Community Leadership Summit 2009

Just a quick message to let you all know that today I announced the Community Leadership Summit 2009 on the 18th and 19th July 2009 in San Jose, California. The event takes place the weekend before OSCON in the same venue: the San Jose McEnery Convention Center. The goal is simple: if those passionate about building great communities can get together to compare notes and discuss and debate these topics, we will all benefit from better communities. The summit gathers together community managers, leaders and organizers as well as the projects, organizations, commercial vendors, ISVs and others who have an interest in building a strong and enabled community. The purpose of the event is to get everyone together to talk about the many nuances of building strong and effective community, such as governance, creating collaborative environments, conflict resolution, transparency, open infrastructure, social networking, commercial investment in community, engineering vs. marketing approaches to community leadership and more. The event is very much a summit: it’s primary focus is around discussion. It will be run in the style of an unconference; a clear and open schedule in which attendees can volunteer sessions and engage with other attendees. This will ensure the summit packs in a healthy chunk of diversity, covering a wide range of topics and perspectives. In addition to the discussions the summit will feature some scheduled presentations, panel discussions and social events. The event is entirely free, but you need to pre-register here. You can read more about the event at www.communityleadershipsummit.com. In its first day day many community managers have signed up to attend such as Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier (OpenSuSE Community Manager - Novell), Dave Neary (GNOME Foundation Board Member - Neary Consulting), Brian Proffitt (Community Manager - Linux Foundation), David “Lefty” Schlesinger (Linux Foundation Mobile Advisory Board, GNOME Foundation), Karsten Wade - (Fedora Community Leader - Red Hat) and John Mark Walker (Community Manager - Collab.net). Rock and roll.