The Neo4j community team was happy to have supported the event, but the biggest thanks go to Allison Sparrow and Adam Herzog for the bulk of the organization.We had a quite busy time. Andreas picked up the IKEA furniture on Friday which we had lots of fun assembling Friday night. Then we used the time for an intensive community discussion with Pernilla, Peter and Michael.
On Sunday we joined forces to work on the new website for neo4j and then had a great first community hangout at our incredible airbnb place by Cheryl.
On Monday Jim and Ian presented their Neo4j themed Dr. Who tutorial which was a real success. Next we prepared the Monday evening meetup and organized the furniture transport.Monday evening saw a full house at the Thirsty Bear with delicious beer and food.
We used the opportunity to look back at the first tiny meetups, and happily shared the growth this community has experienced over the last year. We now have 3,903 members in 32 Neo4j-related meetup groups that span 28 cities over 16 countries.
Pernilla, our newest member of the community team, had her first public appearance and enjoyed socializing with the community. Pernlilla takes on the responsibility of supporting the world-wide meetups.Andreas and Michael stole away from the party to move the IKEA furniture into the hotel to set up the community lounge. Unfortunately we couldn’t use the shortcut for unloading and had to haul everything from the loading docks into the deep vaults. Setting up the space was much more fun and we really felt like spreading the “love from Sweden”.
Michael stayed over night to set up the RFID equipment (readers and tags) for the unique conference interaction graph that we planned to create, and helped Adam fight the badge printers. Morning came quickly and the space filled with attendees ready for registration. Over the day we enjoyed the presentations, chatting with many people (seeing some of our community members for the first time), relaxing in our community lounge and having fun.
Our friends from Heroku graciously lent us the “Zen-Desktop-Table” which we used to render some nice pictures. The graph visualization didn’t work out due to lack of time. We hope we can set up the table together so that it is exposed over the internet and everyone can try their luck in drawing the creations.Andreas and Michael had fun rehearsing the stand-up “Cypher vs. SQL” presentation which finally helped Andreas leverage a graph database to talk to the interesting blondes at the conference, using his friend connections.
Over the day attendees of the conference connected via their RFID badges, and as promised we put the dataset online. Of course in a Heroku-App with the new public Neo4j Add-On plan.
During the day we had many discussions in the community lounge and also a few presentations, like the one on Neo4j Spatial by
The rest of the week saw our presence at QCon and another, the third, meetup on Thursday.On Friday everything wound down after a busy, exciting and tiring week.
Thanks to everyone who was there and made the week such a success.
For everyone else – see you next time at a GraphConnect or at a meetup in your area, and if there is none make sure to contact us about it.
The Neo4j Community Team – Andreas, Peter, Pernilla & Michael
