CommunityNorth

imply attending any live event–from the three-person lunch meetup to the 100-person local user group can give you the most positive effect of being at an event like SXSW.

In my talk, I mentioned two implications of the importance of face-to-face:

1) We should encourage our (human) users to get together in the offline world.
2) We should add more human-ness to the interactions in our software.

– Kathy Sierra

Events are an important part of helping foster community. Face-to-face connections are important for building connections between people and helping them to share their passions. The benefit of events like DemoCamp have never been in the presentations but in the connections created between people.  Tech entrepreneurs around the world seem to find inspiration and passion from connecting with others. Whether they are demoing their products, pitching their companies, sharing information, or having a drink there are a variety of different organizational formats happening around the world. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and after dinner drinks. What ideas should we be bringing to Toronto?

• TECH Cocktail
• Web Innovators Group
• Ignite Seattle
• SF Beta
• Founders & Funders
• STIRR’s Founders Hacks, Founders Table, PITCHLab, DealHacks
• Founder’s Lunch
• SF NewTech
• nextNY
• Pecha Kucha Night
• Launch Party
• StartupDrinks
• DemoCamp
• OpenCoffee
• Social Media Breakfast
• Girl Geek Dinners
• Austin Tech Happy Hour
• SFentrepreneur Challenge
• Powerpoint Karaoke

Tell me your favourite conference or event experience/

Richard Dice has made it possible for one of my favourite DemoCampToronto speakers, Damian Conway, to return to Toronto and present again. Damian is in North America obviously for OSCON 2008 because from what I can tell, he is presenting the entire Perl track with 5 separate sessions:

• Programming Vim
• Perl Worst Practices
• Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…Made Easy!
• Perl 6 Update
• The Twilight Perl

We’re incredibly lucky to get a preview of what is going to be an engaging presentation. Richard is also taking up a donation collection to help cover Damian’s expenses:

This is to help defray expenses and to provide Damian with an honorarium for the talk.  Donations are completely voluntary.  If you feel motivated and/or in the right place financially to make a donation please get in touch with me or visit the Paypal links at http://hew.ca/.  The Toronto Perl Mongers and the other groups who have attended Damian’s talks have always been incredibly generous in supporting Damian whenever he has visited in the past and both he and I thank everyone for all the support he has received over the years.

Hopefully the community will come together and help support world-class talent with some donations.