The Business Value generated by our Community

As many of you have seen, I have attended and spoken at a number of Community events over the last couple of weeks - and there are still a few more planned for Oct-Nov. I am often asked why I spend so much time on the road, travelling all over the world for those events. Especially two questions keep coming up:

1. Why do you do this/What's in it for you?
2. Do you make any money from all of those trips and conferences?

The answers to those two questions are very simple and straight-forward:

1. I gain more knowledge , and learn more from the folks attending and speaking in one day, than I would in one week if I was only studying documentation, videos, and blog posts.
2. No, I do not make any money from speaking but I make a lot of connections, and build life-time relationships with Microsoft employees, Community members and Partners.

And third, I feel that I am able to give back to the community, by helping bridge the chasm between Knowledge Management, as an art and a science, and Microsoft AI-powered Knowledge solutions that will accelerate and grow Business Value and ROI for both the business- and the tech side of an organisation. Making that connection is my biggest personal and professional driving force and motivational factor in this equation.

It's not money. It's not fame. It's not power. It's having an impact and helping organisations grow the collective knowledge and ROI on investments they have made, that is my no. 1 driver.        

CollabDays events are a fantastic opportunity for tech nerds, novices and senior experts, to meet, connect and learn from one another. We come together because we share passions and interests in various Microsoft technologies and the secret ingredient to the output is the combination of Tacit- Conversational- and Explicit knowledge. The Conversational Knowledge being the main accelerator for knowledge transfer IMHO.

CollabDays events are free of charge! There are no registration fees or donations required.         

Food and beverages are usually provided throughout the day and often there is a social event/dinner at the end of the event, to allow for conversations to continue and more knowledge to be shared and transferred. They are all funded by volunteer work (planning and execution of the events) by Microsoft MVPs, and Microsoft Partners and event sponsors, enabling the Community to execute those events free of charge for all attendees.

Another key player is a company called run.events that have created a community- and event management platform and app, which is also offered to anyone planning a Community event free of charge. This is where agendas and session abstracts, speaker bios, session content and session feedback all comes together. And here you can connect and chat with other attendees and speakers too of course!

So far this year, I have spoken at three of the CollabDays events:

• The North American Cloud & Collaboration Summit
• CollabDays Portugal
• CollabDays Bletchley Park

And I have at least one, maybe two more this year:

• CollabDays New England (Registration is open! The event is Oct 18, 2024, in Burlington (MA))
• CollabDays Oslo (Registration and Call for Speakers is open! The event is Nov 30, 2024, in Oslo)

I hope this article will drive some awareness of this incredibly valuable resource that is available to all of you, and that it will encourage more people to attend these events. And potentially also plan another CollabDays event in your home city?

The full list of planned (post and future) events is available on the CollabDays Events page, with more events in 2025 continuously added as they get scheduled. Hope to see you at one soon!