Un Posto al Sole: Finding My Place in the Sun

Here's the marketing blurb, I'll write something more personalized... umm, when things calm down a little?

June 16-17, Chicago: Join us in Chicago when INNOVATING EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT meets EXECUTING SOCIAL MEDIA FOR INTERNAL COMMUNICATIONS.

Communitelligence presents two full jam-packed conference days on the most essential aspects of employee engagement, HR and social media for internal communications. Conference includes 4 keynotes, 11 case studies, 8 roundtables, 20-plus expert speakers, a networking reception and dinearounds. Plus a $200 travel rebate! One trip, two great conferences, tons of ideas to take back to your office. Full details here.

Last September I wrote Videoblogging for Sun: By the Numbers. It's time for an update. So here's the situation as of today:

• 21 months: how long I've been shooting video for Sun
• >200 hours (I stopped counting): video in the can (mostly shot by me personally)
  
• ~104 hours of video edited (mostly by me) and available (some of it only internally)
• ~30 events/locations shot
  
• ~40,000 video views as of April, 2009
• dozens of engineers have been in front of my camera - and a few other people as well, even a couple of lawyers
  
• technologies & topics covered have included ZFS, open storage, community, Java, open source & the law, e-discovery, HPC, Solaris cluster, high availability, virtualization...
  

I never planned to be an event planner, but I do have a lifelong history of entertaining in a big way. This was bred into me during my childhood as an expatriate in places like Dhaka, Bangladesh, where (in 1977) there wasn't a lot for foreigners to do except invite each other to dinner parties, musicales, etc.

So I grew up assuming that getting a bunch of people together and letting them have fun was a normal thing to do, and worth the effort I put into it. I've seldom been disappointed in the results. During high school (an international residential school in India), I helped organize dorm open houses. In college, I threw dinner parties to which I invited students and professors, to the surprise of both. For my 21st birthday, with the help of my roommates, I had a big bash at my aunt's place in the country outside Austin.

Whenever I've had space for it (and even when I haven't), I have entertained. At home in Italy, Enrico and I were famous for our parties with "exotic" food (Indian, American, or barbecue) and live music (provided by Enrico and friends). Now that I'm living in a (shared) big house in suburban Colorado, I have (Italian) dinner and (Indian) movie nights for friends and colleagues.

As a very active alumna of Woodstock School, I've also been involved in the planning and execution of alumni events, and have learned a few hard lessons about how not to do this stuff. (Though I fear I will never learn not to over-order on food, but I guess it's better to have too much than too little...)

The first big event I worked on that wasn't strictly personal or school-related was vlogEurope 2006, held in Milan and on Lake Como. That was a lot of work, but I met or re-met a bunch of cool videoblogging folks, and enjoyed taking care of everybody and helping them to get more out of a part of the world that I know very well.

^ videobloggers take over Bellagio

Sun Events

All this considered, it's not surprising that part of the work I now do for Sun is event planning. My job is about community development, and one of the surest ways to make people bond is to get them together and feed them (along with generous libations, for those who partake). I've been working with developer communities, but also with others such as Girl Geeks.

Storage Summits

I was part of the team that organized and ran the first Open Storage Summit in September, 2008, which was such a success that we followed it up with another one - with an even larger attendance - in February, 2009.

Student Events

Sun likes to meet students who are our potential future (and current) users, customers, developers, and colleagues. So we've been experimenting with new ways to involve them in industry and community events.

The biggest event I've worked on so far was for the benefit of ~400 students who came from all over the world to attend SuperComputing '08 in Austin. We threw a party for them with great food and great music, but also gave them the opportunity to meet with some of Sun's HPC developers and marketers - in fact, the Sun folks in attendance were kept busy talking with students the entire night. (I kept busy ensuring the steady supply of barbecue, cupcakes, and entertainment.)

We are now planning something similar for SC09 in Portland, and working with the Broader Engagement program to help bring in wide variety of students from around the world.

But, before that, there's ISC09 in Hamburg, where we're planning a Sun HPC workshop to kick off a coding competition, and, of course, a party. Suggestions are welcome on what kind of party and venue the students (probably mostly German) would enjoy.

And, even before that, there's CommunityOne West in San Francisco, June 1-3. Watch this space for announcements!

see also: The Things I Do at Sun: Video

My official job title at Sun is, I believe, the vague and essentially meaningless "Program Manager." My Sun business cards say I'm a "Community Specialist and (Video)blogger". I made that up in a hurry, and wish I could find something more descriptive. But it has long been the story of my professional life that what I do, even within any single job, is usually hard to explain in a few words or a standard job title.

People do keep asking, though, so I'll take a shot at explaining just what it is I do for Sun, and why.

When I was originally hired as a contractor by Dan Maslowski nearly two years ago, my task was to help his group of engineers produce web content (I believe they had deliverables about that at the time, handed down from on high).

We thought this would mean white papers and blog posts, so I did the training necessary to be able to edit official Sun documents (you have to know a lot about trademarks). I then spent a lot of time begging engineers to write white papers and blog posts, including weekly meetings in which we all solemnly agreed that these things needed to be done. But everyone was too busy writing code to write about the code they were writing, right?

I couldn't do it myself. I have at times been a tech writer (and a good one), but it would have taken me years to achieve the level of knowledge I'd need to write usefully about this deep technology. (Of course there are folks at Sun who have this knowledge, because they have been doing it for years; they are already up to their eyeballs in writing documentation.)

So how could we get vital information out of busy engineers and make it available to those who need it, both within and outside of Sun? We needed to find another way.

Upon hearing that I knew something about video, Dan and Scott had bought me a videocamera. In August, Dan hauled me out to Colorado to film five days of training his staff were giving on the Leadville stack (storage software). This resulted in hours of video about the nitty-gritties of things like MPxIO. The audience for this kind of thing isn't huge, but they are dedicated: it appears that about 150 people (so far) have gotten through all three hours of this presentation!

SNIA's annual Software Developers' Conference that September (2007) featured many Sun speakers, but there were no plans to film it: Sun's preparation, travel, and expense would bear no fruit beyond the (relatively small) conference audience in San Jose. So, with SNIA's blessing, off I went to film it, with Sun colleague Ray Dunn manning a second camera to cover simultaneous tracks. That resulted in about 12 hours of finished video, which can be seen on Storage Stop.

From there, this video thing has snowballed. I've now filmed at: Sun Tech Days (Milan), SNIA Winter Symposium, SNIA Storage Security Industry Forum, USENIX FAST, Storage Networking World, OpenSolaris Developers' Summits (Santa Cruz and Prague), CommunityOne, Open Source Grid & Cluster Summit, Sun's HPC Consortium (Dresden and Austin), International Supercomputing Conference, an analyst round table, Open Storage Summit, SNIA SDC 2008, various Sun internal conferences, LISA, SC08, and Sun offices in Menlo Park, Eagan, Bangalore, Dublin, Grenoble, Guillemont Park, and London... so far.

More importantly, the videoblogging "gospel" has started to spread at Sun. More people have realized that it's possible to produce useful video, quickly and cheaply (some were already doing it completely independent of me). It doesn't have to be a big deal, and many Sun offices and individuals already have most or all of the equipment they need. I still do a lot of video work myself directly, but others are now eager to learn. I've been sharing my know-how as best I can (and plan to do more, in this blog and in person), and am working with other Sun folks (and others) interested in media to do even more. Let a thousand vloggers bloom!


...but video, though it takes up the bulk of my time, is not the whole story of what I do at Sun. More to come!

see also: The Things I do at Sun: Events