Our 2023 journey

December has arrived, the month in which I can slow down and stop to take a moment to look back on everything I've experienced this year. 

January was a month full of news and in which I started this new path as Community Program Manager Europe in Codemotion, if I think that all this time has already passed it makes me really strange. 

It seems like yesterday that I started to get to know the great Codemotion team and that Mara told me about the growth objectives for this year. 

The results we have achieved on the community side are not few and by no means trivial and I would like to celebrate them with you by sharing them:

Events

First of all there are the events, the result of the work of the entire Codemotion team who achieved truly exciting results!

During Codemotion Milan we dedicated an area entirely to the community where we had: 

• + 25 Tech buddies: people who are experts in various technologies who were available to answer doubts and discuss the various topics; 

• a new scholarship program dedicated to members of groups under-represented in the tech world and to those who cannot afford the costs of the conference; 

• a photo contest with fantastic prizes made available by community sponsors; 

• lightening talk sessions in which those who participated in the conference had the opportunity to go on the codemotion stage and propose their speech, prize quizzes, a slide roulette improvisation session in which we challenged each other with jokes on random slides and random topics with a single objective: to entertain the audience; 

• a community wall that gathered the presence of all the communities present at the conference; 

• live shows in the presence of all the ongoing series; 

• the wannabe speaker program in which our team of Ambassadors followed people who had never brought a talk to a conference stage; 

• a section dedicated to videos to collect your impressions of the event; 

• a dedications book; 

• the presentation of the book Open Surce, a workshop on how to program a Telegram bot to do a retrospective (thank you Manuel for making this dream of mine come true), and a panel on the presence of women in managerial roles in the tech world.

Good resolutions for 2024

The results achieved this year have been truly many but we certainly won't stop here. 2024 will be a year of consolidation but we will do our best to grow the community more and create new opportunities for members. 

So here are our good resolutions for 2024: 

• develop a mentorship program from the community for the community in which the exchange of skills and knowledge can be promoted thanks to the support of Contributors and Ambassadors; 

• expand the Wannabe Speaker program for Codemotion Madrid; 

• continue to meet in person at our meetups organized with partners and have stimulating moments of discussion; 

• grow more community members thanks to the Codemotion Contributor program and by sharing content of interest; 

• forge an even stronger relationship with partners by carrying out valuable initiative activities that can generate impact on the territory; 

• organize moments of discussion between members, contributors, ambassadors and partners in order to carry out new activities together during the conferences in Madrid and Milan; 

• continue with the second edition of the State Of European Tech Communities and receive the support of more European communities who want to take part in this project.

And this is all. 

Stopping for a moment to put your ideas together, understand what happened, seems stupid but it is not trivial. Very often, caught up in the whirlwind of the activities and projects in which we are involved, we struggle to realize the successes and leave everything in the background. We are focused on doing and we lose the small results we achieve along the way. I believe that celebrating certain goals does extremely well, because it is the result of a year of work, of many people, a great team, who day after day with the desire to grow and test themselves have created and are creating, in my way to see a great impact in this world: from raising companies' awareness of certain issues to mentoring for the professional growth of every developer who wants to change their career, from the creation of interesting content to the creation of new friendships and connections. 

This 2023 has been an extremely intense, rich, challenging and full of great satisfaction year. I can't even count the people I've met, laughed with, and helped and supported me through it all. Community is not just a word, for me it is a lifestyle that shapes our path. The value that people have on our journey is not measurable with numbers, but the impact they have, well that is indescribable. 

And for that I want to say thank you. A small word but with a big meaning. Thanks to all the people who helped me, gave me feedback, spent time to understand my questions and supported me, thanks to the community members who actively support all the initiatives, thanks to the trust of the partners and thanks to my fantastic team where you really feel at home. 

I would like to conclude with a phrase from Michele Riva, during the closing keynote of Codemotion Milano 2022 which resonated with me extremely strongly: "Wherever you go, conference or meetup, there is only one lowest common denominator that will change the your life forever: it's the people. What will change your life won't be the book you never read, or the course you didn't finish but the people you never had the chance to interact with." 

A big hug and... let 2024 begin! 😊

Michela Bertaina