We're a couple weeks past Dreamforce now, where we had unprecedented
numbers of people passing through the Force.com Zone. I've been thinking about our ever growing community, and wanted to write about
how much we appreciate each and every one of you taking the time and
making the effort to come to Dreamforce.

During
the show, one of the ways we tried to show our appreciation, get a
conversation going with the community, and have some fun was through
our twitter feeds. Throughout the conference, we had a general twitter
conversation going with the #forcedotcom tag, and then we have a trivia
contest using the #forcetrivia tag.

During Tuesday night's
tweetup event, it seems most folks were engrossed in networking the
twitter community. As a result, there was very little participation in
the trivia contest. Fortunately for apexsutherland, he was able to
tweet a correct answer to win an iPod Nano.

Wednesday
was the first full day, and we had questions rotating every half hour
or so. We ended up with a good response
rate, and the first correct answer from our winner
picking script was stonecobra, who took home a Nintendo DSi! (Can you tell I
don't actually know anybody's "real" names?)

Thursday
the trivia game was in full swing, and we updated the frequency of the
questions to change every 15 minutes, which seemed to get more folks
jazzed about participation. In the end, after a full day of tweets, psplunker was our winner, also getting a Nintendo DSi.

The
crowds were in full force on Friday, despite it traditionally being a slow
day. The twitter wire was crackling with life and we wrapped up our
last day that afternoon. Unfortunately our winner, unbrelievable had
already skedaddled out of the venue, so we FedExed her the iPod Nano
instead of getting to embarrass her in public with our award "ceremony"
(if you could call it that, ha!)

In the end, the contest was tons of
fun! If you have suggestions for questions for next year's contest, DM
them to @forcetrivia. They can run the gamut of Force.com, from admin to deep technology, or just about the community in general. Maybe
we'll have a prize drawing meanwhile for trivia contest submissions!

Now that we've wrapped up all the exciting times, we're thinking about the more mundane task on how to keep our community a close, happy family during the rest of the year, and while we continue expanding in numbers… specifically:

– What suggestions do you have for keeping the conversation going all year long?
– How can we build a sense of community,and belonging?
– What kinds of appreciation gestures would you developers like to see happen? Schwag and socials, or something else?

Hit me up with your suggestions in the comments. Thanks for reading!