Highlight Midwest

If you’ve never attended an unconference before, the by-the-seat-of-our-pants approach to scheduling sessions can be a bit disorienting. Newcomers might want to take a peek at this post on the whole open grid deal:

Basically, there will be a wall that looks something like the one in the picture with rooms across the top and times down the side and blank spaces in between. It is up to attendees to fill up the spots.

So we won’t have rooms, more like 2-3 designated areas where sessions will happen, and our daytime emcees will help fill in the blanks, but after most people have shown up the morning of the 29th, expect Christa or Rob to start facilitating that session schedule, with lots of help and encouragement from the rest of us.

And did you see that part in the link about the law of 2 feet? Once the ball gets rolling people at HM1 are actually encouraged to roam from session to session as they please; this means don’t be offended if you start your session and see some people wander off after a bit. Sampling the different chunks of content going on is all in keeping with the participant-directed nature of the event.

Learn stuff! Meet peers! Have fun!

Hey look at Idaho:

IDAHO may be best known for its potatoes — it produces, after all, a third of all the potatoes in the United States. But its economy is increasingly being driven by technology and green manufacturing companies, big and small.

Check out the skinny at the I+A blog.

Then consider attending OpenBeta. Or heck, attend both. OpenBeta is the 30th.

All we need now is some people, some laptops, some food, some music, and of course some good discussion and then hm1 will just be there…

The evening reception will be a great chance to see all Highlight Midwest has to offer put together in a format that is fun to take in. But at 8:00 it concludes and there is no reason that this should signal the end for everyone involved.

After the evening reception everyone is welcome to come to 810 Zone located in Kansas City’s beautiful Country Club Plaza. Great place to socialize, consume adult beverages, catch up on sports, and even play some games. There are rumors that the I+A crew are pros at Big Buck Hunter and Pop-A-Shot.

Map of 810’s location is here. Surely any “out of towners” will be able to follow or ride with KC locals to get there. This venue is within walking distance of what seems to be the hotel choice of Highlight Midwest’s out of town visitors.

Not long after the dot com bust, O’Reilly Media gave the world Foo Camp.

Foo Camp was followed two years later by Socialtext’s variation known as BarCamp.

Soon barcamps started popping up all over the world, many in our own backyards including Des Moines, Kansas City, and Omaha. Other variations are also common now: ProductCamps, DemoCamps, PodCamps, even WordCamps — all based on two basic ideas that the web can be your conference organizer and cutting-edge information is better shared in an open environment instead of closing it off behind the walls of pricey trade shows.

And there’s an interesting side effect of events put together in this way: it turns out talented people tend to come and participate of their own accord. You don’t really need keynote speakers.

Recently, some of us who had been wondering what might happen if we applied some barcamp concepts to a regional event were lucky enough to run into some people at the the Kauffman Foundation who were open to the idea; they have been incredibly supportive, plain and simple.

As icing on the cake, we were only slightly later put in touch with the forward-thinking minds at Record Bar, including Steve Tulipana, who in addition to sponsoring the day time space for the Highlight Midwest experiment and being very supportive of the concept, has been involved in many other creative things.

…the end!

Fast forward to now, and we’re busy finishing up the details for Oct 29. We’re also looking forward to seeing you be a part of it.

Lots of good tweetup suggestions on the wiki and in fact we might go with one of those places for a post-event tweetup on the 29th.

But for the 28th it’s the Flying Saucer that’s reserving tweetup space for around 40 Highlight Midwest-ers starting at 5pm.

Unless we’re too late…

That’s the catch, the part about being late. At least a few of us need to get there between 5:00-5:15pm or they forget about us and let the crowd that will ostensibly be forming for the nearby Alanis Morissette concert take our place.

So be punctual HMers! At least a few of you. Kansas Citians will have the easiest time of it so it’s on the locals to get at least a small group on-site, sampling the selection right at quittin’ time. And don’t let any Alanis Morissette fans push you around. That would be sad.

If some out-of-towners actually get there around this time, all the better. If we’re all too late, oh well, we can mingle with the unwashed masses at Flying Saucer or spontaneously move the tweetup to one of the many places nearby.

So see you at the Flying Saucer on the 28th! (here’s a map - and I love that the street view shows the building before it was even finished…)

The word “cadge” means to mooch so in true web mooch fashion you should skulk over to Lava Row and cadge the killer hm1 badge Nathan made for you. Then paste it into your many sites. See it? It’s on the right, just below Hillary Bean Brown’s profile.