Bay Area Mobility Forum
Things are, as always, insanely busy at the moment.
So continuing the thought from Saturday, I think I've gotten some great reception to the idea of having an "un-conference"/get together about mobility. Since I'm up in Emeryville and not technically in Silicon Valley, I decided to call it the Bay Area Mobility Forum. I just registered mobilityforum.org as well.
Now, what's the best way to organize online? There's three ways I can think of - I can:
1) Start a Yahoo Group. But I think that's aging platform. Yes, once upon a time it was cool, but now mailing lists are so passé.
2) Start a wiki. I could grab JSP Wiki and have it up and running in a matter of minutes. And I think Wikis are wonderful and cool and all that, but I may be too type-A to deal with the hassle of a zillion people editing pages without control.
3) Start a blog. I think this is probably the best option. And I'm not even thinking about using *my* weblog, but the new Blogger. It supports multiple authors, comments, etc. It doesn't supprt RSS which sorta sucks, but the rest is pretty great.
I'm partial to the blog because it's easier to diseminate timely information, comments are great ways of getting feedback without getting things lost in discussion groups, and by inviting multiple authors, I can - like Mobitopia - take the load off me when I flake out and move on to other shiny things that catch my interest.
In terms of the what the goal is of the get together, I think it's a great idea to copy wholesale from the OWC.
Thus:
The Bay Area Mobility Forum mission is to cultivate and accelerate Silicon Valley's mobile and telecom sectors through leadership, technology, government relations, research, education, mentoring, investment, recruitment, networking and promotion.
And free beer. Let's not forget the free beer. And pizza too.
So in the coming days, I'll throw up a blog, invite people who are interested in helping me organize this thing to become editors, we'll figure out a good date for the inaugural meeting (we can use my current offices at WaveMarket - where there's a conference room for about 50 people and a couple board rooms for sessions), gauge interest among potential attendees, figure out some topics to chat about and maybe get a few mobile-sector leaders to give a presentation, send some emails to everyone I can think of getting them to show up with their gadgets and other mobile toys...
Actually, most people will show up for the beer. I just want to see the gadgets. No one gets in the door without a cool toy. (Just kidding).
Comments welcome.
-Russ