What about a Community Leadership Summit in Italy?

I’ve been working with Italian tech communities very closely since years now, and I’m convinced that time has came for a new step forward: running the first Italian Community Leadership Summit.

What

An occasions to connect community leaders, organizers and managers that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. To debate around the present situation, visions and tools, sharing the teaching and learning adventure, agreed on common initiatives to make the community more capable and effective. It’s a protected moment where managers can leave the leadership roles and be the perfect community members they’ve had in mind, to work together in refining the art of community management and make it better understood and shared by us all. Nothing new, although.

Why

I feel the Italian context has now the right level of maturity for an event of this kind: we already have established networks of communities, like GrUSP, GDGs, DotNet etc, acting as meta-communities for the organisers and working together country-wide(ish), but generally only the same type of groups are inside these networks, and the latter are disconnected each other. Not because of a particular devil will, but only because “We’ve never had the occasion to try“.

It has happened that, during events like Codemotion or XXDays or others, the community managers gathered, had fun together, complained about common issues, shared experiences and contacts and even worked on new ideas together. Having a dedicated moment, not just an occasion during another event, can potentially bring a huge value to all the attendees.

Take for example Milan, where the community density (together with a good collaboration spirit leaded by Daniele) allowed to create Milano Tech Scene. Big enough to offer cross-pollination occasions and small enough to still preserve an old, good, community mindset. Just to compare, the density in cities like Paris, London or Berlin is so high that this kind of initiatives wouldn’t be possibile, and Meetup rules :) It’s time to scale this mindset to the whole country.

Finally, I trust contamination as one of the key to evolve in the dev ecosystem, and so the community scene should reflect this approach. Shared mindset, practices and skills on how to organize a successful event, contacts, next steps about the evolution of the community ecosystem and much more can only help that evolution, and having the feeling of the existence of such network can help newcomers to grow quickly and experienced managers to refine their art.

Why I’m proposing that?

Simple: be the change you want to see. I believe in the usefulness of the format and in this moment as the right moment. Following a lean approach, the Summit is the MVP I want to validate. After an initial phase where I gathered ideas, impressions and thoughts, it’s time to test.

Then, I’ve another objective in mind: diversity, in particular gender gap. Until we simply complain about low female presence at tech events, considering ourselves out of the equation because “We’re open to opposite gender participation”, we’re not really doing a lot to improve the situation. All of us should add our own contribution for the cause, no matter what we can add. Just do it. So, my first contribution in pushing everyone acting, is to open registration to one person only if he/she can bring (along) another person of the opposite gender. Could be an organiser of the same community or a different one, I don’t mind until we don’t cheat, like involving partners that haven’t never taken part to the community life. Aiming for a balanced participation. Damn difficult, but moonshots are here for that.

When and Where

Probably around November or December, before is too difficult and I don’t want to wait too much time. In Milan or somewhere else, proposals are more than welcome!

So, now?

I’ve already in mind something about the agenda, but probably I’ll discuss in another post. Right now, I really want to know what you think about this idea. Lean methodology says that is impossible to create something for the users if the users aren’t involved (also) in the problem-definition phase. Not a problem this time, but an opportunity. So, YOUR comments and constructive criticisms are more than welcome.