In may 2009, Laurent Eschenauer opened a new experiment for the belgian web-ecosystem. I’m not going to tell you again about how it happened; but let’s try to talk about what we have reached so far.
In 2009; 14 of us travelled to San Francisco. It was quite easy, informal; no really organised visits. Set up in 3 weeks. Yahoo, MySpace devJam, Citizen Space, Sf NEwTech, Google IO. It was more a question of opportunities than a real planning. Being a smaller group also meant it was easier to move around the city, etc.
In november, another group travelled to Sevilla for the Evento Blog. Some of them were part of the first webmission, others not. That meant the initiative was interesting more people. In organising stuff for the community, and in participating.
Now. May 2010. 30 people travelling to the city by the bay. That doubles the size of the group (yeah, i know, i’m good in maths…) It also brings a level of complexity. Various hotels, different flights; differents arrival times. On the other hand, it also helped to set up a good agenda, as we all have our contacts. Let’s talk about it.
We, the Webmission Team, don’t own the agenda. The only thing we did was being the core unit, centralizing datas, setting up the communication channels, and reach out to the community. Now, this is how the agenda was set up. Last year, we met a cool belgian guy named Jeremy Le Van. As a web designer, Jeremy decided to move to SF to graduate. He joined us for our visits in 09 and was really happy to see that something was happening in Belgium (you know, Betagroup was in the lift, then the Webmission…). This year, we also had Xavier Damman in SF. And finally, popping up from London, Laurent Duchateau. Let’s see who did what.
Jeremy helped us get in touch with Kyte, CBSi and of course Seesmic
Xavier helped us with Twitter and SF NewTech
Yves Hiernaux had contacts with Microsoft
Laurent Duchateau offered us his contacts in Google and Orange Labs
Vincent Battaglia organised the Facebook meeting; he also met Adobe
Gregoire Hoin had contacts with Happy Cog people
Thanks to them, all we had to do was getting in touch with their contacts, organising the agenda. Again, the companies involved, quite surprisingly, gave us their OK’s. So did their security agents.
A community stuff, for the community.
If we now look at how it worked in San Fran, i have to admit that with such a big group, technologies played their role, and mostly… e-mails and Twitter. Some people had belgian data plans, others bought US 1 month data plans, then we had this nice Google IO device, and of course our laptops and hotel Wifi. It’s obvious that we couldn’t simply call each other for each meeting. So, Twitter played a big part in our various meetings.
Finally, the Webmission also helps the people to know each other. Although we meet at the Betagroup, or Café Numérique, it’s not the same as living together for a week.
I cannot, and will not talk for Antoine, Jenny or Xavier, but i have to admit that it’s cool to see what we can reach, as a group. And that something is on the move in Belgium. Being part of it makes me happy. And i’d like to end this post by quoting Xavier : “Forward payback”. The Webmission 1 gave me friends and great events, i now feel the duty to communicate about it, and help others join this experiment. Reach beyond their borders. I hope you will all join me in that!
Great post Sam ! Thanks also for your HUGE job !