Deflowered twice on one day at nrw07

Last Friday the nrw07 took place in Wuppertal, the biggest community conference in North Rhine-Westphalia. About 100 attendees including the 22 speakers! The Diebels brewery contributes a couple of beer crates, and Subway served lots of sandwiches for lunch.

And I was deflowered twice on that day.

First, it was my very first talk! I gave a Community Server presentation a couple of month ago at our local .NET UserGroup, and the other guys suggested that I should repeat that at the nrw07. Unfortunately, I didn´t object enough.

When I sat in the hotel lobby with some other speakers the night before nrw07, I started getting nervous, but they managed to calm me down (or was it the beers we had?). The next day was fine, my talk was one of the first. It ran pretty well (as far as I am concerned). Of course we experienced the usual technical difficulties such as a projector, whose picture was twice as large as the screen and not resizable. Although I got the second largest room in the facility, there were only 7 attendees. Seems to me as Community Server is not of interest for everyone. The good thing about that is that those folks already knew CS, so I didn´t have to start at square one, but instead dive right into the technical stuff. The time flew, I ran over about 10 minutes and had still enough material for another hour. Nevertheless my talk can not have been that bad because the audience asked the right questions afterwards. I hopethink that´s a good sign.

My second premiere happened later that night, when Craig Murphy interviewed me for a podcast (not aired yet). At that point in time I already had a couple of beers, so it went quite smooth. It´s self-evident that we talked much about Community Server. Because I mentioned Twitter in my talk, Craig took me up on that, and somehow we drifted into social networking, a topic I´m quite interested in. Even when the podcast was over, we continued the discussion.

To sum it up, it was a great event, where I met many smart people. Many thanks to the orga team, Stephan Oetzel and Daniel Fisher!

And now that I lost my virginity, I´m looking forward to give a talk again next year (assumed they let me on stage ever again)

Here are some other speakers and attendees blogging about nrw07:

• Craig Murphy
• Oliver Sturm
• Frank Solinske
• Lars Keller
• Kai Gloth
• Karim El Jed

I met some more nice guys, who didn´t blog about this event. Nevertheless I´d like to send them my regards because we had such a good time and talks: Andreas Hoffmann, Christian Schütz, Mischa Hüschen, Pascal Kremmers, Constantin Klein, Marcel Gnoth, and Marcel Franke. Sorry if I forgot one, there were so many faces new to me. When you see me next time, just stop by and treat me to a beer…