As I had mentioned before on this blog we celebrated the second anniversary of the Chennai .NET User Group with a full day event on the 23rd of September 2004.
This was the first time that we had a lot of local speakers volunteering to do sessions and in the end we were able to do all the 6 sessions from local MVPs or other local speakers. This I think is a very significant achievement as it shows the growth of the local community and the self sustaining capabilities of the user group. One year back, most of the user group sessions were done exclusively by me, with a session or two per year by other speaker or MS people. Now I did not do even 1 technical session for the event (I only did the Key Note as the President of CNUG), but we were able to do a full day event with local speakers. This makes me tremendously happy.
The other major change this year was the high participation of the student community. Maybe due to the the big hype by Sriram or due to increasing realization among students about learning .NET, we had almost 50% of the crowd being students.
Well the whole event went of wonderfully well, with over 320 people turning up. (We were expecting 250 odd and in the end had to rush to order extra lunches)
And it was when preparing the Keynote that I found that CNUG (including all the chapters) reached around 5000 members. That is one huge number for a group that started with 20 members..:-)
A lot of good feedback during the event and a lot of technical discussions. We also had a device stall where we were demoing a new Acer Tabler PC so that people can see and play around with it. And for people who are into serious playing/gaming (sounds oxymoronic) we had a XBOX. The XBOX proved to be the most sought after stall, with a lot of crowding around to get a chance to play around. Both of this we got via a MS India program called the MVP Hardware Pool.
We had a book stall that was selling .NET books at a huge 20% discount. And ofcourse to end the day we had a very interesting quiz by Sriram.
And all of this would not have been possible without the support of all of our sponsors : Verizon Data Services, HCL, Polaris and Pentasoft. A Big Thanks to all of them.
Here are a few snaps:
I am happy for you. I also love to hear about the current # of the UG though I am no more part of it.
Posted by: Teucer | October 07, 2004 at 09:33 AM
Tameem, that is with all the chapters put together. I did not realize we were so huge till I started adding up all the chapters togther for the Keynote..:-)
Posted by: Anand | October 07, 2004 at 12:57 PM