Going Solo

I discovered six groups a few days before Going Solo Lausanne, when Stowe created a channel for the conference. I’m happy to announce that they are sponsoring Going Solo Leeds and helping us get set up with their service, as it was pretty quickly obvious they were a really useful service for an event like ours.

If you already use Twitter (and you should!) you won’t have too much trouble understanding the utility of six groups. The Going Solo six groups livecommunity aggregates tweets from members of the community which are hashtagged #goingsolo. If you don’t have a Twitter account, you can of course participate directly on the six groups site.

Six groups also provides code which allows us to display the latest message sent to the Going Solo Livestream, and gives easy access to the functionality:

So, in practice?

• register for a six groups account (you may use OpenID)
• join the Going Solo community
• edit your profile (add your Twitter ID in there so that @sixgroups can follow you!), add a photo, and look through community members to start adding friends
• adjust your Twitter settings so that your tweets are captured into the livestream
• for your tweet to appear in the livestream, use the #goingsolo (that’s a hashtag) somewhere in your tweet
• of course, the livestream is available through RSS.

And:

• you may also post a message directly from anywhere on the Going Solo websites, by using the six groups toolbar which appears at the top of each page
• if you enjoy being identified as something like “Gast88684”, you don’t even have to register! 😉

If you would like to add the Going Solo six groups bar to your site (and become a partnersite), all you need to do is copy the widget code into your template, just before </body>.

Looking forward to having you all take part in the livecommunity! Use the comments here for questions if you have any.

Quite a few bloggers have asked me for a referral code to use on their sites. I’ve also had requests for discount codes for those of you who want to promote the event to your community or mailing-list.

I’m happy to say that all this is now a possibility. Send me an e-mail (steph at going-solo.net) or a tweet (@goingsolo) to introduce yourself and your community. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can!

Enter the twisty roads of branding. Going Solo Lausanne ’08 was branded simply “Going Solo” (and a bit in a rush!) — so with the preparation of Going Solo Leeds ’08, I’ve been wondering how to deal with the website (I’m figuring it out, thankfully, as you can see if you start clicking around) and also, what to do about the logo.

Those of you who were already around at the time will remember that the badges and logo for Going Solo were whipped up in a bit of an emergency by the lovely and talented Stephanie Troeth, who in addition to being a precious advisor to Going Solo, also took part in the panel Solo in a Networked World in Lausanne.

I decided to keep the logo for the Leeds event (Steph tells me she wasn’t expecting it to stick around so long!) with a slight modification to indicate that it is not the Lausanne event anymore. Corinne Stoppelli (Exoconcept) came up with the Leeds stamp you can see below:

The logo also exists as a square, and on a white background. Sébastien Baudet kindly took over the rather ungratifying work of exporting the logo (and badges!) from Photoshop over and over again in various shapes and sizes. The “Promote Going Solo” page (lovingly put together by Virginie) will give you access to all the different versions, with handy copy-paste code so you can easily use this material on your site.

Oh yes, there’s a hint here. Now that you have shiny visual material close at hand, we’re expecting to see many a blog post!

As you probably know, Going Solo Leeds has a group on Facebook. The conference is of course present through an event page there. It has now also been published on Upcoming, so if you are staying away from Facebook, add it to your events!

On Upcoming:

• Going Solo Leeds on Upcoming

On Facebook:

• Going Solo Leeds Facebook event
• Going Solo Facebook group

Newsletter:

• Going Solo Leeds newsletter, if you prefer e-mail!

 

Wanted: sponsorship salesperson for Going Solo conference

Going Solo is looking for an enthusiastic salesperson to negotiate and finalise sponsorship deals. After a very successful first event in Lausanne, Switzerland, the conference is taking place again in Leeds, UK, on September 12th. There are plans to produce the event elsewhere in Europe and in the US.

Availability: as soon as possible
Remuneration: 20% commission on cash sponsorships
Profile: skilled in negotiating and closing sponsorship deals, knowledge of the tech/freelancing world a plus.

What we provide:

– leads (past sponsors and fresh contacts)
– sponsorship materials

What we expect:

– discuss and amend existing sponsorship offerings
– follow through to closure on provided leads
– other leads can also be explored freely.

If you’re interested or would like more information, get in touch with
Stephanie Booth (steph@going-solo.net, @stephtara, or steph-booth on
skype).

Cross-posted from CTTS.

Update: the link “sign up right away” was wrong and gave the impression registration was not open — actually, I messed up and posted the link to the Lausanne ’08 event registration (which is, obviously, closed). It’s corrected now, and you can really sign up right away 🙂

It took some time, but Going Solo Leeds (Sept. 12th) registration is open. Hop along to our partner Expectnation‘s site to sign up right away.

Here’s the deal:

• Early Bird (first 25 tickets — hurry up some have already been sold!): £150
• Normal: £220
• Late Bird (will kick in approx. 10 days before the conference date): £300
• On-site (if you really want to play it ‘last minute’): £350

A comment or two:

• for the Lausanne event, the first 25 tickets were sold in under a week
• there will be advanced seminars (3h workshops) on the Saturday morning — more about them shortly, but know already that if you have already registered for the main conference when they are announced, you will get a special discount on them (they will be open only to conference participants)
• Jet2.com is a low-cost company that flies to Leeds-Bradford International airport
• Leeds is 2.5h from London by train (book early, and you could pay as little as £22.50 return)
• the programme for the main conference is going to be very similar to the Lausanne one (don’t change a winning team) — videos are online for you to have a preview if you wish
• the Going Solo team is pretty excited about all this!

Looking forward to seeing you in Leeds 🙂

As you might notice, things are slowly moving on the website. The Going Solo blog is not moving, but the Lausanne ’08 site has been archived at http://lausanne08.going-solo.net and the Going Solo Leeds ’08 site is (still in the making) http://leeds08.going-solo.net.

So, here we are: Going Solo on tour. Take the same concept, the same great speaker team, the same programme, but another city.

(When I say “same”, I mean “almost the same: little changes here and there, improvements based on lessons learned, but basically, the same idea.)

Going Solo Leeds will take place on September 12th, 2008. I’m letting you know straight away (I had confirmation this morning for the venue, the Old Broadcasting House (BBC) where met:space is located) so that you can book dates and start making travel arrangements if you want.

I’ll be publishing information about Leeds and making promotional material available as soon as possible. Registration will also open… as soon as I’ve set it up :-).

Now that Going Solo is going on tour, the website is going to have to evolve. Instead of having a 1D website (one event and that’s it), the Going Solo site is going to have to become multi-dimensional: add time and space, and you have a 3D site. Different cities, different moments in the year. Even if it is not “planned” that Going Solo will take place in Lausanne again next year (it’s not that kind of event), who knows — it’s perfectly possible that it’ll come back some day.

So, how do I archive the “Lausanne” event? This isn’t as simple as 2008, 2009, 2010 subdomains. Or subdomains with city names. “lausanne.2008.going-solo.net”? Blogs are easy, for that: just keep on writing.

Also, what about visual branding? Keep exactly the same logos and colours (and update city/date information on them), or make a subtle change (which one? add “Leeds” somewhere?) so that people realise it’s not the same event?

Also, tags: goingsolo, goingsololausanne, goingsolo2008lausanne, gs2008lausanne, gs2008leeds, goingsololeeds — heck.

I suspect I might have to move away from wordpress.com to find an acceptable solution. While I’m perfectly capable of hosting a blog (I do that for CTTS), it’s quite nice not having to worry about maintenance and downtime.

Ideas and suggestions welcome — for Going Solo Leeds as well as for the website.

At the risk of repeating myself, one idea which is at the core of Going Solo is that even though we may be soloists, we are never completely isolated. We learn a lot from our peers or mentors, and this is something that I wanted to achieve with the conference. Experienced freelancers sharing some of their insights, and a place to take the time to think about our business skills.

It became clear at the event that there was extremely good interaction between participants, be they attendees, staff or speakers, and in looking for ways to prolong this community richness online, the e-mail discussion list seemed the obvious way to go.

I am therefore happy to introduce Going Solo Together, a discussion list for web-enabled freelancers, soloists and small business owners to share stories, advice and problems with their peers.

Though of course the material provided through the Going Solo conference is going to be a topic of discussion at first, the objective of this discussion list is not be concentrate on the event itself, but more on the various issues that arise when being a soloist. Share tips, advice, or ask for them.

Archives are members-only, which gives some amount of “privacy”, but keep in mind that anybody can join the group. If something is really private, you should probably not be sharing it on a public e-mail list. However, we do ask list members to keep the issues discussed here reasonably confidential.

At the difference of the Going Solo Newsletter, which is a one-way form of communication (I send out newsletters, people read or hit delete), Going Solo Together goes all ways. Everybody can participate, so the traffic could become heavy. If it’s too much for you, be sure to visit the mailing list site and switch to “digest”, which collects multiple e-mails into one big one, thus saving you from inbox flood.

You may also subscribe by sending an e-mail to going-solo-together-subscribe@googlegroups.com.

Many thanks to Daniel Schildt who came up with “Going Solo Together”, a name I immediately liked.

It’s been a week now since Going Solo, and judging from immediate and more delayed feedback, it was clearly a success. I’ve been travelling a bit this last week (I’m now settled in Leeds until next Thursday) so I haven’t had as much online time as I thought I would — but all in all it’s not a bad thing as I need some time to recuperate. I came out of Going Solo positively boosted and full of ideas (almost too full!) about “what to do next”, so these next weeks are going to be a bit about sorting that out and making certain things happen.

A survey made with SurveyMonkey, which I found really easy to use, has been sent to all registered attendees. Most people have filled it in and I’m finding the feedback from the responses really interesting. If you haven’t sent in your responses, please do!

If you haven’t seen them yet, do check out the videos of the conference (all the talks are online now!), the interviews Charbax made during the day, live-blogging notes by Suw, Jaap and Urs, as well as the photos (official or not) — and give a hand with the tagging if you feel so inclined. If you understand French, you can also check out this interview of me on Culture Pod. You’ll find more posts about the event on del.icio.us.

So, what’s next? Here are some of the things floating in my mind:

• write a proper round-up of blog posts, videos, etc. related to the event and the talks
• collect quotes that make Going Solo look good 😉 (if you have something quotable, e-mail it to me!)
• secure venue and date for Going Solo Leeds so that ticket sale can open and discussions with sponsors can start
• discuss how the programme will evolve with speakers and advisors (it will be very much the same, but we can make it even better)
• get a discussion mailing-list started for freelancers in Europe, so that we can continue exchanging tips and experience in the spirit of Going Solo
• think about how the Going Solo blog can evolve into a real community ressource
• write about the Big Wifi Adventure (both a disaster and a success story for Swisscom, from different angles)
• analyse the survey data
• see if my workshops-the-next-day idea leads somewhere (and continue tossing around other similar ideas for Going Solo development)
• tie up some loose administrative strings (welcome behind the scenes) like paying bills, etc. 😉

Anything I’ve forgotten?