This evening I watched a short video, What's Next for SAP Community?, with Björn Goerke, Chief Technology Officer and President of SAP Cloud Platform, and Thomas Grassl, Head of Developer Relations, laying out the vision for the SAP Community. Here are some brief Friday night thoughts.

I have been involved in building and helping the SAP community (small 'c') grow for a long time, from mailing lists in the 1990's, through co-creating the original SAP Developer Network and seeing the changes through the SAP Community Network to become simply the SAP Community (see The SAP developer community 10 years ago, a post from 2005).

It's been great to see Developer Relations and the SAP Community moving under the wing of the office of the CTO, and with the backing of CEO Bill McDermott, there's certainly more than enough torque and momentum upon which to build.

The chassis has undergone some significant welding in recent years, but the current remodelling, while still needing some love and attention, is so much better for content creators. And without content, there is no community. I'm hopeful that the chassis and bodywork will go from strength to strength, especially with the recently announced 2018 redesigns, and we see the rebirth of interconnectivity.

What struck me most about listening to Björn and Thomas on the video just now was my perception of the sense of community being the strong, implicit anchor for the message and the vision. So I decided to transcribe the video, to perform a simple text analysis.

The transcription is here, and we can see from some simple textalyser analysis that the perception wasn't too far off - the top five places for word frequencies in the entire piece are (with occurrences in brackets):

1: "our" (12) 2: "community" (10) 3: "sap" (6) 4: "how", "new", "customers" (5) 5: "need", "think", "help", "content" (4)

Now it's a short dialogue so perhaps this analysis needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, but it certainly occurs to me that the core message, and the core task, is getting people and knowledge connected.

We can do that, can't we?

Update: I've since been encouraged to re-post this on the SAP Community site itself. So I've done so, here: Thoughts on what's next for the SAP Community.