"It’s really easy planning a virtual happy hour, with a new platform, that will be fun, engaging for everyone, and that no one will whine about…" said no one ever!
Most of 2021 will be like most of 2020 for conferences and events, they will be virtual. The Atlanta Java Users Group (AJUG) will run its annual developer conference Devnexus as a virtual event in February. On Feb 16 we will start with what is becoming our annual Java Users Group Leaders Summit (60 JUGs from around the world will be represented), the main six track conference of Feb 17 and a workshop day on Feb 18 with workshops by IBM, JFrog, Oracle, Sonatype, Microsoft and Okta
But what about the Open Source Relax Recharge Refresh (OSSRRR) Party Jam that has become our annual community hang out at the conference? To be honest, virtual happy hours connected to conferences have been hit and miss in 2020, as we all try to figure out the right combination of platform, add-ons etc. But one of the reasons that we run this is to thank and celebrate a number of open-source orgs for what they do for the community by giving them a free sponsorship of Devnexus and of the OSSRRR. Running an open-source project takes an immense amount of passion and effort. It is a lot of hard and mostly thankless work. This is a way that we can give back to them by helping them to amplify their messaging and reach our audience via our platforms. This year we are excited to give the Asciidoctor Project, Jakarta EE, Jelastic, Jetty, Maven and MicroProfile this support. These orgs join Azul Systems, JFrog, Sonatype and Tomitribe as OSSRRR sponsors.
This year as the conference is virtual there is no free swag to be had. Well…. One of the things we are doing to help with the virtual experience is to send a swag box to the first 500 registrants. This swag box includes T-Shirts and stickers and other goodies provided by our sponsors. It will also include our exclusive OSSRRR limited edition T-Shirt, the one that you can normally only get by blogging or vlogging about Devnexus. This T-Shirt can still be had by blogging or vlogging about the event though, details here.
So, what are we doing? We are going to use a platform called spatial.chat which provides a unique experience. I won’t describe it here as others have done so more eloquently (links below) than I can. Plus, I am tired!!! We will have a number of rooms that people can gather in plus our resident DJ, DJ Provost will be live streaming into the event.
How is this going to go? TBH I don’t know. We have tested spatial.chat a number of times and we have a great feeling about it. As in most things though it’s going to be what you, our fabulous Devnexus community, makes of it. Bring a smile, bring a sense of adventure, bring a beverage of your choice and it will be super fun!
Devnexus (Feb 17-18, 2021) is free to attend, Register here
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