a2geeks Blog from Oct 23, 2008

This was largely a brainstorming session around the idea of the conference, what our goals would be, and what involvement each person and organization would have in it. As freewheeling as the discussion was, we covered a lot of ground, and roughed out some outline of what we're trying to do. Our next meetings will have more formal agendas to cover as we get organized.

Date / Location

Engineering campus, either the week of Feb 11 (the date of the M-Powered Entrepreneurship career fair) or mid-March, as suggested by Christine and confirmed by the group (2 weeks after spring break, and well before exams). Preference is to do a Thurs/Fri event, as weekends are horrible for students. Parking and weekday may present a challenge for non-students to attend, perhaps, and a March date away from the career fairs happening in early February may not be as appealing to sponsors?

Codemash is in early January, so shouldn't conflict. No other conflicts we know of.

Time is short to get this lined up. Need to move quickly.

Theme / Mission

We agreed to focus on keeping engineers here, and building a local tech startup community as our primary goals. We'll try to find speakers that attract non-engineers from across the University and community as well, but we are not trying to be an all-singing all-dancing entrepreneurship / startup conference - M-Powered is doing a good job of servicing this need via their weekly Friday entrepreneurship speaker series in Stamps auditorium.

Event plan

The goal is to do a 1 or 2-day event potentially leading into the M-Powered career fair, which mostly focuses on local, high-growth, early stage startups. A proposed schedule was to have:

• Keynote in the morning
• 2 - 3 talks before lunch
• Lunch, with signups for open space sessions afterward
• Open space sessions (concurrent with scheduled talks?)
• More scheduled talks
• Conference wrap-up, with other BoF sessions afterward
• Conference after-party events with sponsors at local bars, etc. Potentially a geek crawl through Pinball Pete's and other local hangouts, depending on sponsor involvement

M-Powered is throwing most of their resources into their career fair event; Christine and a new M-Powered project manager may be able to help manage sponsors, market the event to students on campus, etc. M-Powered has over 2k students from various schools that have joined their events, 300+ alone in the entrepreneurship class that attends their weekly Friday speaker series. They're willing to help with marketing on campus, and communications in general (liasing with other groups like Zell-Lurie Institute, Center for Entrepreneurship, SPARK). Their prior fair in Oct had about 50 companies, and their March fair roughly doubled that.

Jackie from Zattoo will help with most other aspects of event planning, including speaker arrangements (travel and accomodations, etc.) and day-of logistics.

We will market this event through many smaller events leading up to this, e.g. social mixers, hackathons, barcamps. Eli @ AADL has offered to host events at the downtown library.

Speakers

We will collect as many ideas for speakers as we can on the website. We have no budget currently for speakers (travel, accomodations, honorarium) so we're focusing on local speakers or those with ties to Michigan already. If we line up serious sponsorship, we could put out a CFP to solicit talk proposals, but this is sort of chicken-and-egg.

Sponsors

Need to structure our sponsorship program and opportunities. M-Powered already in contact with Grady Burnett at Google, other local Google contacts available, Dug also in discussion with Yahoo folks about this. Les interested in getting Mozilla involved.

Next Steps

Plan to meet every two weeks, Thursdays around the same time (7 or 8 PM), at the CSE building (Dug to try to secure space) which has free parking after hours. Michigan League was about the worst place we could have met - no parking, lots of events happening this night both in the League and nearby.

Find Program Committee members to line up speakers, and compose a program.

Come up with a name for the conference.