First Friday: South Bay

Announcing a new Meetup for Community Leadership Summit West!

When: Friday, February 5, 2010 6:00 PM

Krillion, Inc.
607A W. Dana Street
Mountain View, CA 94041
650-965-0222

Please join us for the very first CLS West First Friday dinner. We will be ordering Chinese takeout from Cafe Yulong and eating at Krillion in downtown Mountain View. Start time is listed as 6pm and people are welcome to arrive then, but, the food will be arriving around 6:30pm. When you RSVP, there will be a chance to recommend a main dish that you would like included in our order. Here is an online menu for Cafe Yulong. This first dinner will be paid for out of the surplus funding for CLS West.

The Krillion office is near the Hair By Heinz salon at the corner of Dana and View streets. The entrance to Krillion is just around the corner from the salon with the entrance actually being on View street despite the street address being 607A Dana. There are several parking lots nearby including one right across the street. There is also plenty of street parking in the area. The location is also 3 short blocks from the combined Caltrain and Light Rail station in downtown Mountain View.

Primarily, this is an opportunity to join other experienced community leaders and organizers to discuss, debate and explore the many avenues of building strong community. At this very first one though, I would like to gather feedback on what people liked about our recent CLS West unconference *and* suggestions for how we can improve it next year.

After dinner, those that are interested can keep the conversation going over drinks at a nearby bar. The tentative plan is to move the gathering to the Tied House at 954 Villa Street from 8pm to 10pm. It is also an option to skip the dinner and join us afterwards at the bar. Unless you are joining us at Krillion before 8pm, it is recommended that you check the @CLSWest twitter stream for any updates on last minute changes in the group's plans before joining us for drinks.

Finally, we are looking for First Friday organizers in San Francisco and the East Bay. I could also use a co-organizer for First Fridays in the South Bay. This is something we will be doing on a monthly basis going forward. The expectation is the organizers for a given locality would become assistant organizers for our CLS West meetup group and arrange a First Friday Dinner once every three months as we rotate through these three locales. If this is something you would like to volunteer for, please contact Van Riper. Thanks!

Learn more here:
http://www.meetup.com/clswest/calendar/12480930/

Posted via email from CLS West's Posterous

We are NOT Family

The theme for our first CLS West event was "We Are Family." During the event proper, there were no complaints registered about this theme by anyone in attendance. However, I have since learned that several local community managers chose not to attend primarily because of this theme and in particular the use of the word "Family." If I had known that earlier, I would have never chosen this as our theme for the event. It is ironic that my intent in choosing that theme was to communicate that this event was open to all and it actually communicated the exact opposite to some people.

I still personally have no problem with the theme as I expressed it, but, I can not control how others choose to interpret it. I subscribe to the hippocratic oath principle of "do no harm." Although I meant no harm, it would be harmful to the CLS West Community to continue to use messaging that refers to "Family." Per my original intent of communicating that CLS West is open to all, the right thing to do is to refrain from that kind of messaging around CLS West activities going forward.

To that end, I have deleted the @CLSWest/family twitter list after first migrating everyone on that list to a new @CLSWest/community twitter list. If you use twitter and you would like to be on our community list, simply retweet this @CLSWest tweet and you will get automatically added to the list within 24 hours.

Also, I had discussed earlier on the CLS West Google Group the idea of having some informal Friday evening gatherings about once a month going forward and referred to them as CLS West Family Fridays. We will be moving forward with these informal monthly gatherings, but, the name has been changed to CLS West First Fridays and they will be scheduled on the first Friday of each month. The first one will be on Friday, February 5th. I've already setup a CLS West Meetup Group you can join to hear about CLS West First Fridays. Once you have joined the meetup group, you can suggest First Friday venues here. You can vote for suggested venues there too.

I already suggested a first gathering in downtown Mountain View for February 5th. The intent is to rotate these gatherings to locations in the East Bay, San Francisco and elsewhere based on your input. I hope to see you all at some future CLS West First Friday.

That's All Folks!

Our Sponsors

There were a few last minute sponsors that need to be included in our final sponsor banner. CLS West was a huge success this past weekend and it would not have been possible without the support of all these sponsors:

• Platinum: PayPal X
• Gold: Guidewire
• Silver: Adobe, Meetup, Oracle, O'Reilly
• Venue: DeVry University, Google
• In-Kind: Brisbane Printing, unconference.net
• Book: Innovation Games, Packt Publishing, Peachpit, Pearson Education, Wrox

If you run into anyone from one of our sponsors, please let them know how much you appreciated their support of CLS West 2010. Thanks!

To All Our CLS West Sponsors: Thank You!

With the late addition of Guidewire as a Gold Sponsor, we have reached our funding target for this event. Due to the combined generosity of all our sponsors listed above, we will be providing a delightful Indian buffet catered lunch at the unconference. Plus, we can cover the costs for professional high definition recordings of all the Ignite talks in the evening. Not to mention the morning/afternoon coffee, some healthy snacks and plenty of beer at the evening Ignite. Nor all the free books we will be giving away thanks to all the book publishers supporting this event. CLS West is less than 24 hours away starting with badge pickup at onsite registration at 9am. See everyone bright and early tomorrow at our first annual CLS West gathering.

Posted via email from CLS West's Posterous

Yeah! 25 More Free Tickets

We could still use a few more sponsors, but, we have a contingency plan to cover the costs in place now for an additional 25 tickets. If you were holding off from inviting someone else due to the event being sold out, now is the time to let them know about the event. They can register here:

http://clswest.eventbrite.com

That's All Folks!

Posted via email from CLS West's Posterous