Notes for March 25 meetup

Good morning meeting hackers!

This week I want to try something new.

Five topics. Divide the 1.5 hours into five equal segments. You’ve got 15-20 really smart aware professional interesting people in the room. What can we learn from this collection of people. Topics are concrete, not meta.

Ten examples. Here are 10 examples. If they stimulate ideas for you, before you forget, post a comment as a response. Don’t be shy — there are no wrong answers.

Editorial process. Put lots of ideas out there. There are already more than we can use. At 6PM, I’ll review what’s there and choose five, and also will choose discussion leaders for each topic.

RSVP by 3PM. The meeting is at 7PM in room 654 at 20 Cooper Sq, NYC. Please RSVP by emailing me, or post a comment here.

Looking forward to seeing you!

Dave

Podcast with Jon Glick, Manhattan FIOS survey, leading NYC blogs?

Good morning people on my Media Hackers list!

I love this weather — kind of a chill in the air, refreshing, and the rain keeps the drunks on my West Village street relatively quiet at night. This west coast transplant is still learning to adjust to the norms of east coast living. 🙂

I’m thinking about the format for this Thursday’s meetup. Obviously sometime in the next day or so I have to make up my mind. If you have any thoughts, I’m posting this email on the Unberkeley blog. Comments are welcome.

In the meantime, my podcast-partner Jay Rosen was sick yesterday so I called on Jonathan Glick to fill in. Jon is CEO of Tlists and a regular at the Thurs eve meetups. It’s 45-minutes and was recorded at our excellent radio studio at 20 Cooper Sq with the expert engineering of Adrian Mihai. I think it’s worth a listen.

http://rebootnews.com/2010/03/22/rebooting-the-news-45/

As a recent Manhattan transplant, I’m interested in knowing where you can and can’t get high speed Internet. My mother, who lives in Queens, has great connectivity, with Verizon FIOS. At least 20 megabits in both directions. I honestly thought they’d have Manhattan covered, and while FIOS is still the exception not the rule, it’s not quite as bad as I thought. Turns out you *can* get FIOS, if you choose the right neighborhood. Just what those are, we’re still figuring out.

http://scripting.com/stories/2010/03/22/doYouHaveFiosInManhattan.html

Yesterday I posted a question on Scripting News asking for any clues. I got quite a few!

One more thing and then I have to go to a breakfast meeting — Why is there no aggregator for NYC blogs? It should be easy for a newbie like myself to get acquainted with the blogging leaders in the largest city in the US. I put an aggregator together for the East Village, and could easily do one for the city as a whole, if we had a good list of blogs in the city. Anyone know of such a list?

http://east-village.org/

Comments, questions, suggestions, essays, pointers, bricks, pies …

Guidelines for March 18 meetup at NYU

First, if you will not be at the Thursday meetup tomorrow, you can safely ignore this email. Otherwise please read it. It takes less than 5 minutes.

A heads-up, I’ve tweaked the format a little to allow an exception to the no-promotion rule.

Details: Thursday evening at 7PM on March 11. 20 Cooper Sq, room 654. RSVP by 3PM on Thursday. No exceptions.

This week we’ll have a special format. We’ll go around the table clockwise starting with the person to my left. Each person will speak for a couple of minutes, say who you are, and talk about whatever you want to talk about.

For a few minutes we are all ears. We have to listen to whatever you want to say. But there are some ground rules. If you don’t read them you will be embarrassed, and you don’t want that — so read them!

We’ll go around the table clockwise starting with the person to my left. Each person will speak for a couple of minutes, say who you are, and talk about whatever you want to talk about.

For a few minutes we are all ears. We have to listen to whatever you want to say. But there are some groundrules. If you don’t read them you will be embarrassed, and you don’t want that — so read them!

1. You may not talk about yourself.

2. You may not talk about a product you sell or the organization you work for. In other words — no pitches, we are not part of a business model for you. We will groan loudly if you start promoting something commercial, so please don’t do it.

3. Give us a nugget. Tell a story. Something with a moral. Some way the world sucks. Some way the world is great. Make us laugh. Reach our hearts. Inspire.

4. Think of it as an intellectual potluck. You bring an idea, we all taste it. (Don’t worry about whether we like it. Even if we don’t we’ll say we do.)

5. You can demo a product in your slot, but it must not be your product. Exception: You have been explicitly invited to demo a product of your own.

The ground rules for the other people.

1. We listen to the person speaking. Listening is a lot harder than most people think it is.

2. You can read your email if you want, but think about the person speaking and how they feel. Here they are pouring their heart out. If you can listen to them and really hear what they’re saying *and* tweet something or read Facebook or whatever, go for it.

This is consistent with the first rule of BloggerCon format — there is no audience, no panel, no speaker. The room is the story. Only this time, we’re going to keep the role of the Discussion Leader to a minimum. Each of you is responsible for leading your own discussion. Be mindful not to take too much time, because there’s only 1.5 hours. Divide by the number of people there.

Now — what to do about people who either don’t read the guidelines, or show up late and didn’t hear the opening schpiel (which I promise to keep very short). I don’t know the answer. Let’s look to the room to make a decision about what to do, in real time, as it’s happening. I’m not going to say what we’ll do, other than it’s almost certain to come up.

In the meantime, I wrote up a new updated version of the BloggerCon rules, believe me, you’re going to get a lot of links to this piece. If you want to skip ahead you can read the whole thing now. 🙂

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/03/04/renewedEvangelismBloggerco.html

Also, you can forward this email to anyone you like, as long as you personally feel they will make a contribution to the discussion on Thursday. (So there’s no concept of “being invited” to these meetups. They are open. That’s important too. We do reserve the right to ask people not to participate, this is a private facility, but in the years we were running this meetup at Harvard (starting in 2003, continuing to this day) as far as I know we never asked anyone not to come.)

This is all about everyone participating and taking responsibility. If we get around the table with everyone feeling they’ve been heard, no matter what they’re speaking about, and if you feel you really heard from a dozen or more people, that may be more than you accomplish at all the conferences you go to this year. Maybe all the conferences you’ve been to in your life.

That was a lot to read, but this format is about listening and being heard, so thanks very much for listening!

Big hugs, and looking forward to seeing you on Thursday! 🙂

Dave

Notes for Thurs March 18 meetup at NYU

Last week’s meetup was great.

We just went around the room, each person told a story and led a brief discussion.

Each story was different. Some personal, others global. All were thoughtful and thought-provoking. We have a powerful group of people in the room, and we were able to experience their intelligence and feeling.

It worked so well last week, I think the best thing to do for this week’s meetup is to do it again.

Where: 20 Cooper Sq, Room 654.

When: Thurs March 18, 7PM.

RSVP before 3PM on Thurs. No exceptions.

If you have questions or comments please post them here,

Dave

Notes for Thurs March 11 meetup at NYU

Good morning everybody!

We will have our second Thursday evening meetup at 7PM on March 11.

20 Cooper Sq, 7th Floor. RSVP by 3PM on Thursday. No exceptions.

Here’s the deal. This week we’ll have a special format. We’ll go around the table clockwise starting with the person to my left. Each person will speak for a couple of minutes, say who you are, and talk about whatever you want to talk about.

For a few minutes we are all ears. We have to listen to whatever you want to say. But there are some groundrules. If you don’t read them you will be embarrassed, and you don’t want that — so read them!

1. You may not talk about yourself.

2. You may not talk about a product you sell or the organization you work for. In other words — no pitches, we are not part of a business model for you. We will groan loudly if you start promoting something commercial, so please don’t do it.

3. Give us a nugget. Tell a story. Something with a moral. Some way the world sucks. Some way the world is great. Make us laugh. Reach our hearts. Inspire.

4. Think of it as an intellectual potluck. You bring an idea, we all taste it. (Don’t worry about whether we like it. Even if we don’t we’ll say we do.)

The groundrules for the other people.

1. We listen to the person speaking. Listening is a lot harder than most people think it is.

2. You can read your email if you want, but think about the person speaking and how they feel. Here they are pouring their heart out. If you can listen to them and really hear what they’re saying *and* tweet something or read Facebook or whatever, go for it.

This is consistent with the first rule of BloggerCon format — there is no audience, no panel, no speaker. The room is the story. Only this time, we’re going to keep the role of the Discussion Leader to a minimum. Each of you is responsible for leading your own discussion. Be mindful not to take too much time, because there’s only 1.5 hours. Divide by the number of people there.

Now — what to do about people who either don’t read the guidelines, or show up late and didn’t hear the opening schpiel (which I promise to keep very short). I don’t know the answer. Let’s look to the room to make a decision about what to do, in real time, as it’s happening. I’m not going to say what we’ll do, other than it’s almost certain to come up.

In the meantime, I wrote up a new updated version of the BloggerCon rules, believe me, you’re going to get a lot of links to this piece. If you want to skip ahead you can read the whole thing now.

http://www.scripting.com/stories/2010/03/04/renewedEvangelismBloggerco.html

Also, you can forward this email to anyone you like, as long as you personally feel they will make a contribution to the discussion on Thursday.

This is all about everyone participating and taking responsibility. If we get around the table with everyone feeling they’ve been heard, no matter what they’re speaking about, and if you feel you really heard from a dozen or more people, that may be more than you accomplish at all the conferences you go to this year. Maybe all the conferences you’ve been to in your life.

Big hugs, and looking forward to seeing you all on Thursday!

Dave

PS: If you have comments or question, I’ll cross-post this email at http://unberkeley.com/ — and there’s a place to comment there. Better to post there where others can see it.