This week I was delighted to see that we could take the wraps off a new event that I am running in conjunction with my friends at the Linux Foundation called the Community Leadership Conference. The event will be part of the Open Source Summit which was previously known as LinuxCon and I will be running it in Los Angeles from 11th – 13th Sep 2017 and Prague from 23rd – 25th Oct 2017.

Now, some of you may be wondering if this replaces or is different to the Community Leadership Summit in Portland/Austin. Let me add some clarity.

The Community Leadership Summit

The Community Leadership Summit takes place each year the weekend before OSCON. I can confirm that there will be another Community Leadership Summit in 2017 in Austin. We plan to announce this soon formally.

The Community Leadership Summit has the primary goal of bringing together community managers from around the world to discuss and debate community leadership principles. The event is an unconference and is focused on discussions as opposed to formal presentations. As such, and as with any unconference, the thrill of the event is the organic schedule and conversations that follow. Thus, CLS is a great event for those who are interested in playing an active role in furthering the art of and science of community leadership more broadly in an organic way.

The Community Leadership Conference

The Community Leadership Conference, which will be part of the Open Source Summit in Los Angeles and Prague, has a slightly different format and focus.

CLC will instead be a traditional conference. My goal here is to bring together speakers from around the world to deliver presentations, panels, and other material that shares best practices, methods, and approaches in community leadership, and specific to open source. CLC is not intended to shape the future of community leadership, but more to present best practices and principles for consumption, and tailed to the needs of open source projects and organizations.

In Summary

So, in summary, the Community Leadership Conference is designed to be a place to consume community leadership best practices and principles via carefully curated presentations, panels, and networking. The Community Leadership Summit is designed to be more of an informal roll-your-sleeves up summit where attendees discuss and debate community leadership to help shape how it evolves and grows.

As regular readers will know, I am passionate about evolving the art and science of community leadership and while CLS has been an important component in this evolution, I felt we needed to augment it with CLC. These two events, combined with the respective audiences of their shared conferences, and bolstered by my wonderful friends at O’Reilly and the Linux Foundation, are going to help us to evolve this art and science faster and more efficiently than ever.

I hope to see you all at either or both of these events!