Thoughts on Istanbul Chapter

Last year, these days; found some people in Turkey and created Istanbul Chapter. We'll be celebrating our 1st Anniversary 2 months later. Excited as the first time we created our chapter.

It was a sunny day.

Called my buddy Fikret and told him lets create a small community among us. He told me that was a good idea and joined me. But there was a problem. We didn't have a sponsor, a place, organizator or an angel investor to help us. We were 2 guys interested in gathering people, like us.

Fikret was a supporter type. He preferred to stay behind but helping surely. So, I was supposed to play 'Leader' thing which my characteristics didn't provide. But the leadership in our chapter was never "Do this, Do that" thing, so I offered equality in behind scenes while playing "Leader" in front.

This approach attracted many friends and later they joined as well. Erdem Tuzen & Ugur Kazdal were the later joiners. The same rules was still: "Never order someone around".

Because when you do that for a free community, people will be examining the leader. Following to this; people leave the community. These guys are working in the sector and have names! So you cant order them even if you wanted to regardless the explanation.

One day, I told my buddy Erdem to make an event. But, I never had spoken in an event before, so I was pretty scared, in addition, our first event was LIVE! We invaded a Starbucks Coffee and recorded our session using a phone :)

Well, since we had limited resources that was the best approach we could get. The event surprisingly went good Attainders liked it, I hope :)

After the 1st meeting, we planned a second event: February 2013 Meeting

This meeting was to talk about Windows 8 Development. But most of the time, we were talking about ourselves and what we built. You know, Networking.

In May 2013,we decided to improve our eventline by giving our First seminar. We gave sessions about Design Patterns, Mobile Design, Windows Phone Development using XAML and HTML5.

35+ enthusiasts joined us at this event. It was totally one of the greatest event we did Not only we liked, but also the attainders liked it with feedbacks after the event.

That proved we had to do more events just like that. So we did.

Our next event was about Windows 8 Development, ASP.NET MVC and Azure Mobile Services.

Me and my pal,Erdem TUZEN presented Windows 8 Development Features. After our talk, Fikret AKIN gave a session about ASP.NET MVC which almost everyone liked it!

And in the end, Nadir AKDAG gave session about Mobile Services. It was a great talk and lots of demos. We liked it, too!

Well, this event was also a good one. The feedbacks I've received afterwards was good enough.

When the date was 29th of June, Android Event was upon us. Well this time we had 3 special speakers: Aykut KARAALIOGLU(Mobile Action,CEO), Gokhan CALI and Ugur KAZDAL

While Mr.Aykut spoke about becoming successful on releasing apps on market and getting noticed worldwide, Gokhan and Ugur talked about Android Development.

Gokhan CALI,Chapter Lead of Ankara/Turkey, spoke of Android Basics and how to start Android App Development. Nice session, it was!

Ugur KAZDAL,one of our founding members :) , spoke about much more depth topics and shared some cool demos and insights with us. I bet everyone liked the session!

After this event we went on holiday until 17th of September. Every year, after May, people go on holiday and the best time to make an event is 3 months later when the universities start. So we planned a pre-talk event with our speakers.

So far,we did 6 events(3 seminars and 3 meetings) and until 2014 we have 3 months. So we're planning at least 2 more events in schedule. Hope we can do it!

By the 2014,I'll be leaving my Chapter Lead and a combination of our speakers&attainders will choose a new leader. Hope he/she will succeed on it! So that was my pre-quit blog post to leaving Chapter Lead.

I'll be celebrating for the last 3 months as a chapter lead.   
 

"A Leader should know to quit. Especially how and when to quit! You cant be a leader forever. By doing so, you block the young generation. When the time comes, we should all leave."

-Ibrahim ERSOY

Enough with the touching talk! I've began to planning a special event to get drunk and dance. So wait for my another post about the party!