As I sit here and look around the room at the number of people who have paid good money to be here at Content Week, where I am serving as Conference Chair at the moment, it just occurred to me how we can get more of these wonderful, smart, caring people into conversations with us at unconferences. We will likely do this with a future Social Media Club Workshop - if you try it, please let me know how it works.

The idea is similar to what I was talking about with Chris Carfi regarding how we might be able to fully realize our spirit of social entrepreneurism in the software industry - by providing one free license to a 501(c)3 for every licensed copy sold to corporations. Perhaps even create a buddy system, or just enable the corporate purchaser to choose from a list of those non-profits who have shown sufficient interest.  In fact, some non-profits who really want the software in question, would become evangelists, trying to find others who would also benefit from the software.
So what we could do with increasing corporate participation in unconferences is charge a lot of money for corporate attendees to participate - perhaps $1,500 each for a 2 day event. Each corporate participant would have ’sponsored’ the another under-funded, but highly valued contributor to the conversation, paying for their travel expenses, and perhaps even providing a small stipend. We would need to use a few hundred dollars to offset hard costs, but the end goal is the same - to get the right people in the room, to get the costs covered and to enrich our ability to learn from each other.  Perhaps we can do this with the Informl Learning Unconference we have been speaking about with Jay Cross - or perhaps use this technique to help Nancy White bring her incredibly talented crew of facilitators together.

Just an idea at this point - wonder if it has legs to run?

I have talked with several of y’all about sponsoring and/or attending the upcoming Web 2point2 unconference (tag is web22 btw) happening on November 9 and 10, so now is the time to do something about it.  If you are still interested in sponsoring, please send me a note and a logo to one of my email addresses so I can include your support in the launched version of the site which I will most definitely be completing on Sunday.

You can also register for $32.95 (plus a small service charge) which includes a t-shirt, 2 lunches and access to the Web 2point2 Release Party, which will be a blowout on Thursday night November 9. Special thanks to Dave Winer who unbeknownst to me was on an email thread circulated by the lovely Miss Grace and who blogged about it on Scripting News, also becoming the first paying participant.  Nice.

His quote was perfect, embodying the true spirit of the event

“Like all the cool kids, I’ll be at Web 2.2, November 9-10 in San Francisco. Like the web, it’s open to everyone”

More details coming very soon, but please do know that space is limited, nothing I can do about physics…

We have been thinking about it for a long time, but it is time to start doing the work and make this real. So this Sunday we are hosting a planning party over at our house with some beers and pizza and unconference strategy to figure out how we can blow the roof off the joint. Please RSVP for the party over on Upcoming if you plan to attend so we can make appropriate plans for beverages and food.

Given that we pulled off Web2point1 last year in less than a week, having 2 months of planning feels like a true luxury - we should all take advantage of the extra time to create a truly extraordinary event. Now that the conference for “that-phase-of-the-web-that-shall-happen-before-web-3.0 (no more, no less etc etc)” is now sold out, you have more reason than ever to join your colleagues for a bit of low cost, high value learning, networking and collaborating - unconference style.

Some of the details we have already worked out:

• We have the dates! Thursday November 9 and Friday November 10
• We have a venue! Much thanks to Nima Dilmaghani who has secured the Microsoft Conference Center at One Market in San Francisco (the same location as BarCamp San Francisco back in June)
• We have a registration fee!  $3.29usd - with all fees and other participant donations going to Creative Commons.
• We have some sponsors already! Microsoft, Joyent and my friends at Fleishman Hillard have already offered up their support, even though we have not finalized the sponsorship packages yet (that will be done on Sunday)
• We are thinking about organizing the day in 2 main tracks (because there are 2 main rooms at the conference center and we want to offer an opportunity for newcomers to learn and for old-hands to dig deeper) - but this is why we want to have a party to talk about it some more - Open Space is fine and dandy, but I am thinking of this more along the lines of facilitated conversations and a few World Cafe’s

So why are we doing this? Because hippy-crites like Tim O’Reilly who talk the big talk on open source, but hold all of these expensive, exclusive, invite only events need to see that there is another way.  Now, I have never had a problem with expensive and exclusive events really - if there is a market that is willing to pay for something that is fine, if you want to have a certain experience at your party, invite the people you think will create that sort of atmosphere.  But if the whole point of what you are doing is about being open and including more people, you need to find another way to do it.  Dave Winer spoke more eloquently about the problem O’Reilly is facing and it made me realize - I don’t need to and I don’t want to work with people who are so closed minded that anyone with a differing opinion is not allowed into the party.  I am an adult and I don’t need to sit at the cool kid’s table any more - I can sit with the good kid’s instead and I want to work with people who can disagree with one another’s ideas without being disagreeable.
You see, I didn’t realize that there was really a NOO list (Not-friends Of O’Reilly) until reading Dave’s post and talking to some other people who are in the know.  So I have not really spoken out about this because I thought there might still be some opportunities to work together with O’Reilly.  But seeing that there is probably no chance of this happening, I might as well write about why.
So last year, the night before Web 2point1, I was heading to the colors of Web 2.0 party with Will Pate when we hooked up with Chris Messina and some other folks for dinner.  It turned out that the other folkls were the people in charge of the Web 2.0 Conference.  We mentioned what we were doing the next day and before we could even order dinner, both of those people took off - suddenly remembering somewhere else they had to be.  Chris has been talking to them about running some BarCamps around OSCON or something, but I don’t know what if anything actually happened with that - I dont think anything really came of it since Chris did not get an invite to FOO Camp this year, but his other half Tara Hunt did (that is really pretty rude FOO folks).  Of course, that in and of itself says nothing and I may be wrongly assuming a connection there, but it just seemed odd.
So after the event I was reading this great Wired article on O’Reilly and I decided to write him an email to see if we might be able to talk - perhaps there was a way that we could work together since we shared so many things in common (other than me being cash poor and him having tons of it).  It seemed from the article that he was my sort of guy.  After all, I had met him and spoken with him on several occasions over the years and there are few people I don’t get along with.  In fact, at the Creative Commons launch during Etech a few years back, we had a long conversation about Open Source’s impact on the rest of society and its potential to influence collaboration in other industry’s.

Of course, he never responded. So I wrote again.  He never responded.  These were personal emails along the lines you would expect from me with all that flowery, spiritually aware goodness.

So I just figured he was busy and wrote it off.  I held out hope that we might be able to have a conversation some day and he could see that what we were doing with Web 2point1 and BrainJams was not anything against him or his companies, but instead it was FOR something. FOR finding another way of bringing people together to connect, learn and collaborate. Reading Dave Winer’s post though, I got the sense that it really did not matter and that I was just on the NOO list and would be relegated to it for life if that is really the way he thinks.

So let’s all of us on the NOO list, and everyone else who cares about the opportunity of this era come together and show them that it isnt all about the money - the point is still people!

Related Links:  Original Blog Post | Wiki | Offer your Expertise |  Request some Expertise | Help us Organize | RSVP on the Wiki 

I am excited and a iittle nervous about the Rent an Expert event this Wednesday July 19th starting at 530pm.  It still seems that a lot of other people have expressed interest in coming that are not on the Wiki - I don’t know if it is because they don’t have the password “yeswecan” or because they don’t know how to edit a Wiki or because they are not really coming but are being nice to me Whatever, the reason, I will be there along with at least a couple dozen other good folks who want to share their expertise with others so it looks like this will be a very interesting experiment.

The brief overview of the night is that people like you will be able to set up shop at one of the tables in the room offering your expertise in 15 or 30 minute appointments, helping people learn or do anything that you want to offer.  Sessions can be one on one or perhaps even done in a small group setting if appropriate.  People will pay a minimum of $1 per 15 minute sessions but are encouraged to spend more if the value they received was high.  Throughout the evening, everyone in attendace will vote on which charity will receive the donation of all the money collected.  At the end of the night, all the money and votes will be tallied and we will announce which charity is the big winner.  Also, the person who collected the most money will win a copy of MindManager Pro from Mindjet!

So now we need a few volunteers and could really use one more last minute sponsor since the company we had hoped to donate additional wine fell through (or rather, we never heard back from them after initial interest).  Volunteers will help with signage, managing the appointments, helping people get oriented when they arrive, setting up the room and a little bit of the cleanup.  Those of you who can volunteer, please show up around 5pm.

We will mix and mingle from about 530-6pm.  At 6pm we will do a little kickoff and the first appointments/sessions will begin at 615pm, continuing through till about 8 at which time we will collect all the monies and tally up the winners.  Make sense?  Do you have an idea that will make it better?  Want to sponsor or volunteer?  email Kristie@ this domain.org

Much love and thanks to our sponsors, CNet, MindJet, Rate It All, Stormhoek and Social Media Club. 

Looking forward to seeing you there! 

technorati tags:brainjams, rentanexpert1, p2p

While I have been thinking about this and talking with many of you about this personally over the past month, we are now moving forward with our plans for re-organizing our efforts with BrainJams and moving forward with Social Media Club.  For the last few months, I have been thinking about this matter constantly - trying to tap into my true heart’s desire about what I wanted to do with my time and what purpose I was going to serve in the world with this work.  In fact, to give you a real sense of how long I have been thinking about this, I actually registered the Social Media Club domains back in March.



Now things are pretty clear, we are moving out and we will be announcing more about our plans over the coming days.  If you want to know more about why we are making this shift and what it really entails, I have a long post over on BrainJams that provides all the details.

technorati tags:brainjams:planning, brainjams, socialmediaclub

There is so much going on lately, it’s hard to know where to start. For once, I will take the simplest approach possible - here is a list of some of the cool events we have in the BrainJams future:

Sunday July 2 930am-1230pm: The morning after Gnomedex in Seattle, WA I am helping Shannon Clark from MeshForum to organize a MeshWalk focused on three very important post conference questions we often don’t have time to consider: 1) What are your big takeaways from Gnomedex? 2) What are you going to do with it? 3) How can we help each other to make it happen? Meshwalk is a walking conference with some occasional stopping points for engaging with other participants in wider conversations. It is a great chance to exercise your body and your mind (and work off the hangover from the night before!)

Thursday July 19 530pm-830pm: Our rescheduled date for the “Rent An Expert” event. Thanks to Joel Sacks from CNet for really stepping up to the plate to obtain approval for us to host the event at CNet’s offices in downtown San Francisco (in the same room where I am writing this post from Bloggercon right now). I will be writing more about this over the next week, but please help us get the word out. If you are trying to learn how to do something with Blogs, Podcasts, Vlogs, Wikis, Photography or other forms of social media tools, come on over to our event Wiki and post a request. Likewise if you want to share your expertise. As Howard Rheingold says, “What it is -> is up to us!”

Thursday August 3 930am-500pm: Our next Bay Area BrainJams event! I have been waiting to announce this for way too long - I am so excited about this BrainJam. We are organizing this day long unconference to bring together Bay Area Social Media and Web 2.0 enthusiasts with members of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation. This is a great opportunity for our BrainJams folks to talk to real people who are doing really great work for their communities around the world and help them understand what is possible with the new world of easy to use Web tools. This event will be held at the Parc 55 Hotel as a pre-conference workshop for the NCDD Conference. Due to the costs of the hotel and the lunch that will be provided, there is a fee of $50 for this event to cover the costs that the conference organizers are incurring. In deference to our prior free events, the organizers are offering a reduced fee for this BrainJam (other workshops are priced at $75). I also have a few free passes for those who are willing to contribute their expertise and lend a hand with the workshop, so call me or write me an email to discuss.

4 Stanford undergraduates joined 60+ people in Menlo Park to discuss what they think about the latest technology, what they use and why. Noak Kagan from OkDork.com and TheFaceBook.com did an exceptional job leading a sharp, insightful and entertaining conversation across generational boundaries. Thanks to Andy Kaufman for recording this session. This one is for you Tara…