Written By Will Strohl
2023-06-12
This was my second time coming to Champéry, Switzerland, and it’s a place that I instantly fell in love with the previous trip. There are all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe it’s the magic views that you can’t stop looking at. Maybe it’s the people or the venue. It could be the afternoon activities… Maybe, it’s the amazing friends that we get to share this with, all the while learning and teaching all things DNN. (Accompanied by a drink or two, of course…)
There’s too much to mention, so let’s just agree that it's all of the above and more!
Before I continue, I do want to be sure to thank the sponsors. I struggle all of the time with how I want to say that to people, but sponsors are critical to the success of any conference. Ours is no different. They help ensure that we have a venue, food, activities, and it also helps to keep the overall conference price down for all attendees. THANK YOU, to all sponsors of DNN-Connect 2023!
2023 Sponsors:
The Venue
First, there are not many places you can go to have a conference that can claim as much beauty as Champéry does. That, and the hotel of choice, Hotel Suisse, just does an incredible job of hosting us. The people there might as well be a part of our conference – and in many ways, they really are.
Hotel Suisse apparently loved our previous event in 2019 so much, that they built out the most beautiful dedicated meeting spaces that you could ask for. Everything was plug-and-play, and there were no issues with seeing or hearing anything.
The People
I’ve always jokingly called DNN conferences a “family reunion.” This still holds true for me today. It always feels like home when we get to be together. We drink, joke, laugh, play – and then we do it again, all in an effort to further improve and grow DNN together.
It’s of course great to see known friends again. Some I see regularly via online meetings, but some we may not see until the event occurs again. And then again, some you meet for the first time. People like Brian Dukes and Daniel Valadas have never before been able to attend DNN-Connect. Having them (and others like them) there, was such a great thing for the community overall.
Another first-timer that attended came all of the way from Costa Rica. I’ve chatted with Marco Alvarado quite a few times in the past over email and Zoom, but nothing beats meeting face-to-face and bonding over DNN together. (Not to mention the crazy topics we had between sessions and events!)
One reason that some folks from the US attended was because DNN-Connect partially sponsored their visit via a stipend. Basically, if your journey to the event required a flight, like going over a giant ocean, then you were provided a very generous stipend in exchange for also presenting. However, you also had to perform enough trackable DNN activity to put yourself in the top 10 on the DNN community leaderboard.
It was such a cool surprise once I heard about that. It makes a major difference for those of us that flew internationally.
Oh, and we also have sessions to go to and/or present!
The Activities
DNN-Connect is such a unique conference. Few conferences include group meals, where we all travel (or walk) together and then spend the next few hours networking over good food and wine. This is maybe the most effective networking I’ve experienced, ever. This is only possible in person.
Beyond the other things you’d expect – like our infamous bar – were all kinds of other summertime activities. A very large group went mountain biking together. I missed traversing the Via Ferrata again, though. It didn’t seem like paragliding was open this time around for long, but I did see one flyer go up while we were there.
The Sessions
I had noticed something that I didn’t know how to say until Daniel Mettler said it during the general assembly… This event had some of the most well-thought-out and professional presentations that I’ve seen at any prior DNN event – and most larger commercial conferences, even. All of the speakers certainly stepped up their game! From the topics, to the slide decks, to the demos, to how the presentations were conducted – it was all very well done.
Thank you to all who presented a session!
One thing that we noticed, though, was that all of the topics were too advanced for beginners. We discussed a number of ways to do something about that in the future. What do you think? Do you want to have more introductory sessions at conferences?
Or…
Are you someone who’s willing/wanting to present such a session? Despite what you’ve seen at recent DNN conferences, those sessions continue to be something that I consistently hear people talk about and ask for.
My Sessions
I had the opportunity to present two different sessions. I struggled a bit to come up with content I was comfortable with presenting – mostly because I wanted to present something I haven’t yet presented. This was one rare time when I didn’t present anything technical. I didn’t show a single line of code, and I didn’t even directly present on DNN itself.
Unveiling the Secrets of Software Company Transitions: Navigating the Path to Success
If you haven’t yet heard, Upendo Ventures is the new team behind the popular Glanton Modules suite of authentication extensions. This announcement was teased during the keynote. However, it’s clear to me that if you look at what’s already happened historically, Glanton Modules will not be the last vendor in the ecosystem to either leave, want to leave, sell, or otherwise have an exit of some kind from the DNN ecosystem.
There are so many moving parts to transitions like this, that I wanted to provide a framework of information I’ve personally learned over the few months to help inform others in the DNN ecosystem. Who knows, you – yeah, YOU, reader – may one day need to consider all kinds of things when you find yourself inheriting, buying, or otherwise taking over another vendor’s source code and/or business.
The real intent here is to be sure that if any kind of vendor exit occurs in the future, you have information to help you keep those customers supported.
For example, if a vendor decides to move on to something else and they don’t provide their clients with a reasonable path forward, not only does the reputation of the vendor suffer… DNN itself as an ecosystem and community also suffers. The client(s) in question – right or wrong – feel that DNN itself is to blame. If you know me at all, this is something I’m especially passionate about preventing.
Hopefully, the presentation, content, and slide show will help someone else in the future.
View the Presentation on SlideShare
DNN Community Newsletter: An In-Person Review of Recent Open-Source Activity
During the keynote, I gave a high-level overview of what’s recently been happening with the Awareness group, and what is in store for the community in the future. However, for a variety of reasons, we don’t have a community newsletter anymore. Quite frankly, such a newsletter will not exist for the foreseeable future.
Instead, we’ll be leveraging the blogs and the Community Member Announcements forum to fulfill this need. More announcements will be made about that in the future.
Since we don’t have that newsletter yet…
During this session, I wanted to treat this time as something of an in-person community newsletter. Few of us have the time to look at everything we know to look at to know what’s happening in the open-source part of the community. Also, not everyone knows where to look or what to do when they get there. Since most of us in the community are developers or developer-minded, we tend to unintentionally forget those who are not technical still need to know what’s happening.
This session sought to first fulfill that need by going into greater detail about what the Awareness group has been doing and what we’re about to do. Also, we overviewed some strategic features on the community website, including the leaderboard, and the new theme for our website, that’s currently in development.
Following that section, I overviewed all of the open-source releases I found in the DNN ecosystem since February of this year. I did my best to highlight any notable updates I saw in the release notes and commits.
Finally, we transitioned to a workshop part of my presentation. During this time, I led the group in a discussion where we all discussed all things Awareness in the DNN ecosystem. We spent time on localization, the website, discoverability, marketing, SEO, videos, MVP, and much more.
I took notes in the slide deck so we can all refer to them later. This workshop really ended up being a very useful brainstorming session as well. I didn’t know it would be so well-received that nearly everyone was willing to miss most of the upcoming tea break.
THANK YOU so much to everyone that attended this session. The fact that you showed up, nearly missed tea time, and participated in the workshop means so much to me. My love for DNN grows every time something like this happens.
SOFTWARE IS NOT ABOUT CODE. IT’S ABOUT PEOPLE. All in attendance definitely understood that. This was an awesome moment for me. Your passion ignites my passion. I can’t wait to see what we do together.
View the Presentation on SlideShare
The Organizers
No event can be successful unless there are people in place doing all of the time-consuming and hard work to plan and organize everything. There are hundreds and hundreds of tasks that need to be done. All the while, still doing whatever is actually putting food on their table. These open-source events come at the cost of irreplaceable lost time with their friends and family.
I can’t THANK the organizers enough, but I tried. As is the custom in the European event, everyone that could, brought a gift from their country to help spread their own culture and thank the organizers for their countless hours of work at the same time.
Photo taken by iJungleBoy.
The Closing
Well, this part isn’t about the closing of the conference, but it is about the closing of this LONG blog post.
First, it’s easy to say that if you missed this event, you’re missing out. However, I don’t have the words to help you describe what you’ve missed. At least, I don’t know how to on my own impart how important it is to attend an event like this one.
The moments you have with others in the community to generate ideas, build bonds with each other, generate new business, and meet new friends are invaluable. Sure, the content is valuable too, but meeting and speaking to the people delivering the content before/afterward is something that has no equal.
The price tag for a conference of this size is a drop in the bucket compared to the value you get back. It’s not impossible to do many of those things online, but it’s pretty close to it.