday 21.9.2007: While we have very few sessions closed for the community even on the other days (Wed 21.9, Sat 22.9, Mon 24.9), our scheduling started from the insight that few community members can afford to stay for too many days. So meetings that are of most relevance for Community generally take place on Thu and Fri.
2. MySQL University sessions are scheduled for the same Thursday and Friday. That’s where we spread our accumulated knowledge on how to develop MySQL internally amongst those who code MySQL, the Connectors, and Tools. Invited community members are welcome to attend physically, and anyone can participate virtually at no cost.
3. Team Exhibitions are a new form of gathering. MySQL engineering teams invite their fellow teams to celebrate success by showing what they themselves think is cool stuff — already in production, or in beta, or just in alpha. This doesn’t have to be flashy user interfaces. For instance, the Optimiser team may choose to demo a query that runs 75 % faster in 5.1 than in 5.0. We’ll make sure that our non-attending Community members gets to hear about this through MySQL Forge. And naturally, any external community members are most welcome to attend the Team Exhibitions first hand, both to get an impression of what’s happening, and to give us feedback.
4. Every attending non-MySQLer will get two hosts: one Community Team Host and one Engineering Team Host. The Community Team Host is either Jay, Lenz, Colin, Giuseppe, David or myself (Lenz will tell you know who is your host), and we make sure you know where and when the meetings are, we introduce you to the proper Engineering team members, and try to ensure your expectations are met. The Engineering Team Host is whichever MySQL developer who is the domain expert on your topic. Meeting with this developer is probably the reason why you came to Heidelberg in the first place, but do take into account that such devs are likely to be busy with many meetings in Heidelberg.
5. The detailed agenda is still under works. During the course of July, we expect to be able to publish the MySQL University schedule, as well as the tentative Team Exhibition schedule. Individual community members should also get a picture of what meetings they are likely to be interested in, through interaction at least with their Community Team hosts and in some cases even with their Engineering Team hosts.

External participants should expect to be firming up their travel schedule within the next week or two. This involves getting a firm booking from the Heidelberg Marriott Hotel (along Neckar River at Vangerowstrasse, a short distance from Heidelberg’s Old Town), which is both our meeting venue and the place where nearly all MySQLers stay. Expect to be contacted by Lenz Grimmer, our Community Manager EMEA (or contact him yourself at firstname@mysql.com, if you want to be proactive). Lenz is keeping a list of the arrival and departure dates and times of our guests.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 7th, 2007 at 11:17 and is filed under Architecture of Participation, Events, MySQL, Virtual company. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.