Joseph Guadagno

Rants, Raves and other stuff about ASP.NET development.

Phoenix AZ Community Leaders Unite

This Saturday, June 13th, 2009, is the next Desert Code Camp. While I am co teaching on session on “Write your first desktop .net app (or, Write you own Twitter Client for .net)” with Saul Mora, I am heading up two community based sessions. the first session is open to the “general public” and is titled “Open forum with Community Leaders”. The intend of this session is to provide an open forum between the community members of Phoenix and the community leaders of Phoenix. So if you are a community leader, or are attending Desert Code Camp, stop by the session and share you thoughts and feedback on the technology community in Phoenix.  The second session is a “private invite only” session for the community leaders of ALL TECHNOLOGIES in the Phoenix area.  In this session, I want to get the community leaders together to talk about ways we can improve the technology community in Phoenix.  If you are interested in this session, please contact me jguadagno [ at ] sevdnug.org, I will forward you the room and time information once it is scheduled.

Posted: Jun 09 2009, 08:35 AM by jguadagno | with 4 comment(s)
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Comments

francine hardaway said:

Please let me know the results of this.  I would love to be kept informed, and if I were in town, I'd definitely be there!

# June 10, 2009 12:25 AM

Curtis Miller said:

I'm not sure I see the need for an invite-only session of self-appointed community leaders. If the first session goes well, then the second session should be entirely unnecessary. The community members will indicate what they want from the tech community. Various people will attempt to implement strategies to satisfy those needs, or not. If nobody steps up to help with something that you really want to see done, then either take the reins yourself or move on.

Community leaders must strive to provide value to both the community and themselves. They strike a tenuous balance between selflessness and selfishness. From talking with many people about this it seems easy to lose that balance and go one way or the other. Too much in either direction often leads to disaster for the community.

Anyway, I believe that leaders are emergent and people who place themselves into leadership positions rarely make good leaders. I appreciate you helping to facilitate the session at Desert Code Camp, but I'd rather not receive an invitation to the private session. However, I'll be around throughout the day on Saturday if you'd like to discuss this more. Or find me on Twitter - @curtism.

# June 10, 2009 3:43 PM

James Britt said:

Good points, Curtis.  I can somewhat appreciate wanting to have a more focused group discuss certain things, but without community members it could get too self-satisfying.  Maybe it's the term "community leaders' rather than "local event coordinators".

In mulling this over, I think it would be more useful to have a gathering to teach people how to be community leaders. That is, show people that it is not magic, it's not really about leading per se, that it's mostly getting off your ass to get things done.

# June 10, 2009 4:33 PM

jguadagno said:

@Curtis, @James,

I see both your points! I guess I struck a sore point with a few people this post with respect to the term “Community Leaders”. The term was not used to try a put people on different levels from one and another but more like you refer to them as “doers”.

# June 10, 2009 4:54 PM
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