Going Solo

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.

There have been a few questions on Twitter, so here’s some information for the Big Day.

First of all, aside from Sébastien who will be filming and uploading the talks, Charbax who will be conducting video interviews, and Ernst-Jan who will be live-blogging for The Next Web blog, Swiss podcaster Thierry Weber of Culture Pod will also be present with his camera to report on the event.

And then, there are all of you, the people formerly known as the audience ;-), Going Solo attendees, bloggers, podcasters, videobloggers, photographers or reporters in your own right. You are most welcome to blog, photograph, record, sketch all the happenings of the day. We’ll do our best to keep track of everything that pops on our radar, but you can help us by:

• tagging your various productions goingsolo
• sending a tweet @goingsolo with the link or an e-mail to steph at going hyphen solo dot net

We encourage you to use a Creative Commons license, by-nc-sa for example, but of course you’re free to do what you want with your work. If you produce video material, we’d be really happy to be able to include it on the official Going Solo DailyMotion page (with a link to the original, of course), if you’ll let us.

As far as the backchannel is concerned, Twitter is of course the place to go (use @goingsolo in front of your message if you want to make sure we see it). If you don’t have an account yet, open one now!

There will be folks hanging out in channel #goingsolo on the Freenode IRC network, too. I’m already there – come on in.

Update: if you’re on Twitter, join the Going Solo community on SixGroups. Give them your Twitter name and @sixgroups will start following you. Any of your updates using the hashtag #goingsolo will appear in the SixGroups livestream.