The Online Community Camp 2006 took place last Thursday. Here are a few observations:

1) We had a very experienced and senior group show up (capped at 110 participants -- 40 on waiting list) reflecting great interest in discussing issues on online interaction with other practitioners.

2) The event itself ran smoothly. Ft. Mason is a fun venue -- particularly on a gorgeous day. People seemed to get a lot out of it (we're polling opinions now).

3) We used an untraditional approach of fixing the days agenda (mostly nine breakout sessions) at the start of the day. The big news was that this seemed to be no big deal to participants -- and ran very smoothly. I think the sessions and presenters we had were certainly as good as any agenda set in advance, with the advantage of much more participant buy-in. The agenda-setting process itself was very instructive to folks in seeing what issues were on which peoples minds, especially as we voted on topics.

Overall the event was great. We'll use the tag "occ2006" so in coming days you should be able to watch blog posts, photos, or other content with this tag. Thanks again to all who participated!

technorati tags: occ2006, onlinecommunity

Forum One has been doing more events recently, through which we've become more familar with some of the events-related community sites. The most elegant is probably Upcoming.org, which allows users to post, catalog, tag, and comment on upcoming events of all sorts. It has a developed a very active and successful community around the site (thus its acquisition last October by Yahoo). A similar site, Eventful, uses a comparable format but seems to rely more on spidering content than user-submitted content. And while on the topic, we might mention Mollyguard, a terrific (and strangely named) web application that, while not really a community site per se, does allow easy registration, payment, and management of events.

Forum One is hosting an Online Community Forum June 29 in Washington, DC, entitled "Online Collaboration for Public Policy: Blogs, Wikis and Workspaces". The session will feature a set of overviews and case studies on how these tools can help policy organizations in outreach, in collaboration, and in having a stronger policy impact. We'll discuss the tools, how they work, where they can be valuable, key issues in technology and implementation, and staffing and cost implications. This event targets issues facing public policy organizations, but is widely applicable to other sectors. Everyone is cordially welcome. The event will be held at the National Press Club from 8:00 AM - 11:00 AM. Full details and registration information are available on the event web site.

CMP is hosting this years Collaborative Technologies Conference June 19th - 22nd in Boston.

Creative Concepts is hosting the Business Smart Tools Conference, June 13 in Stamford, CT. The conference will look at corporate applications of blogging, podcasting, and other new media.

The Online Community Camp 2006, the May 25th gathering of online community practitioners in San Francisco, is sold out. We are maintaining a waiting list for interested participants on the event registration site. Sorry to not have more spaces this time around (we try to keep our events at manageable size for the benefit of participants). We'll expand the event next time around.

Tag: occ2006