Wednesday, January 23, 2013

2012 recap and 2013 roadmap

2012 has been our third year as a GDG/GTUG. If the first one was the foundation, and the second one the consolidation, this 2012 has been the expansion one. But also this year has been the first time we have experienced two renovations.

The best way to understand why we call this year the expansion one is to show some numbers: 26 events in the whole year (8 on 2011), 18 of them taking place in the last 6 months; 176 members in developers.google.com and 116 new members in our Google Group (about 500 by the end of the year); after creating our Google+ page in August and our Google+ community in December, we have 420 followers and 247 members in Google's social network, and 754 have "+1-ed" us. And 1582 participants in our events, which means about 61 per event on average!

But we didn't increased only in numbers, but also in diversity of events. We mainly did conferences in 2010 and 2012, and though most of those 26 continue to be the same, we started doing codelabs, beerworkings (beer + networking), parties, Live conferences (using Hangouts on Air), and a DevFest. The DevFest. Because it's been a milestone for the GDG Barcelona.

1 keynote, 14 conferences, 3 codelabs, 3 GDGs organizing (Vigo, Tarragona and Barcelona), and almost 320 attendees, made the GDG DevFest our most successful event so far. Besides being a great event, it also gave us a renovated vigor: potential speakers approached us, new ideas come, and in no time things went crazy! That was our second renovation, happier than the first one.

The year started under a different organization, and the first months were good ones, with 5 events between January and March. But in April, for a lot of different reasons, the previous organization had to left the Barcelona GTUG. It wasn't an easy task to form a new organization, and maintain the level established by the previous one, but with the help of the community everything is possible. So no events in April and May, but we returned after our first renovation with 3 events in June, 2 in July, 1 in August, another in September, and 2 more on October. And then it came the second renovation with the GDG DevFest Barcelona, and November got the amazing number of 6 events, and December was even more amazing with 7 events.

Now we are on January, and what could we do after the best year of the GDG Barcelona until now? Try to aim higher ;) We have 4 events confirmed for January, and 2 more being organized at this moment. We plan to make a Core Team to join the current organizers. And we asked to the community what were our interests, and the answer was so diverse, that we will have to do a lot of events: Android, HTML5, AppEngine, Chrome, GWT, games, security... And one of the most exciting moments of the year is very near.

As Barcelona is the Mobile Capital, and the Mobile World Congress takes place on the last week of February, we are planing to do the Mobile Month: a series of events related to mobile applications development, with conferences, codelabs, hackathon... 11 events are already in the agenda!