Dallas Community Leadership Summit
Recently INETA asked me to attend the Dallas Community Leadership Summit (http://www.barcamp.org/CommunityCamp). The event was interesting and a great chance for me to see beyond the borders of Florida. I flew out of Orlando Friday morning to Huston, and then caught a commuter jet to Dallas. Before the event on Friday night the event organizer Caleb Jenkins (http://www.calebjenkins.com), Rob Zelt (http://www.robzelt.com/blog/) from INETA, myself and some of the other attendees got a chance to hang out at a few adult beverage establishments and talk shop.
The next day we got up bright and early and walked over to the Improving Enterprises (http://improvingenterprises.com/) offices as they were so kind as to donate the facilities for the event. Caleb gave the first talk, gave a general overview of lots of topics (see notes below). Besides the technical difficulties he was having with his laptop I enjoyed his presentation. It had lots of good content and was well organized. After his talk a gentleman (sorry I am bad with names) from Sabre talked about some software developed with Ruby to allow for Web 2.0 style online community building. The software was very interesting. The best part of there implementation of karma points. Yes I said it karma like My Name is Earl (http://www.nbc.com/My_Name_Is_Earl/). They use karma as a mechanism to encourage and reward participation in the site. The more karma you have the more features you can unlock on the site.
After a great lunch sponsored by INETA (http://www.ineta.org), we picked up with even more sessions. First up was a talk by David Walker from Tulsa on Running your UG like a Business. I found this presentation very interesting for many reasons but namely the fact that much of what David is doing is what we are doing here in Orlando (getting a 501c3, running large events, etc.) I enjoyed his perspective on things. After David was a girl from the local Dallas pod casters group, and again I apologize for forgetting her name. I enjoyed her talk a lot since she doesn’t run a .NET group. Heck she is not even a programmer. She is going through the growing pains of spinning up a new group and trying to build her base. In her talk she told us her story allowing us to draw parallels to each of us has gone through. After the pod cast lady was another lady that did something with handhelds professionally. She showed us a community browser, basically a replacement for FireFox that had all sorts of cool features to more easily work with community sites like Flickr and blogs. I wish I could remember the name of the software package, but I don’t think I am going to be giving up my IE any time soon.
The day concluded with an huge round table where everyone in the room brought up topic that were important to them. We talked about everything from getting venues and the participation of educational instructions to encouraging participation through the use of things like Community Credit (http://www.community-credit.com).
After the event we took the opportunity to continue the discussion at a local Mexican restaurant.
After attending this event and helping INETA run the 2007 User Group Leader Summit, I have learned a few things that I feel would make these events better. These thoughts are meant to help the community as whole improve in the future and not designed to diminish the work done by everyone that worked so hard to put both events together. I think these events have 2 goals. The first is obvious to share ideas about how to run user groups. The less obvious but perhaps more important is the fact that UG leaders from a given area have a chance to meet and build relationships. These relationships are very important in the business of running a user group as it is only with the help of the surrounding communities can you build big events like the 5 annual CodeCamps we have in Florida.
It is great to get a bunch of UG leaders in a room. We all seem to have something to say, boy do we. It is very important at these events to find the balance between presentation and participation. As is always the case when I give a presentation there is someone smarter then me in the audience, but unlike technical presentations I feel that it is important to give everyone a chance to voice there opinions about the topic at hand. I not only want to hear how the speaker solved a given problem, I want to hear how everyone in the room solved the same problem. It is also good that INETA has the ability to cross pollinate these events to prevent idea incest in a given community. (idea incest what a great term!!) Basically when people are brought in from other areas it gives the local community a chance to see another viewpoint instead of the same things over and over again. That is also why I enjoyed seeing people from outside the .NET community at the event. Just as people from different locations bring in new ideas, people from different technology areas can help avoid idea incest.
Now that we have an opportunity to get ideas from all over the community, we need a little scaffolding to help keep us organized and ensure that we have enough time to cover many different aspects of running a user group. I feel that having an outline of what should be covered at one of these events prevents it from becoming a free for all and helps to spur the imaginations of the wealth of information available at one of these events.
My final idea for improving these events is to designate a scribe. I know it sounds silly but ideas were flying around so fast that it was impossible for me to get them all, that is why it would be great to be able to get a “transcript” of the event at the end of the day that can be used not only to refresh the memory of those that attended, but to build upon for the next event. This would allow the building of a knowledge base information on how to run user groups. While I am as good as the next guy at reinventing the wheel, I prefer to not.
All that being said it was a great weekend. A big thanks goes out to Caleb for putting it together, and to the sponsors for providing the stuff to make it happen. I know I learned a lot and cannot wait for the next one.
Notes:
Leadership
Single strong leader
Committee of leaders
Incentive
For the members?
For the leadership?
How do you promote leadership growth?
Longevity/Health of the group
What can be done to promote group health
Membership
What can be done to increase membership?
What can be done to sustain membership?
Connections
What do you do to support member to member connections?
Sponsors
Where do you draw the line between the need for money and the desire not to turn into a marketing company
Longevity
How do you promote longevity of your group?
Give people ownership of the group
5 min talk about what you are doing
Have board meeting after the normal meeting
Pictures at the meeting/event - give a person responsibility
Different channels of communication
Study group
Three v’s
Voice
Vote
Vocation - put people to work
Give people title and email address
Facilities
When is the best time for meetings, day vs night, weekday vs weekend
New membership card with questions
Don’t create a center of excellence create a culture of excellence
$250 per day for event insurance
Income tax form?