On the Symfony Blog today they have an update on their latest community offering, SensioLabs Connect, a service connecting Symfony developers all around the world. It's been one week since the release and there's already some changes happening.

To celebrate our 1000th user on SensioLabs Connect in a week, we have just rolled out a new version that takes into account some of the feedback we had from the community after the launch.

Changes include updates to use Gravatar images if you choose not to upload a photo, fixes for a bug with email confirmations and a few new badges added to the system - "first 100 users", "attendees of SymfonyLive" and ones based on seniority in the community. A public API is in the works, but you can grab a profile in json by adding ".json" to the end of a profile URL (like Fabien's).

In this new post to the Symfony Blog, Fabien Potencier shares some of his thoughts about the Symfony community and tosses out an idea of a way to "gameify" the process to let community members proudly show off their level of involvement.

When I say "community", I'm not talking about just the Symfony community, but I'm talking about all the people that are part of a larger ecosystem that makes Symfony better. [...] The corner stone of such a system is a unique account where all information are gathered and aggregated. We already have such a system on symfony-project.org but it is quite limited as it is only used for authentication.

Related to this goal, they've introduced SenseioLabs Connect, a site for tracking accounts "on steroids" and the Symfony Community Awards that lets you nominate individuals for awards like "Best Blogger", "Best Support in the Forum" and "Best Evangelist". Voting is open and will run until December 24th with the winners announced in January 2012.

Lorna Mitchell has posted her second part of her "tips for [tech] event hosting" series (first part here) with some suggestions for the day of the event - those last minute things that might get forgotten.

As an organiser you should know exactly where you are going on the day and what you need. [...] As an organiser you see all the small behind-the-scenes crises, but if they are invisible to the average attendee, then you're doing really well.

She makes suggestions about the little things - ensuring name badges are ready, a posted schedule of the happenings at the event (not every event will have programs), check in on all of the tech like projectors, wifi and the like as well as keeping track of things like hashtags on twitter to see what people like and don't like more immediately.