TL;DR I have created a new Meetup.com group to curate and aggregate the important Microsoft events happening in Australia. Join it to keep up to date on what is happening in your area. http://www.meetup.com/Microsoft-events-in-Australia

The situation

I have been involved in the Australian developer community for 10+ years now. While there is a lot of talent and passion in the community, there has always been the issue of event discoverability. While there is an issue on a per user group level (I will tackle this in a future blog post), no where has this fragmentation been worse than with Microsoft.

I like to think of myself as a very informed dev community member, and I try to keep up with what major events are going on but too often there are big events that slip by without being aware it was even on. I am a Microsoft MVP, I was a Technical Evangelist for Infragistics which required that I keep abreast of events that are happening, I am signed up to countless newsletters, websites, groups, I am frequently asked to speak at some of these events and I am still missing things.

To give an idea of just the Microsoft news sources I subscribe to in Australia:

Microsoft Technet Flash
http://w8.msdeveloper.com.au/ (for Microsoft Windows 8 events)
http://wp.msdeveloper.com.au/ (for Microsoft Windows Phone events)
http://azure.msdeveloper.com.au/ (for Microsoft Azure events)
https://publishwindows.com/ (listed Windows //publish events)
http://global.windowsazurebootcamp.com/ (listed the Microsoft Azure global boot camp events)
https://msevents.microsoft.com (which has 0 events listed when you search for Australia)
https://www.technicalcommunity.com/EventsCalendar.aspx (which has 0 events listed when you search for Australia)
http://www.lalaninja.com.au/ (A local DPE effort to aggregate)
MVP public Facebook group
MVP private Facebook group
MVP Yammer group
MVP newsletter
+ many more that I have forgotten

Long story short there are so many silos of event information, I’m subscribed to as many as I can and I still miss out on events and can’t find information on events that *I* am speaking at so I know the events exist.

Stop complaining, do something about it

I have brought this up multiple times without any resolution. So I decided to step up and create a curated list of Microsoft training events, web camps, conferences and any other big events (like DDD Melbourne/Sydney/Brisbane).

http://www.meetup.com/Microsoft-events-in-Australia

While there may be other ways to solve this, I decided to go with Meetup.com as it is the single best thing that has happened to user groups. Newsletters and blog posts can be tricky to send out and maintain, and on the consumer side they can take time to parse and get the information out. Meetup quickly lists out each event and the date. Simple at a glance summary of events.

So go, sign up. Spread the word to your twitter followers, coworkers, etc. The more involvement we can get in these events, the more frequent and larger the events can be!