After lots of preparation, sleepless nights and thrown in as a happy spanner in the midst of all other activities, the first GTUG Stockholm meeting managed to fly off the runway without as much as a single missing wing or fuselage.
I was on place at Ottoboni as early as possible, since I have had many years as an instructor, wise to the ways simple things can take a long time to fix in the last minute.
Ottoboni have floor 12 and 13 in a very 1998 kind of building. Lots of glass, space and white, wide tables. Nice.
Here's the final schedule for the evening:
17.30 - 18.00 Mingle. Getting machinery to work :)
18.00 - 18.10 Presentation Ottoboni /Google /Peter S.
18.10 - 18.45 Google Code. APIs and stuff!
18.45 - 19.15 Beer break (and some food)
19.15 - 19.45 Google Wave presentation / demo
19.45 - 20.00 Break
20.00 - 20.30 Android development (AR)
20.30 - Later Chat, breakout sessions, beer.
Me and Markus from Ottoboni dashed back and forth to aarrange chairs, tables, cables and whatnot. On a ussgenstion form Markus I created a quick Google doc which I shared with him, and which he opened on a portable inside the enterance to let people register themselves, and it worked! Or it worked somehwat, because it wasn't easy to find the portable among all the people pouring in, but we got almost 40 people registering themselves as GTUGers among somwhere above 60 attendees, which quite OK in my book.
Above sits half of our participants, waiting for me to stop taking pictures and get on with it already.
We got Daniel Rytterstöm from Google Sweden (right) to annoint our first meeting, and Markus Blomkvist from ottoboni (left) welcomed everyone to the posh venue. In between them we see a cautious-looking local JavaScript hero Robert Nyman.
We were actually supposed to have an Engineer from Google to speak on some topics, but he had to pull the plug on some Gmail servers (just joking! :) so I had to speak for the entire event (as usual), but at least I couldn't complain over the quality of the speakers..
During the evening I took a poll on what theme people would like to have for our upcoming (TBA) hackathon, and I must admit I was siltenly rooting for a Wave hackathon, the overwhelming majority opted for an Android hackathon (which is really, really OK as well, naturally) and we're now trying to uncover the identity of a Google Sweden employee who is a truly savvy Android developer and can help me talk between hacks at that event. more to come on that one.
I want to thank Ottoboni for being such gracious hosts, for Google Sweden for delivering such large quantities of beer and wonderful, varied, small sandwhiches (watchamacallits) to the event, and of course all of you who attended.
Måns Jonasson (who helped me demo Wave) have some variable quality videos from the event taken from his non-Android mobile phone, and can be viewed here; http://bambuser.com/channel/MungoBBQ/broadcast/256538 (Watch out for that bearded fellow in the last one)
The morning after, I was whisked off to a two-day conference, so I felt I missed a lot of tweets and other commentary, but in all I felt that the event was well received. The next time will be October 1st, and I will put up a LinkedIn event for that as well, and mail out to all of you who registered in good time.
Also note that all GTUGers can get up to 40% discounts on any Oreilly, Apress or Packtpub book, if you mail me about it (I have teh s3cret c0de), since GTUG Stockholm (thanks to Stephanie at Google) is a User group for all three publishers.
Thanks!!
[Update: Ottoboni has a post up at their site with some more info and way better pictures: http://www.ottoboni.se/sv/Bloggen/Sveriges-forsta-Google-Technology-User-Group/]
Cheers,
PS
PS