ben van 't ende

Flying into Portland you have a stunning view of the state of Washington covered with forests and a couple of mountains of which one is the well-known volcano Mount St. Helens. I shared my long flight with Jos Poortvliet, community manager for Open Suse. That really made the 9 hour plus flight more than bearable. 

Dealing with the jetlag is always a hard thing and that is quite setback when travelling these distances. Day one was spent sleeping round the clock, which wasn't too bad as that made me ready and set for the first day of the Community Leadership Summit (CLS). After having mistakenly mixed CLS up with the Duncan Family Reunion I finally found the location of CLS. CLS takes place two day before OSCON in the Oregon convention center. 

CLS is an (un)conference. There is no prepared schedule and the event is not vendor related, although some rather large companies are sponsoring CLS. Everything is done in a low budget manner. Jono Bacon, organizer of the event, gave a small introduction on the proceedings and off we went. People propose their own sessions and put them onto an already prepared timetable. To my amazement a huge line formed of people with a proposed session. The first day was filled in no time!

Unlike a TYPO3 event there was almost no-one I knew, but of course with a crowd of community managers it is not that difficult to get in touch with others. It is quite common to just introduce yourself to someone and have a talk with that person. Representing an Open Source CMS I was very excited to meet the Wordpress girls Jane and Chelsea and Joomla's Paul and Sandra. I finally met Jacob Redding, Drupal CEO, who I talked to online previously. It was almost like meeting an old friend. Besides Jacob there where three Drupal developers as well. All in all a very warm meet-up like open source should be.

CLS11 was a total information overload for me, but a good overload at that. Topics ranged from involving new people in your community, how to give props to your contributors (make them rockstars). There were quite a few examples of how a community without rules will fail in the end. That strengthens me in the believe that the TYPO3 community also needs proper guidelines about what it means to be an active member of the community. The occupation of community manager is relatively new and you can say this is the first generation of community managers. In one of the sessions it was even mentioned that community managers will be the ceo's if the future. Community thinking is gaining importance over individual thinking. One of the goals of the summit could be described as pushing the profession of community manager forward. Communicating the work of the community manager towards management is difficult as it is not measurable in the traditional sense, but it lies in the value of acting as an interface to the community. The notes of the "We Do Awesome" session by Jono Bacon provides some insight into that. Two things that are really worth mentioning about CLS11 is the fact that there where almost as many women as men and that 90% of the attendants where from commercial projects like Adobe, Microsoft, E-bay etc.

At the end of the event a CLS East (New York) was announced and I am happy to announce that I will be organising a CLS Europe in Amsterdam this coming spring. I would certainly hope to see some of the CLS11 attendants there. Thank you all CLS people for being awesome!