Folks, go and take a look at [Linux Against Poverty](https://linuxagainstpoverty.org/).

Ken Starks recently got in touch with my colleague Robbie Wlliamson, who then passed this on to me and I wanted to raise some awareness.

If you are anywhere near Austin, go and check it out. If you are not near Austin, find someone who is and tell them. If they already know tell someone else. 🙂

*This blog entry is a little delayed after a crazy week of the Community Leadership Summit, then OSCON, then a weekend away for some much needed decompressing*.

Last weekend the very first [Community Leadership Summit](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/) happened in San Jose and what a weekend it turned out to be. The idea for the event was inspired by what I felt was a bit of a lack of independent best practise flowing between community leaders. Like many others I would travel to different conferences and shows, and much of the discussion around building awesome community was very much vendor-driven. We would all be talking about our specific communities and the specific achievements we had made. While this is fine and entirely understandable, what was lacking was an environment in which community leaders could share best practise and *stories*.

*Stories* are vessels of best practise: they are little wrapped up nuggets of information that can flow easily between people. They typically encase not only a meaning or lesson to be learned, but an experience that justifies and emphasizes the learning. We all naturally share stories and we all naturally learn from them, and I was keen to build an environment in which we could share these stories, share ideas and opinions on building great community and meet and greet new friends. This was the core of what I was hoping to achieve with the Community Leadership Summit.

*The schedule for one of the days*.

To do this I put together the [website](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/) and planned for an unconference: an event in which the attendees define the schedule at the event itself. I spent some time getting the nuts and bolts for the event in place such as a collaborative place to share session ideas and information (the [wiki](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/wiki/)), communications channels (the [mailing list](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/mailing-list/) and IRC channel), and organizing the event itself such as resources, timetables, printing, the schedule area, session cards, projection, audio and other elements.

A key part of the organizational challenge was finding sponsors to provide support for the event. Some things needed paying for, but I was intently keen to maintain the editorial ethos and vendor-neutral nature of the event. I was conscious to not let over-eager marketing departments from sponsors dictate the content of the event, but to also provide a useful opportunity for that sponsor to demonstrate their support for an event that promotes community building and best-practise. Every one of the sponsors absolutely supported this ethos and were happy to contribute to the event. This included:

* [O’Reilly](https://www.oreilly.com/) – provided the conference space and lanyards.
* [Alfresco](https://www.alfresco.com/) and [SourceForge](https://www.sourceforge.net/) – provided coffee.
* [Canonical](https://www.canonical.com/) and [Monty Program AB](https://www.askmonty.org/) – provided equipment.
* [Ragga-Wear.com](https://ragga-wear.com/) – provided the rather spanky-gorgeous t-shirts.

With the logistics of the event pretty much ready to roll I was keen to see how many people would join us. My hope was for around 40 – 60: I felt this would give us a good group for discussion. If we managed to get 100 this would be even better.

At 7am on the Saturday morning I showed up with my wife and our excellent team of volunteers (Grant Bowman, Karsten Wade, Mel Chua, Amber and Pete Graner, Kaliya Hamlin and some others who I am sure I have missed off) arrived and we got everything ready. Over the next few hours over 200 people arrived with the final count at around 230. I was astonished.

*Kicking off the event*.

I kicked off the Saturday with a plenary that explained the ethos of the event and then the schedule was open to the audience to run their sessions. What followed was a stunning two days in which a remarkably smart and diverse group of people shared their experience, their stories and their insight for building great community. We had a delightfully wide ranging spread of content across the sessions and most of the ten tracks were filled with sessions for both days. Although the net access was down for the first morning of the event, we did have pretty solid net access throughout the rest of the event (thanks O’Reilly!) and many of the attendees took notes for their sessions [here on the wiki](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com/wiki/index.php/Session_Notes). I am planning to gather these notes together into some proceedings for the event.

What was so noticeable about the CLS was not only the diversity of the attendees, with people from Open Source, green technology, media, urban regeneration, education, charities and more, but also the passion of these attendees to engage and share with others at the event. Our attendees were not only sharing ideas and insight, but also chomping at the bit to meet and help others to get the most out of the event. There was just a *good people vibe* hovering over the event for the entire weekend and I was absolutely delighted to feel that: this was exactly what I was hoping for, and it was our incredible attendees who made that happen.

*One of the many discussion sessions*.

While the response to the event was tremendous throughout the weekend itself, I was conscious to see what the response would be in the write-ups, blog entries, Twitter/identi.ca comments and more. The true measure of an event is not what is said to the face of the organizer, but what is written afterwards. Fortunately, the response continued to be incredible positive. Here are some of the write-ups:

* [Andy Oram](https://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/07/community-leadership-summit-th.html)
* [Onno Kluyt](https://onno-consulting.com/2009/07/community-leadership-summit/)
* [Sara Ford](https://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2009/07/20/community-leadership-summit-trip-report.aspx)
* [Mike Slinn](https://www.mslinn.com/blog/?p=308)
* [Mark Williams](https://socialvoice.liveworld.com/blog-entry/Social-Net/Relapse-Recovery-Community/1100001139)

You can also see a summary of the tweets from the CLS [here](https://search.twitter.com/search?q=”community+leadership+summit”) – skip on a few pages to see the tweets from the event itself.

So all in all, I am really happy with the event and I want to thank all of the fantastic folks who made it what it was, both attendees and those helping to run it. I have already started making some initial plans for next year’s event. I am looking forward to what I hope to be one of the most interesting and important annual fixtures for community builders, leaders and managers.

*Thanks to Jim Grisanzio for the [photos](https://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/community_leadership_summit_photos)*.

One of the attributes in the Free Software, Open Source and Free Culture world that I am most proud of is the seeming openness and accessibility in the patch-work of communities that form this inspiring landscape. Every day we hear wonderful stories of people joining these communities, furnished with the opportunity to collaborate and having their contributions make a difference to the very community they joined. These stories often talk of openness, transparency, equality and meritocracy, yet as many have acknowledged over the years, the number of women participating in these communities is still worryingly low.

Typically when I hear of a problem I tend to naturally latch into problem-solving mode. You know how it goes: you perform some research into the topic, talk to the key stake-holders, build a strategy around a solution and seek to implement that solution by working with said stake-holders. While this approach can work for projects and project management, it doesn’t really wash with understanding and improving a social phenomena. When I started working in community I used this approach with most issues as they were typically project and goal-orientated.

Hindsight though has taught me that with social patterns and misnomers, the real challenge is learning how to listen and *really* understanding the problems, drivers and environmental influences, not just *assuming* you understand. I get the impression that many of us (and I am included here) *think* we understand the issues but we are often basing our knowledge on a limited pool of input and experience. As such, I am trying to mentally switch gears away from my natural problem-solving mode and instead of finding solutions I want to myself better understand the scope of the problem about why fewer women are involved in Open Source than men.

To do this I am going to be gathering feedback from a diverse range of places. Traditionally this feedback has come from people who I have actively engaged with or who have engaged with me around this topic, and this has mostly included some participants in projects such as Ubuntu Women and Linuxchix as well as female friends and colleagues who work inside and outside of IT. While a great source of opinion and feedback, I feel like I need to (a) engage in these discussions again but with this renewed perspective, but also (b) there are many women who I have not sought input from and I feel I need to expand my reach and speak to women involved in other communities, other collaborative mediums (such as Free Culture art, design, music and social media projects) and from a greater breadth of cultures, countries and backgrounds. While I unfortunately don’t have the time to turn this into a full research project, if nothing else it will help me as one voice on the Internet, understand the issues better and help me be a more effective participant in these discussions.

I used my trip to Gran Canaria as an opportunity to gather some of this feedback (thanks to everyone who I spoke to there) and since I have been home I have been kicking off some phone calls and IRC discussions on this topic. I have already had some really interesting discussions that have already been eye-opening. I am also planning on running a few sessions on this topic this weekend at the [Community Leadership Summit](https://www.communityleadershipsummit.com) in San Jose which I have put together to discuss community growth, leadership and best practice.

If you are a woman involved in technology, I would love to gather your thoughts too either in a private discussion or feel free to post a comment on this entry.

In a world where most companies would give their hind teeth to get your email address into their marketing database, it was refreshing to see this from [VMWare](https://vmware.com/):

> Thank you for your past interest in VMware. As part of our routine scheduled maintenance, we will be removing email addresses and associated subscription information from our marketing database for contacts who have not updated their profile and/or subscription preferences within the last 6 months.

> If you would like to remain on our mailing list and wish to receive updates on news, specific solutions, offers and much more, then please update your current profile.

This is great: it clearly states that if you are not engaging with VMWare, they won’t spam you. Good work. Let’s see more of this from other companies.