Mobile Monday Silicon Valley

Last week Russ and I went to the Mobile Monday Global Summit, a gathering of Mobile Monday organizers from all over the world. The goal of the meeting was to talk about the overall future of Mobile Monday. The meetings have been running in their own little areas (http://www.mobilemonday.com, http://www.mobilemonday.net, http://www.mobilemonday.jp, http://www.mobilemonday.la, etc.) with little connection to each other or guidance in starting up. That’s been causing a bunch of problems because attendees don’t know where to look for info about meetings in their area, they don’t know how to tell how lively their local environment is, and it’s hard to connect with those folks except at the physical meetings. It’s also hard for potential organizers because they don’t know how to start a group and find other folks in the area who might be interested.

So there are two things we’re working on:

We don’t have a timeline for this. Everyone is working on this on a volunteer basis and has other commitments that have higher priority. However, if you’re interested in helping out with setting up the services please let me know (miker at bitsplitter dot net). Comments and suggestions welcome as well. You can direct those to me if you want, but it would be best to put them out in the public by either commenting on the blog or joining the discussion group. The services we’re looking to setup for each group:

We might also do a forum style discussion board, but that one is still somewhat uncertain. There’s a lot more that could be done, but not all services will make sense for all areas. And a complex site that makes the information difficult to locate is almost as bad as a dead site with no timely information. So the plan is to start with a simple set of services and see what people end up using them for. If the discussion lists are being used for exchanging images we’ll setup a gallery system, if there are lots of job posts we’ll setup a listings database, etc.

We had a great May Mobile Monday last night at Sun’s Santa gorgeous Clara Auditorium. Tons of great space in a beautiful old building, and great speakers to boot! Thanks to Simon, David, Amy Jo (”AJ”), and Marc for taking the time to present and thanks to everyone who made the trek down to the Sunnyvale campus.

As usual, you can check out all the photos tagged with MobileMonday over at Flickr.

Next month the topic should be Usability and we’ll be holding the meeting at OpenWave’s offices! Hope to see you there!

-Russ