SUN Tech Days @ Brazil

The giant SUN Tech Days @ Brazil

First of all I need to mention that Brazil is promoting probably the biggest SUN Tech Days in the world, with more than three thousand participants over twenty different cities. With a huge effort, SUN Brazil promotes it every year, counting on the support of SUN Microsystems and some local heroes, with a special remark on Bruno de Souza - an unbreakable JavaMan who deals with the avalanche of issues with serenity and friendship behaviour - a privilege to have a so passionate person working to promote Brazilian Java community. And he is not alone, all over the country we have regional leaders working hard to organize the best event as possible. On the event of my JUG - the CEJUG Tech Day - we've done everything in a collaborative way, with community members producing t-shirts, professors and students involved in promoting the event and we - the coordinators - doing over night efforts to provide a great Java show on 19th April 2007 - with almost 300 people already registered. We've got also a great support from local sponsors, providing the event with a higher quality, which would not be possible without financial support. And, of course, there is some pending issues, like the certificates.

Certificates of presence - how to deal with that?

An interesting point of our tech days is about certificates. The attendants of the event are coming from all layers of the software industry, including students, professors, professionals and business people. Different people, different goals but since the event is during the commercial hours, some of the students and professional require certificates to show to the companies they are out of the office but still investing in their technical education. A burocracy, simple and quite reasonable, but something a bit complex if you think about that.

Two issues: first of all, the certificate themselves: they must be designed, printed and released in some way - that's the easy part, since you will reuse it several times. The second aspect about certificates is the controlling over who is really attending the conference. After some evaluation, we agree the controlling is not feasible without a lot of resources investment, so we decided to simplify the certificates process. The SUN Tech Days has a web application for registration, that includes the name and the e-mail of the participants. Well, we decided to generate a PDF with the individual certificate and send back to the registered users after the event. It is not bullet proof, but at least it is a simple, economical and echological solution. People who really need to get a printed certificate, can do it by themselves. We plan to use locked PDF - the ones you can't modify - to guarantee a minimum trustful level. Or use a PGP key to sign the original documents, or other great ideas about trustful documents that geeks love to discuss :)

Global registering of conference attendants.

Other idea I already posted here about a global server containing the registering of all conferences people had attended all over the planet - sorted by region, country or whatever it is required to be useful. In this case, a person would be identified by a unique ID, and this ID would be associated to his JUG. It is not useful only for dummy reasons like proving to your boss you were in a conference, but it can be used for marketing campaigns and discount programs similar to the ones used by Las Vegas casinos. If you are a frequent attendant of big conferences, why not receiving a privileged treatment on the next events ? Or why not receiving business benefits as a vip attendant ? :)

That's all. Remember to check the SUN Tech Days nearest your home, these events are really a great moment to keep in touch with your community.