Over the weekend we volunteered for and attended the Social Dev Camp Event at the IIT campus on the south side of Chicago. It was awesome. 300 plus developers, journalists, entrepreneurs, investors, not for profit and industry leaders assembled to share their experiences and learn from each other. It  was a packed 2 day schedule including presentations, unconference sessions, networking and a hackathon.

The speakers/panels were a mix of high profile executives such as Andrew Mason (Groupon), Ben Huh (The Cheezburger Network) and Chis Messina (Google) and the cream of Chicago based talent such as Pek Pongpaet, Alex Bratton, Chris Pautsch, Ravi Singh and Pete Simon.

It was an interesting milestone for Paul and I as we met at the 2009 event. Paul had built a Weave to facilitate better networking for the attendees and as a result we discovered we were looking for similar things. Nine months later we have developed a great working relationship and moved the business forward a great deal.

This year we built on last years success and had a great response to the SDCChi Weave. We also learned a lot from the feedback and networking.

In all we had 151 participants but the Weave proved popular beyond the event itself. Over 4 days we had 440 unique users, of which 198 visited more then once. The average time on the Weave was just under 6 minutes. As always the weave will be available online long after the event to help continue the conversation and facilitate connections.

Bring on 2011 – we can’t wait to do it again. I’m sure Chicago will have even more stories to tell.

Both Paul and I would like to extend our thanks to Tim Courtney and Andy Angelos for organizing the event and letting us be involved. Nice work guys.