Last Saturday it was the day of the 3rd Italian ALT.NET Conference, held in Milano, and it’s now time to think about it, and learn for the next future conferences.

The room was completely full, with around 45-50 people that attended the conference, and I think this shows how people are getting interested in the topics covered during the session. It was a big increase from the first 10 people conference.

We experimented with 3 different way of presenting the sessions:

• Complete OpenSpace discussion for topics we thought everybody knew something about (Domain Driven Design)
• Introduction + openspace discussion for topics that someone knew and other people didn’t know (User Stories, Testing and Acceptance Tests)
• Traditional “one-way” presentation for new topics (IronRuby)

And given my personal opinion and from what I heard at the conference, it is not possible to do the total opensource discussion because there will always be someone that doesn’t know anything about the topic… and in the DDD session, half of the people preferred not to talk and many of these said that they didn’t learn what DDD is, so I think that way of presenting is a failure: negative feedback is the best feedback, so we can improve for the next conference. And we will make sure that every topic has at least a 10 minutes introduction so that everyone knows what we are going to discuss about.

The conference was free to attend, but we accepted donations to cover the expenses (room and prizes were offered by the sponsors). We made it, and we even collected more money than needed, and we decided to make a donation to an OpenSource project ourselves. The project was voted among five projects (Castle, Ninject, RhinoMocks, Spark View Engine and MbUnit/Gallio) and the 45 people at the conference decided to give the 45€ to Ayende’s RhinoMock.

We filmed all the day, and I’m now in the process of trimming, cutting, editing, converting and uploading the sessions. All are in Italian, but the one held by Ivan about IronRuby is in English.

All the slides (they are all in English) and demos are already available for download at the SVN repository of the conference: http://code.google.com/p/ugialtnet3/source/browse/trunk/

And finally, as a way to thank everyone that organized the event, the speakers, the people that made a donation and the sponsors, we made a short introductory movie that we projected before the beginning of the event.

Italian ALT.NET Conference Introduction from Piyodesign on Vimeo.

Stay tuned for more videos, and hope to see someone else from the “traditional” Italian .NET community next time.