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Former Member
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Together, Two Million

We knew it was coming: imminent.  We've been talking about it for the past few months. We've been watching the numbers creep closer. And now, it's final and official. A scant two years after reaching our SAP Community Network Reaches One Million Members! member milestone, SAP Community Network (SCN) has doubled in membership to be 2 million members strong!

Two million is a big number, so here are some fun facts to help put it in context:

 

What's 2,000,000 people?
  • It's approximately the populations of the last 4 host cities of the Winter Olympic Games combined (Vancouver + Torino + Salt Lake City + Nagano).

 

 

  • If SCN was part of the United States, we'd be the 36th most populated state, beating out New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, South Dakota, Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming.

 

 

 

 

How long would it take to count to 2,000,000?
  • It takes this YouTube video almost 9 minutes to flash through every number from 1 to 1,000,000 - so watch it twice and you've wasted 18 minutes to flash-count your way to 2,000,000.

 

  • If you counted every minute, of every hour, of every day, at a rate of 1 number per second, reaching 2 million would take you ~23 days.

 

  • If you started now, and spent a 1 dollar / euro / rupee / yuan per minute, you will have spent 2 million by about Christmas 2013 (3.8 years from today).  Or you could spend it all at once on a Bugatti Veyron.

 

How big is 2,000,000?

 

  • Two million M&M's = 40,000 bags = ~2.2 tons.

 

  • Who wants that many M&Ms? Perhaps one of the folks who helped arrange the return of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" after Masterfoods USA, makers of M&M ‘s candy, offered 2 million M&M's as a reward for the stolen masterpiece.

 

  • If you walked 2 million steps, you could walk from my office in Palo Alto to our SAP BusinessObjects team's offices in Vancouver... taking 12.5 days.

 

THANK YOU... to YOU as one of the 2,000,000 individual members

It's fun looking at this tremendous number in aggregate, but as Forget the 1 Million... two years ago, it's a number made up of 2 million "ones" ... two million individual people alot like me and you.  

As we continue to scale and add areas to address new audiences (such as SAP BusinessObjects Community, University Alliances Community, and SAP EcoHub, as well as all the new content areas across SCN), we promise to work to maintain the sense of "community" in the community. Over and over, we hear that a key reason that members stay involved in SCN is because of the personal relationships they've formed. SCN provides friendships, and for many of us it's an extended family.

The challenge for all of us is keeping that same feeling we had with 30,000 members - or even 1 million members - as we keep growing. Physical meetups like SAP TechEd help, as do social media extensions like Twitter, but it's the day to day interactions between individuals who met in SCN, the individuals helping out and supporting each other that really drive the feeling of "community."

So thank you for joining SCN, reading, participating, sharing, supporting... thank you for keeping our community valuable, relevant, healthy ... and growing.

      

 

It's a Marathon, Not a Sprint

We're just getting started on this journey.

As our membership hits these milestones, it's even more important to remember to keep nurturing the community. An expanding membership offers great potential - more peers to connect with, more opinions and experiences to leverage, wider reach - but quality, sustained growth takes work. It relies on experienced members to help guide and coach the newbies, and on the newbies to give feedback on what's valuable for them.  It takes some education, and some reminders (my recent blogs on Building Community: Policies & Rules Are Guard Rails for Safe & Healthy Social Networks and a Building Community: Expressing Core Cultural Values Through an Honor Code were spurred in part by conversations we've had about the best way to encourage Active Contributors without encouraging bad behavior).

With everyone's help, the community will continue to grow not just in membership and activity but also add value through new content, new experiences, new innovations, and new friendships.

 

Congratulations! 

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