While I gather my thoughts, and put my own feedback together, I thought I'd share my 10Layer cohort Jason Norwood-Young's feedback to Philipp Moehring and Reshma Sohoni:

Hi Philipp

Please pass this on to Reshma as I don't have her email address.

I'd just like to briefly let you know what Guy and I thought of Seedcamp. When we initially signed up, we had in mind to look for VC through Seedcamp, but before the event we'd changed our strategy to try and fund ourselves for as long as possible. I think this was advantageous as we weren't really pitching to the mentors and could happily admit all the large holes in our current business plan and get real, honest and excellent advice.

I think it was also to our advantage that we are for the most part just "slideware" at the moment, as we're able to implement the advice from the mentors immediately without having gone down wrong roads to having to change existing business practices.

For these two reasons I suspect we experienced Seedcamp quite differently from the other startups.

So how did we find Seedcamp? My measure of its success would be the amount of change it has created in our business, and by this measure it was highly successful. In particular, our marketing message and pitch was dramatically honed; our pricing structure will have a severe review; our funding time-frames and the entire way we think about funding have changed dramatically.

Our weakness is that we take our strategy by thinking about the product and the customer. While this is still vital, we don't think enough about the business - it's a typical weakness for us idealistic startups. Seedcamp gave us access to people who think about the business first - its sustainability, profitability, risk reduction, and market perception. We feel significantly more skilled after Seedcamp (although still far from considering ourselves to be experts).

While every mentor was valuable and excellent, Sheraan and Stefan stood out in terms of strategy, Andrea was amazingly open and gave us an immense wealth of information, and Gareth was incredibly insightful. I'm sure Guy has his own list of stand-out mentors.

The most incredible thing about Seedcamp is it was exposure to experience that it would have taken us months to achieve, and probably immense expense. You guys brought us this amazing resource, for free, compressed into a day, and I cannot express my gratitude enough for what you've done for us and our business.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Kind regards
Jason
10Layer

If was ever any doubt in my mind (which there hasn't) about whether social media is able to build community back in the meat space world, it would have been dispelled today at the JHB Drupal Users Group first DrupalCamp. I've been around the block as far as communities go, and the comparison between the DrupalCamp of today, using social media platforms to get to the right people, vs. that of the Gauteng Linux Users Group (GLUG) 10 years back, has astounding return on investment.

Our very first camp drew a crowd of about 90 people coming in from mixed backgrounds, and skill levels, from expert brand consultants, who were just playing with Drupal for the first time, to die hard non-core-hacking PHP and Drupal pros, centered around a single cause: Enabling anybody to build better, stronger, more flexible dynamic website, whether behind the firewall, a simple brochureware site, or a massively complex data rich enterprise site.

Justin Spratt (@justinspratt) and IS Labs not only supplied the venue for the event, but also provided some crowd pleasing information in the form of what ISLabs does as far as entreprenerual support within the country, and the give back that IS puts together for us.

Charles Tanton (@foxtrotcharlie) presented an a great outline to the conceptual stuff behind Drupal, a fairly difficult mountain to climb, and did an exceptional job of it, being clear on how the Drupal framework works and what that looks like at the end of the day. Thanks to George Ziady from Springfisher for taking the beginners into a far more practical conversation of the framework, articulating and showing clearly a step by step guide on how to use the theoretical knowledge that Charles imparted, in a paint by numbers approach to setting up a Drupal based website.

After lolling around IS' braai area, munching on boerie rolls (with many to the vegetarians, there will be a salad option at the next one) and sipping beers (or in my case far too many Vitamin Waters), the jolly digital pranksters re-congregated inside to go a little deeper down the rabbit hole. One of Telamenta's developers Greg McKeen showcased the intranet project Open Atrium and the Drupal module Features,a module package management system that was met with, well, "OOh's and Aaah's" from some of even the more seasoned Drupalers, before Willem van Straaten, founder of eConsultant closed the day with his own personal rendition of the Lion King (I have reason to believe that a video of this may be available soon).

A special thank to the sponsors of this incredible first attempt to make the South African chapters of Drupal International as proud, if not prouder than our other contingents: Telamenta, ISLabs, Cerebra, Brandsh, eConsultant, and Springfisherand personal thanks to Charles Tanton for spearheading the Jozi Drupal Users Group and all other volunteers for making this event special to all that attended.

I do have pictures from the event, and I will be putting them up shortly. You guys did yourselves and our community proud.

Specification -

Name: Guy Taylor
Birthdate: 24 October, 1979
Geo-Location: Nomadic, generally between Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa
Company Alliances: Cognasium, Telamenta, 10Layer and Cycan
Email: guy at cognasium dot com
Jabber: guy at jabber dot co dot za
Twitter:http://twitter.com/xsyn

Output -

I help find the functional elements in a company by listening to the people who work there. I provide a valuable feedback loop to their issues by understanding them and their complexities

I am a behavioural theorist, analyst and change agent. The crux of it is I'm a people person, I like to understand the patterns around how and why people interact the way they do, and establish how to optimize people for their own lives.

I'm a great believer in human systems as fractal networks, so as we shift our perspectives and frames to view interactions at different levels, we see the same behaviours playing out in culture, and as we shift meta to that sub-cultural behaviour playing out in larger frameworks.

My influences are eclectic, though some of my biggest influences are the following:

* Neuro-Semantics
* Neuro-Linguistic Programming
* Open Source Cultures and Technologies
* Sports Psychology
* Business Management Methodology