User:Tomcat:CLS

Hey,

so i attended with Marcia the CommunityLeadership Summit (CLS) in Portland over the weekend and about 100 or so people showed up at the Conference. But in this case not the number of people interesting, more the People itself (some from Companies where you would not think that they have Community :) - like Community Managers from Deutsche Bank, Adobe, Microsoft, Openoffice/Oracle/Sun, Symbian & Meego/Nokia, Ubuntu, Meetup.com, Google etc and also one German Chief Editor Journalist of a big computer magazine (and in this role also Community Manager of this Community/Chats/Forums of this magazine) were interesting and important/valuable.

Sessions are organized unconference-style - like no planned sessions before. At the Day of the Event you can bring your Session Idea and post-it on a wall and just do your Session. So we did as Mozilla a Session on our Meetups in Mountain View and Europe/Munich and they really liked the idea and we came to the point that acting with your Community in Person is very important (beside all this online channels :) - even on a just regional base - and that connecting with other projects (like we do in Munich) is one interesting aspect.

Sessions i attended were very interesting and turned out that Mozilla and the way we do things is in a lot of ways is often a showcase for other projects. We got a lot of kudos and credits at this conference (was funny when they mentioned Mozilla as best practice a lot of times when i was in a room with 5 people and all the others were from OpenOffice/Oracle and Adobe :)

Also in one session about pushing, growing, empowering community we talked a lot about "rewarding" the Community and one result of this Discussions was that rewarding the Community with "prices like ipad when they would show up somewhere" or other "material things" is not always the best choice because things like "karma systems" etc can be abused and people show up or only take part because they could get prizes or swag - and not really because they want to help the project. Sometimes just saying "thank you for....." or giving people credits in newsletters etc would be a very effective way to encourage community - and is also sometimes more worth than a "material" rewarding :)

General Agreement was that Community is one of the most valuable Resources you can have - way more important in terms of inspiration, ideas, power and also motivation is more worth than any external company/outsourced source. Communicate with your Community and your Community helps you to bring your project forward.

I also got some take-aways for us and thats:

-> Feedback Sessions: At the CLS they had Feedback Sessions about the Event at the End of the Day. In this Feedback Session people could bring up ideas what went good/wrong and how to improve the Conference on the next day (like changing break times etc). I think this is a very interesting idea also for our Big Events like EU-Camps, Summits etc to act on Feedback at the actual conference and not just change things next time the event happens :)

- Tomcat