Well it's less than a week away -- our first 100% community organized, managed and executed developer gathering for Arena called RefreshCache. I originally envisioned this get together as a very small group of guys (6-8) but we decided to open it up to other Arena community developers. Invitations were sent out about a month ago and we are now double what I was originally expecting.
Arena is unique, and although I've always known it, something changed this past spring when we collaborated with Joel and Daniel of High Desert Church to create a check-in system that works for both of our churches exactly the way we both needed it to work. Something happened when we broke away and moved our code to CodePlex. I think I realized that we are limited only by our fear and actions, and not by any one vendor.
This small group of developers who are gathering together next Monday and Tuesday in a desert town of Arizona are a unique group of developers who share the same goal: to collaborate and combine our development efforts in order to increase the fruit of our labor (my first public blog post). This has been a great journey so far, but the best days are still to come.