October's Midtown Brews All We Hoped It Would Be And More

I had the privilege of moderating last night’s Midtown Brews conversation about advocacy.  Forty plus individuals squeezed into Insivia’s conference area to toss around the changing landscape surrounding advocacy with the advent of web 2.0.  Little did they know that there would be the added treat of celebrating Midtown Brews second anniversary with scrumptious Rascal House pizza topped off with cupcakes and cakes in beautiful fall colors.

Our intent for last night’s meeting was to share how each of us were advocates in our own way.  As the room continued to fill with more and more people, I hesitated, thinking to myself, are there just too many of us to ask –who are you, what do you advocate, and why are you an advocate?  The only concession made was to ask people to keep their remarks to around one minute.  Everyone cooperated and forty minutes later we all knew that there was an incredibly diverse group of advocates in that room-entrepreneurs, professional advocates, journalists, bloggers, advocates for a particular cause on their own dime and on their own time.  All kinds of people coming together to learn together on how we all could work together to enhance our efforts by banding together in a more coherent, focused way.

Then the conversation took another turn and we began discussing ways in which we could work together to make our conversation go to the next step.  Valdis Krebs noted that the fact that 50% of the room did not know the other 50% until last night was a good thing.  He told us that a diverse network is a more sustainable network because new nodes and new people are connected to it.  Steve Fitzgerald reminded us that there are always two sides to any discussion of advocacy and we needed to keep that in mind going forward.  Bill McDermott suggested a webring.  George Nemeth suggested Media Literacy training.  Ken Warren said that Lakewood Library has classes for adults.  Marc Lefkowitz asked how we could work together to promote and move our efforts forward quickly and effectively.  The questions, the solutions, the opportunities were quite staggering.  There are just too many to list here.  Watch the video to get even more insight as to how rich and vibrant the conversation was. 

Last night, Dennis Coughlin in his remarks concerning Midtown Brews and I-Open suggested that I-Open was like a parent to Midtown Brews and just like a parent had to let it become what it would be.  I think that given the conversations I overheard AFTER the video stopped and the podcast ended Midtown Brews may be entering NEXT STEPS itself. 

Thanks to each and everyone of you who joined us last night.  The positive energy and thinking that permeated the room will certainly give us the focus and drive to move forward with the objectives outlined in the conversation.  We look forward to working with all of you to move our collective initiatives forward.