I’m coming back on last wednesday Montreal Social Software conference meeting for myself to keep notes of this first meeting, and for you to know what is going on with this.
— Please feel free to add your comment and ideas to this post, your opinion will be of much value to us! —
I wish i wouldn’t have been feeling sick for this first meeting with the other guys, but still, we got things moving.
The core team consist of me, martine, michel, sébastien, sylvain, marc, Chris and robin.
So, what will the mssc be about and how are we gonna make it? Let’s see:
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Objectives:
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1 – Make blogging accessible: for amateur and neophytes
educate: we all had one thing in common which is to make this event available to neophytes and amateurs, because blogging is accessible to mostly everyone but not well known by the average people yet.
I do feel like blogs and social softwares are the greatest thing that happened since the internet is born and would like everyone to be able to blog in the next 5 years. I feel like i have discovered something much valuable and want to share it with people around, geek and to-be bloggers.
Problems we are facing are:
– why are there so less girls around the web and into blogging? we have to get them in, but how to encourage female participation?
– how to get non-blogging people to get into it? How could they get to understand this phenomena if these people are not introduced to social softwares and blogs? If we want everyone to have his own blog, we gotta work in making blogging easily understandable and mainstream.
2 – In depth exploration of social softwares: for experienced bloggers
Explore technological, social and cultural issues in depth (the future of blogging, the impact of social softwares on our cultures, corporate blogging, emerging technologies, wikis, let me know what else!).
3 – Encourage interaction:
We want conferences to be open and free, something more like ‘working sessions’ with people interacting with each other instead of the conventional 45 minutes talk and 10 minutes talk.
4 – The concept – making it different:
We all agreed we need to make this event ‘our own’, this means, not to recreate something that has been done. We need to find our own ‘voice’ and what will make this event unique and a must see. Being multicultural makes us different and it has to be reflected in the event itself. The value of our culture in making this event different has to be much explored and brainstormed on in the next weeks.
5 – Name:
We started to brainstorm on a name for the event, focusing on the idea of culture being in the core of the concept. Again, go on with your suggestions by posting a comment on this post or mailing me. Check here for submitted names.
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How-when-where-who:
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– The event should take place in June 2005
– we expect between 100 and 500 people taking place – this has to be studied more in depth. Will people come from qc only, canada or US and Europe?
– It will be a 1 full day event
– The day should be a saturday so most people could access it
– The conference will be opened by a evening cocktail kinda event on friday evening and will end with a party on the saturday evening.
– Lunch might be provided on location so that lunchtime could be introduced as a networking session, totally taking part of the day
– We want to keep it accessible and we’ll try to keep the entry price around 20$
– Different places where tought of, such as the MAC, la Sat, L’hotel des gouverneurs, Centre Mt-Royal, Quartier Éphémère
– Michel was named a responsible to look for the financial backend
And finally, next steps are to create:
– a intern maling list for the core team and one for all volunteers for communication purposes
– fix the financial backend
– all communication stuff (website, banners, mailing, promotional material distribution, communications with medias such as tv, newspapers and magazines)
– fix date and place
– create a team for the setup of the place
– more to come.
The wiki page where you’ll find all the info can be found here.