i, quaid

On Friday I had a good chat with Jono Bacon, who dreamed up the Community Leadership Summit, and Mel Chua, community leader from OLPC and Sugar who is interning with my team this summer.  Unsurprisingly, Jono has a lot of stuff sewn up and ready to go, including venue courtesy of O’Reilly.

New and useful:

• Event wiki.  If you’ve ever participated in a BarCamp-style event with pre-planning on a wiki, that’s what this is about.  Pitch ideas in advance, find people with similar talk suggestions, pair up, and wow-the-world.  Plus it’s good for travel planning, car sharing, where-to-eating, and so on.
• Lots of people attending.  Looks like over 150 have signed up, meaning we’ll have a good number actually show.  Although not an explicit goal of the first conference, we’d love to see people from outside of high-tech.  Lots of communities with volunteer and paid leaders out there.
• Think of the CLS as an upstream leadership project.  It is a neutral space where people from any community can contribute ideas and grow materials, content, processes, friendships, and so forth that we all benefit from downstream.

One thing I’ve appreciated is that Jono has been working to keep the event very neutral, including skipping the usual round of high-finance sponsorship seeking.  We figure, for a free event we can be a bit more lean in terms of what is supplied.  Example – expect to take a lunch break and walk outside to downtown San Jose with the group instead of having an expensive catered lunch.  At the end of the event, we’ll have an all-hands session to go over how the event went and plan what we want to do next time.

That said, if anyone who has the (perceived) neutrality of an O’Reilly wants to sponsor a few things, such as coffee service on one day or event lanyards, contact one of us organizers and we can see if it fits.

One idea I had for lanyards was, bring your own.  How many do you have collecting dust hanging in your home office or jammed in a drawer somewhere?  Heck, I might be able to provide lanyards for the whole event!

See you there?