JCertif 2010, the biggest community conference in Central Africa is over. One day of keynotes and three days of workshop with hundreds of people moving between them. This was far from a “classic” event! It was a mix of technical session, life experience and a bit of an adventure.
The conference took place in the impressive room of the Congolese’s parliament (palais des congrès) with comfortable large seats and individual microphones to make the conference more interactive. About 400 people from 6 countries (Congo Brazzaville, Congo Kinshasa, Togo, France, Canada and USA) attended the conference and classes.
The sessions were in French (the official language in Congo) and English and catered to the interests of audiences ranging from beginners to experts.
I opened the conference with a presentation about the social and business impacts of Web2.0, prepared with my colleague Yann Sadok at Fujistu Canada. Then Mike Levin, an entrepreneur and Java community leader from Orlando, Florida (Cambridgeweb, codetown.us) went more deeply into how to build Web2.0 applications. Mike posted some blogs about this here.
In the second half of the conference day, Horacio Lassey the Java Leader of Togo talked about Talend Studio an Open source Data Manager. He gave a great real life demo! Alexis Moussine (the JCertif 2010 guest star) from Oracle’s GlassFish team presented GlassFish and Java EE 6 (slides). See Alexis’s blog about his JCertif 2010 experience. In the end, Stanyslas Bweta who is a technical consultant at the regional office of HCR (the UN refugee organization) presented NetBeans IDE. Stanyslas was actually meant to open the conference but just before he boarded the boat in Kinshasa to cross the Congo river, he was delayed by border officials and missed the departure. Thanks again Stanyslas for doing everything in your power to get there before the end of the conference!
I particularly appreciated the JCertif University (3 days of free training). We had planned a training session for 30 people but on the first day over 100 people were standing in line at the doors! In the end around 45 people attended the session, some standing with their laptops in their arms, and a second session had to be organized quickly. It was exhausting but exciting at the same time to see how much interest this project had generated.
JCertif 2010 had a huge impact in Congo and all Central Africa 's IT community. We have been approached by government agencies to help (tools, app server and framework) in current and future Java EE projects.
The next event will take place in August 2011 at Brazzaville. Hope to see you there.
