Confessions of a Serial Community Organizer

National Dance Day: July 31, 2010

Danceday

Okay. I will admit it. I love to dance. When my daughter was little, we would watch Soul Train together and copy the moves in our living room. I may not be a great dancer myself, but, we had a lot of fun with it. To this day, I love to watch good dancing. Yes, there was some good dancing on Soul Train. :-)

Which is why I am a big fan of So You Think You Can Dance on TV. It may be yet another reality show, but, there is no question that the contestants each season are talented young dancers. Seeing them work with professional choreographers in many different dance styles each week is a joy to watch for anyone that loves to dance.

I'm not coming out of the closet with my Soul Train dance moves at this moment in time for no reason. I want to promote the National Dance Day just announced on that program coming up on July 31, 2010. It is sponsored by the Dizzy Feet Foundation whose mission is to help underprivileged young people realize their dream of becoming professional dancers and to support, improve, and increase access to dance education in the United States.

Getting down to business, this YouTube Video put together by professional choreographers, Tabitha and Napolean, breaks the National Dance Day dance down into 8 sections that anyone can use to learn this dance. Here are links that will take you directly to each section of the choreography training in the video:
I was just thinking that it is too bad that the Dizzy Feet Foundation doesn't have a good way to mobilize people to meetup and dance this routine on National Dance Day. Lucky for them, I just learned about the new Meetup Everywhere free service at a Community Leadership Summit West event. I'd be happy to offer my services for free to the Dizzy Feet Foundation to help them take advantage of Meetup Everywhere for this purpose. I sincerely hope they take me up on that offer.

Thanks for coming by. I hope you learn the routine and I hope you participate in National Dance Day on July 31, 2010.

JUG-USA is calling all JUGs in the United States

Jug-usa

Okay. It was fun last year when JUG-USA in our inaugural year won a Special Meeting with James Gosling during JavaOne. The meeting is awarded to the Java User Group (JUG) with the most members attending JavaOne each year. With James Gosling departing Oracle earlier this year, it was also a historic meeting because it was the last time James would hold one of these winning JUG meetings at a JavaOne. Sigh!

Now that the Oracle/Sun merger dust is settling, we are learning how Oracle would like to engage the JUGs community. It turns out that umbrella organizations like JUG-USA are exactly what the Oracle user group support programs are optimized to deal with. As a result, it is now time to move forward and hold elections for JUG-USA officers ASAP. Once we have elected officers, they can move forward to establish JUG-USA as a legal entity.

To this end, I'm asking each JUG in the United States that would like to be affiliated with JUG-USA to do one thing right away. I need at least one and preferably two liaisons designated for each JUG-USA affiliated JUG and I need these liaisons to join this JUG-USA Meetup Group. We will be using the mailing list of the meetup group to formalize plans for officer elections. The goal being to have elected officers in place prior to JavaOne which starts on September 19, 2010. That way, our officers can meet with the folks at Oracle that support user groups during JavaOne.

Confessions of a Serial Community Organizer

Traditional-confessional

 

Note: What follows is my Ignite talk submission for Google I/O 2010. As such, it is purposely a bit over the top in the way the information is presented. However, the core facts as they pertain to my work as a community organizer are all quite true.

It all started benignly enough when my daughter decided to take part in children's theater. At the mandatory meeting for parent volunteers, I offered to setup a Yahoo! Group (Google Groups were just a twinkle in Larry and Sergey's eyes back then) for us and the theater director turned and said to me, "So, I see you're a community organizer." Before long, I was community organizing every chance I could get. There was my 12 year stint with BayCHI organizing numerous Birds-Of-a-Feather groups. They even started calling me Mr. BOF. ;-)

After that, I decided to start a Java User Group (JUG). Of course, that was not good enough for me. I had to go and create a KML Map that rendered nicely in Google Maps and Google Earth that listed JUGs from all over the world. I even made it a global collaboration project with other JUG Leaders contributing to the project drawing more and more people in to my obsession. Eventually, they made me a Java Champion in hopes that it might slow me down. It didn't though. I went on to form an umbrella JUG for the United States, JUG-USA, which crushed all other JUGs in the annual competition for a meeting with James Gosling at JavaOne in 2009. Bwa, Ha, Ha ...

Having conquered the Java Developer Community, I moved on to the virgin developer community territory for Google Technologies. Although they espouse a "do no evil" policy, Google Developer Advocate Chris Schalk succumbed to the allure of my work as a Java Community Organizer and begged me to apply my community black magic to the Google Technology developer community. Thus, the Silicon Valley Google Technology User Group (GTUG) was formed in January of 2008. It has been so successful that it is now the model being used to spawn GTUGs across the globe.

This developer user group community organizing is fun, but, it is just a sliver of the whole pie. I could no longer be satisfied with only that. So, I felt compelled to attend the first Community Leadership Summit in the summer of 2009. That event was like crack cocaine for someone like me. I was surrounded by a sea of community organizers coming from an incredibly diverse set of communities. I couldn't wait another year for my next fix. I just HAD to organize a West Coast Community Leadership Summit (CLS West) in January of 2010 even if it killed me (side note: it almost did kill me). Not only that, I decided to jump in the Ignite Gurus Pool in the same 6 month timeframe launching the first Ignite CLS West that January too.

Where this story ends is not clear. All I know is that I am counting the days until my next fix at CLS 2010 in Portland this summer. Did I mention that I've been invited to help organize it? I'm no longer just a community organizer. I am now an organizer of community organizers. Bwa, Ha, Ha ...

To get serious for a moment, I do have a takeaway message I plan to "sneak" into my story line. I know I/O is a technical conference and as developers we want to absorb as much information as possible. This can cause people to spend all their time in the technical sessions and very little time networking with other attendees. Since all the talks will be recorded, I want to encourage attendees to take the time to get to know somebody new or get to know better someone they already know. In my community work, I find the personal relationships that can be forged through quality face time with others in my community to be incredibly valuable.

People often ask me how I can put so much effort into my community work. What they don't realize is that I get much more in return from it in terms of the friends I have made in the process. For me, it is a no brainer. In the end, it is always about the people you have touched and those that have touched you even for a geek like me.

The Apple Never Falls Far From The Tree

Apple-never-falls-far

It all started benignly enough when my daughter decided to take part in children's theater. At the mandatory meeting for parent volunteers, I offered to setup a Yahoo! Group (Google Groups were just a twinkle in Larry and Sergey's eyes back then) for us and the theater director turned and said to me, "So, I see you're a community organizer." Before long, I was community organizing every chance I could get: BayCHI, BayDUX, Java User Groups, Java Champions, JUG-USA, Google Technology User Groups, Ignites, Community Leadership Summits, ...

Truth be told, the origins of my obsession with community organizing can be traced back to my early childhood. As they say, the apple never falls far from the tree. It should come as no surprise that my father was also a serial community organizer. Shirleigh Van Riper was a community organizer in both local sports and local politics. He served in various elected capacities for over 25 years including a 10 year stint as Mayor of Onalaska. When not at council meetings, he was on the sports field coaching kids in football and baseball. There were always kids from his sports teams hanging out at our home. On New Year's Day, he would cook a huge batch of chili and all the kids would hang out at our place and watch football games on TV. When he finally retired from politics and coaching, there was a new park being built in town. In honor of his contributions to the community, the park was named Van Riper Park.

So, you might be thinking that "Shirleigh" is an unusual name for a man. It surely was particularly in the rural part of Wisconsin where we come from. He never went by that name. When he was a kid, everyone called him Spanky. Always the community organizer, he was the leader of his gang of friends growing up just like Spanky was the leader of The Little Rascals. When he was older, everyone started calling him Van. After his premature death due to a heart attack in 1994, I started asking people to call me Van too in remembrance of him.

The apple never falls far from the tree.