[Marketing] Community Summit 2014

[Sameer Verma]

Greetings!

It's the end of July, and getting close to the October timeframe when
we usually have our summit. This year, given the recent changes in the
project, scope, etc. we at OLPC SF are leaning towards an online
summit, with offline flavors. The weekend of Oct 18, 2014.

The idea is to have online sessions, with a local offline meetup to:

1) Provide a continued local meeting space and participation in
projects championed by enthusiasts local to the San Francisco Bay
Area, and

2) Provide a platform that allows global participation from locations
that have not had a chance to be a part of the global dialogue.

To facilitate the online piece, we are looking at "Summit", a platform
used by Ubuntu to run their online summits. See
http://summit.ubuntu.com for a recent summit that they ran on this
platform. Aaron Borden is looking into the code and is going to run a
version for olpcsf.org. Briefly, the sessions are organized to be run
on Google Hangout for presenters, with live Youtube feeds for
attendees, with a chat session to ask questions live during the
session.

For the offline part, we are looking to get space at our usual
location, with support for participation in online sessions, and
offline workshops. We do not want to miss out on the camaraderie that
brews around the annual summit. Hint: We think offline gatherings in
Washington DC, Paris, Hong Kong, New Delhi, Sydney, Kathmandu,
Montevideo, and many other locales would be in order as well :-)

So, this is the stub of an idea. Feedback welcome and appreciated.
Volunteers for both online and offline sessions are much needed.
Please write back and let us know onlist or offlist. If you have
experience running online sessions, hangouts, etc. you are in demand!

cheers,
Sameer
-- 
Sameer Verma, Ph.D.
Professor, Information Systems
San Francisco State University
http://verma.sfsu.edu/
http://commons.sfsu.edu/
http://olpcsf.org/
http://olpcjamaica.org.jm/