The Bulgarians are very proud about many things - perhaps even more about their ancient history than the more recent history and I believe they have every reason to be proud about everything. These last 36 hours I have been in Sofia (BG) to present a number of sessions with my great Bulgarian friend Svetlin Petrov. In addition, these 36 hours have been much like the rollercoaster ride that I have been “enjoying” this last weekend with my children at Walibi World (NL). Ride along and allow me to explain what I mean with this, I kindly invite you to read on.
 

These past years the core group of 180+ people connected by GroupWiseR have been responsible for organizing three EMEA Tours. And I have been so lucky to work with all of these great people as the linking pin also called “coordinator” or even “organizer”. Bulgaria was not included in our first Tour, however as I’ve known Svetlin Petrov (who was born in Bulgaria but often works abroad)  for quite some time he introduced me to Reny Karnalova and the other great people of the Novell team in Bulgaria and we soon decided to try to include their country in the Tour as well.

That might seem an easy decision, but it is actually not - please bear in mind that the whole EMEA Tour is run by volunteers like myself and we need to fund these events somehow. Adding another country did certainly raise some eyebrows, also to be honest as many people have strange ideas about Bulgaria being a backward country in a far away and sometimes even troublesome region. So the decision to include Bulgaria in our event list was a gamble, however as shown today not without rewards.

You might have noticed we are using a new website as well as a new name for our EMEA Tour and if anybody registers at www.open-horizons.net I get a copy of that registration in my inbox. Until 3 weeks ago, no (zero) people had registered for the first event of our Tour, to be held in Bulgaria. And I can tell you, as one of the coordinators of 16 EMEA Tour events and 6 Regional Summits, you’re on your way up in your rollercoaster ride. As the days go by you get nearer and nearer to the point where you want to abort and get out. And with my fear of heights, for me that’s even more true - if there would have been an emergency break button in that little car of the Goliath ride last weekend I would have hit it hard when we were getting nearer to the 46 meter high top of the ride.

But hey, my children were sitting next to me and everybody was watching for this first event of the Tour - there is no way you can back out and you have to trust the local people. So that’s what we did while Reny Karnalova and her team did their miracle work again - two weeks ago the first registrations for this event in Sofia started to appear. And one day before the event more than 45 people had registered, which is an impressive number for a relatively small country on the edge of Europe. So on my way I went, with my two (!) laptops, books, magazines, banners, flags, forms, several carefully prepared VMWare images and even a keynote, arriving at Sofia airport on a rainy Wednesday afternoon.

However, the rollercoaster ride continues to go up - after arriving at my hotel, I had to copy some of my images to one of my laptops. However, my external USB hard disk sounded like grandma’s ticking clock - no good, all gone, so most of my preparations of these last two days were gone. The good news was that my hotel in Sofia had a very decent internet connection, so I was able to start the download of GroupWise Mobile Server on Linux, GroupWise Bonsai beta and some other stuff (more than 2,5 GB) before going to dinner with Reny and her colleagues. Unfortunately, I missed one important detail - on leaving the room I took along the room key (obviously); however, I did not realize this triggered the electricity switch. So on returning after dinner later that night the roller coaster ride was going up and up again, as my laptop had gone to sleep and the download was aborted.

Meanwhile Svetlin somewhere else in the area had been experiencing similar bad luck, as he pinged me on Tuesday that the demo Utopia images that he had downloaded did not unzip properly. So on Wednesday night, both he and me in our separate rooms in our separate hotels were having fun downloading and preparing our demo’s until the early morning hours. After 2,5 hours of sleep Vesselin Yankov, one of the Bulgarian Novell team members, picked me up and we drove to the American University BG building, where this year’s event was being held again.

The rest of the day turned out to be the fun part of the rollercoaster ride - delivering the keynote on behalf of Novell and presenting 3 more sessions about GroupWise Bonsai, GroupWise Mobile Server on Linux and of course Teaming + Conferencing. Fun, as the responses from the audience in Sofia is always rewarding. They might not show their appreciation for what you present so much with direct feedback and a lot of cheering (like in some other countries). However, you will see that many if not all attendees indeed appreciate to be part of this event and of the EMEA Tour very much, in their evaluation forms and their feedback after the events has ended.

And this brings me to an important observation that was the key element of the discussion during dinner that evening with Reny and Vesselin - we should all certainly be more “Proud of Bulgaria”, “Proud of the Netherlands” and so on, but we should also start to learn to be “Proud of being part of Europe”. The Bulgarians have a very long history, while my ancestors were still rolling thru the mud in the river delta of the Netherlands, Bulgaria already had a long history of civilization and can be seen as the starting point of civilized Europe as a whole. Nowadays, due to recent history, the country might still show some signs of a somewhat bleak and dark period that started after World War II. Entering the European Union some time ago lead to a lot of internal discussion and even doubt, however their progress is very fast and the Bulgarians have every reason to be proud.

Proud to be part of the EMEA Tour - and yes, I’m personally very proud of being one of the linking pins of such a great series of events - together with my core team members Paul Van der Cruyssen and Herbi Lefering and all the great people of GroupWiseR, I congratulate Reny and her team on the delivery of a great starting event - you can be proud of that!

If you got to this point, thank you for your patience in reading this lengthy e-mail. I hope you don’t mind me spinning this story like this, and if you want to get rid of these stories, just send me an e-mail and I’ll take you out of the list. Otherwise, please share your thoughts. I wish you a very good weekend, meanwhile the rollercoaster ride continues and I’m glad to be part of that. We hope to see you soon somewhere in this small world.

Kindest regards,

Erno de Korte