Your own, personal… keynote

I often get asked what it is like to be a “developer evangelist” and “what do I do?”

I think the term “evangelist” may be misleading and that “advocate” would be more fitting. The way I see it it’s about representing the community’s perspective when it comes to empowering developers. As a developer advocate you have to be at the pulse of the community… or better, act as the platform to get a more diverse set of ideas from the community.

Which brings me to the point. A couple of days back I was surprised to see the following tweet in my timeline:

Now, to be clear on this – it’s not to me to say whom Vishal meant with saying “y’all”. It could have been a polite way to ask Dick Hirsch for his ideas. Richard is one of the most active and well-respected bloggers on SCN, and the topic leader on Cloud Computing by the way. Yet, he could equally well have addressed the whole twitterverse or even the entire community. So… I kind of like the notion of thinking of this tweet as a call for crowd-sourcing additional ideas for the keynote in Bangalore. That’s my very own interpretation – your mileage may vary!

Yet, does it matter if it was meant as such? Personally, I would love to read about what other people would like to hear just to better understand our community.

To get this straight… I was never asked to “crowdsource the keynote“, neither am I involved in shaping the keynote. Having said that, it’s probably certain to assume that the main story plots for all TechEd events have been created together a while back. Also there probably is already too much good content as-is.

Still, any idea being shared here may be considered as additional input or discourse.

To cut it short, let’s get to the point:

“What would you like to see in the keynote in Bangalore?”

[Famous last words] I’m really shooting from the hip here and hence I’m curios about what will happen next. Ultimately we would end up with a lot of great suggestions. We could then summarize the findings and send them to Ingrid van den Hoogen, Aiaz Kazi and Amit Sinha.

(= we surely do not want to overload them or cause any additional effort for them!)