Third episode of the Coffee Corner Radio (The unofficial SAP Community Podcast) is out!

[UxKjaer]

Hello fellow community members.

The 3rd episode of Former Member and my podcast is out. This episode brings you an interview with Craig Cmehil, who is the new head of the SAP community and Mentor program. We discuss his blog: blogs.sap.com/2018/05/22/hello-my-name-is-craig/ as well as touches the blogs from Graham Robbinson: blogs.sap.com/2018/05/13/what-do-i-want-from-scn/ 

And from Nigel James:
blogs.sap.com/2018/05/24/sap-community-start-stop-continue/

We hope you like it and remember to add your comments to this blog, shoutout on twitter on @sapcoffeecorner or add a message to the podcast via Anchor. We would love your feedback.

Have a listen here

[DouglasCezar]

 

Jakob and Former Member, congratulations on your initiative hosting such a valuable series of knowledge sharing sessions, providing the SAP Community access to the thinking and ideas from incredible people, including yourselves.

I really enjoyed and learned a lot from this session with craig.cmehil. Lots of ideas around the SAP Community and SAP Mentor program, the initiatives that are the pillars that make the SAP eco-system as powerful, dynamic and technologically advanced as it is. Both initiatives helped and still help a lot my own advancement as an SAP professional all the time.

Now, inspired by your talk, I have some thinking that I want to share with you and the community.

 

You talked about “what do you call the community?” and explored it in a really nice way, talking about SIT events, CodeJams, Podcasts, the online presence and the general ideas of doing things “out of our regular work” for the SAP world.

Regarding that, I want to share some of my personal experiences because I think they generated positive value for the community. In these experiences I’ve tried to create something “new”, surely helped and inspired by things that were done previously in other ways or other areas by other people.

First I created, with the help of some people, a new event called “Personas Day“. The nice  name was borrowed from a similar event that happened in England some time ago, but I wanted to create something in a new format, more like a CodeJam. So I’ve built the needed CodeJam-like tutorials and delivered the new Personas Day event two times in Brazil having already further dates being prepared for the coming weeks. I have done that because I think we must think of new ways to generate, share and deliver value to the community, touching on new topics, new approaches and new audiences.

The other experience I had was organizing a community event for people “outside” the SAP community. The main goal was to make them aware of the whys and hows of joining the SAP community. In this case, I have partnered with people from the startup community in the city where I live and created the “SAP Startup Night” event. We shared actionable information on how entrepreneurs and startup founders can use SAP technology to build their new products and companies. We have done that to show people who were not aware of the newest SAP technologies that they can easily use these technologies with extremely low or even no financial investment at all (as is the case with OpenUI5, HANA Express and the free tiers of SCP and Build).

There are also people inside SAP that organize extremely valuable monthly and open calls/meetings, like the SAP Community Call, the SAP Fiori Makers, the SAP Screen Personas Practitioners Forum, the SAP Fiori Practitioners Forum, the SAP Build Forum and all of them are creating and sharing real value for the community. I have been participating in all of them, sometimes as an attendee and other times as presenter. I have always seen tremendous value being created and shared by people in all of them. These initiatives are hugely unknown to many people and have the potential to benefit them if we can increase awareness among the community.

There is one more thing regarding community I think is worth mentioning because of its value. While I was doing the marketing of some of the previously mentioned events on social media, someone on the leadership of ASUG in Brazil asked if I wanted to do a presentation of these technologies for the local ASUG  group of directors. When I did the presentation I understood that the community is bigger than we usually think. I suddenly had the unforeseen opportunity to talk to C-level people about SAP technologies that were not fully understood or not fully explored even by them. I had a nice feedback from them because I was rising it to their awareness.

Given all that, I understood that we must see the SAP community as formed by not only us developers and consultants but also tech leaders, business leaders, startup owners and, why not, even the final users in some cases? We could stretch our minds and see how each one of these groups can benefit and collaborate with the community as a whole because each of them surely has something valuable to add.

The SAP Community and SAP Mentors have given and keep giving me the opportunity to learn and grow a lot. I could do a huge list of SAP Mentors who somehow taught me something, both in public presentations and in extremely fruitful private conversations, and they are from all the places including Brazil. Germany, UK, Australia, Spain, Switzerland, Italy, USA, Canada, India and surely somewhere else. Now I am looking for as many ways as I can find to take action and give back to them and also to new community participants. There are many opportunities to be built by each one of us.

Given the current pace of change, both technological and social, I think that the community is one of the foundations of where we are going to be in the future. We are living in an epoch where everybody must work hard to upskill or reskill themselves. Both the community and the mentor programs are well positioned and surely in good hands to help people achieve that.

Now I have more new ideas spinning in my head on how to bring value to the community and I will surely keep working on that, so we can all grow stronger. Let’s keep in touch!

Douglas

[Jelena]

This is what I call "a blog in a comment"! 🙂

Thanks for sharing!

[DouglasCezar]

Hello, thank you, Jelena!

I've been observing how people contribute to the community and now I am doing my best to do the same. I really like the experience of sharing with others what I had already learned when it helps them to achieve good things.

You know that now I am thinking that I should really write a blog on how nice it has been for me, but I will take a few more steps working with the community before doing this.

 

Thank you very kindly,

Douglas

[UxKjaer]

Hi Douglas,

Thanks so much for you comment. I have followed your exciting blogs around arranging the sap inside track and also personas day. We were close to having in on our podcast back in March. Maybe we could get you on sometime in the future to share your experience.

I completely agree that the sap community is not only for devs or Consultants, but an open eco system that continues to grow. Hence why we are trying to support in any way we can with the podcast. Your comments also links nicely to Craig's comments about the members of the community doesn't always have to be super active contributors, but also just someone looking for an answers. And we should embrace them all and be role models for how we can all lift this great community in union to new unforeseen heights.

[DouglasCezar]

Hi Jakob,

Thank you for your kind words, it's such an honor to know you've been seeing what I have been doing with the community. For a few years I just observed and learned but once I began to take action to share knowledge and make new things happen, the experiences have been so great that I can only think of doing more.

I think that each person is at their own time with the contributions they can do to the community. Some are learning, some are sharing, some are creating. I think it is important to recognize that it empowers us and do our share to perpetuate this cycle.

We are in a moment of change such as never before and I think that the Community is a way to keep together and grow stronger.

 

Cheers,

Douglas