CocoaHeads Belgium Founding Meeting – Notes

First of all, I would like to thank all attendees for showing up. We had about 50 people from all over the country joining us on this Founding / Brainstorm Meeting. For those who couldn’t make it, or didn’t know about this initiative, no worries, we will be putting all information online anyway.

I have to admit it all started a bit chaotic. There were some Name Tags / Labels available, but I should have been there to welcome each attendee individually. But as I mentioned during the meeting, I don’t fear mistakes, since I can always learn something from them. Hopefully we can get organized a bit more for our next meeting.

We started this Founding Meeting with a little presentation on some of the Ideas I had for CocoaHeads Belgium. If you want to have another look at the presentation, I made it available on SlideShare : http://www.slideshare.net/StefaanLesage/cocoa-heads-belgium-founding-meeting.

But as I mentioned during the meeting as well CocoaHeads Belgium isn’t just me. It’s all about the community. If enough people in the CocoaHeads Belgium community are asking for something, then there is a real need for it, and we should try to figure out how CocoaHeads Belgium can help the community to get those things they are asking.

After the little presentation the Attendees were invited to Brainstorm together and try to come up with some ideas of things they would like to see in the CocoaHeads Belgium community. It started a bit slow, but gradually I heard some pretty good ideas / initiatives.

I have to agree with most of the attendees when they mentioned that it might be difficult to get something done as a single developer, but as a community we might be able to open doors in the future. It will be hard as a starting community, but the bigger and better organized we get, the easier it might become.

Here is a small list of things which were mentioned during the Brainstorm Session :
  • It might be easier for users to give feedback in a Forum or Mailing list. It does actually give the community members the ability to think about a few things and give feedback at a later point.
  • It would be interesting if we had some kind of Profiles for the attendees / members of the CocoaHeads Belgium Community. This could include general info like Name, First name, Website.
  • Additionally it would be quite interesting if we could add other things like : Mac / iPhone Developer, Novice / Advanced / Expert, Twitter Handle, Email, Website, Company, Applications you are creating or have already created. One side note here is that users should be able to make the additional information public or not. It’s indeed great to have all that info for reference and for use by the CocoaHeads Belgium community, but some people might not be too keen to release that info to the ‘big’ public.
  • List of applications created by CocoaHeads Belgium developers.
  • Additional information about how to get your product out there, legal / copyright support, … Generally most of the things the average developer doesn’t think about.
  • Resources on the Website + in the Mailing List. This could be anything, Books, Podcasts, Websites, Tutorials, Courses, …
  • This wasn’t mentioned in the session, but it was something I thought about when writing out the notes. Maybe it would be a good idea to ‘Tag’ interesting information on Delicious using a tag like ‘CocoaHeadsBE’ ? That way we could already gather a lot of information / resources as well.
  • It would be nice if we could convince some public services to open up their data / API’s to developers. It’s hard to convince a company like the NMBS to share their data when you’re only one developer, but if the community grows and gets stronger, it might be easier to convince them as a groups or CocoaHeads Belgium Community.
    Wouldn’t it be great if we could write apps which simply accessed data from the NMBS, De Lijn, Libraries, Universities, Cultural Centres, …
  • We could collect some data ourselves, for example Open Street Maps, Feedbase, …
  • Create some kind of Code Base for CocoaHeads Belgium where we could show each other how we solved a specific problem. Share code / tips and tricks and maybe even help each other with individual projects ?
  • Many developers are creating applications around the same ‘theme’ or ‘topic’ (e.g. Twitter Clients). It would be great if we could consolidate similar efforts, and maybe get some developers in the CocoaHeads Belgium Community to work together.
  • Keep a list of existing API’s for reference purposes (Facebook API, Twitter API, Fiendfeed API, …)
  • Open Source apps by the CocoaHeadsBE community for the CocoaHeadsBE community. Links to public repositories (Mat Gemmel, Simon, …)
  • Tutorials on Unit Testing / Code Testing.
  • Share Hidden Gems in the Cocoa FrameWork
  • Other things you are doing, ideas about your projects
  • It would be a good idea if we could create sessions aimed at Beginner / Expert / Wizzy Cocoa Devs
  • Open the sessions up for Foreign speakers. You never know someone from CocoaHeads US is in Belgium and wants to hop in on one of our Meetins.
  • Video taping the sessions would be good for those who couldn’t make it to the live session. That way they still have access to the information shared during that session.
  • NSConference in the UK. Get in touch, maybe do something together ???
  • CocoaHeads Amsterdam, Get in touch !
  • Big Nerd Ranch, get in touch, try to get a discount :-P Apparently both the Atlanta / Germany courses were very well received by those devs in our CocoaHeads Belgium community who had the opportunity to follow one of the courses.
  • Once we get bigger and have gained some credibility as CocoaHeads Belgium, we could maybe host a local Cocoa / CocoaTouch conference.
Some questions which were raised during the session :
  • Who pays the hosting bill ? Well, no worries, that has been taken care of for another 2 years !
  • Who pays for catering / drinks / food on the next CocoaHeads Belgium meeting ? Well if we can find sponsors, that would be great. But if we can’t why not just bring our own drinks / snacks along ?
  • What about sessions in other locations ? Well, if we can find a venue in Brussels for example, we could hold sessions there as well. The people of IBBT in Ghent have been so kind to let us use their offices, and they have told us they would be happy to do it again. Meanwhile they questions has also been raised to someone at Apple (yes indeed, we had someone from Apple Belgium in the audience), and he is willing to check if we could use their venue in Brussels !!! Woooohooo :=)
  • When will the next meeting take place ? Well we had a little vote and most of the audience was find with mondays, but we will set up a doodle thingie in order to let everyone vote. If we could do it the second week of the month, that would be great. If we need 2 meetings in the future, we could alwasy do one for novices and one for experts ?
  • Who is CocoaHeads Belgium ? Well, it not me, it’s not IBBT, it’s US. If we need a spokesman to the outside world, I’m willing to do that of course. CocoaHeads Belgium isn’t supposed to be my ‘personal project’, but a ‘Community Project’, I just happened to be the guy who put it in motion :-)
Ideas for Presentations :

Some of you gave some ideas for presentations on the next meeting (sorry, forgot to write down your names), so I’m going to add a list of those as well :

  • Session about Desing Patterns, or Patterns in general and how they are used in the Cocoa / CocoaTouch world.
  • Session about your experiences at the Big Nerd Ranch.
  • Session about OpenGL / iPhone

Well, I hope I didn’t miss anything. If I did, or if you have other good ideas, feel free to post them on the Website as a comment to this Blog Post.

I did already set up a Google Group as well for CocoaHeads Belgium, so feel free to start using it (do we need moderators for that ?). You can find the Google Groups page at http://groups.google.com/group/cocoaheadsbe and make sure to register as well. We will probably be using this group a lot to send some information around.

Final Note

If anyone is thinks he can help us out with one of the ideas mentioned in this topic, please do contact us. If you still have more ideas … well contact us as well. There is a real need for a CocoaHeads Belgium, and I’m sure that we can make it happen if we all work on it together.

Regards,

Stefaan