Report: Meetup #11 - Another Unmeetup

Unmeetup 11 was valuable social and professional development networking meetup. This wasn't your father's service group meeting. We met in downtown Burlington on the lake's edge at Emma's Back Porch.  This is truly a gem of a venue.  You feel that you've left the city behind, and are up north by the lake.  Check them out. 

The Program

We again didn't know what the presentations would be, the attendees decided right there-and-then on-the-fly.  We designed to meetup, or rather unmeetup, to resemble, best we can in the time available, an unconference using the Open Space format. Hence, the name "unmeetup". Attendees were "unattendees" as they could unattend any session at any time. The purpose was to generate awareness of the unique format and momentum for the proposed Silicon Halton unconference.  The actual un-procedure for Meetup 11 was captured in the Meetup 10 blog, so we won't rehash it here.

With an objective of keeping the converstation alive, each of the topic (below) presenters/facilitators have separately blogged about their session and have or will create a discussion thread on the Silicon Halton LinkedIn group.  Jump in and join the continuing conversations.   We had 6 people pitch topics, 4 which bubbled to the top and became discussion topics:

• Improve Silicon Halton Business Directory topic and blog post by Ricardo Covo
• Facilitating the Hiring Process blog post by Brian Hogg
• Halton Business Entry into the US topic and blog post by Rick Stomphorst
• Should we Continue with the OpenSpace meetup format? topic and blog post by Philip Papadopoulos

Thanks

Thanks again to Jason Little who walked us through Open Space guidelines (he really knows his stuff) and helping to run the show.  Thanks to Emma's Back Porch for donating the facilities (truely a treasure of a spot right on Lake Ontario).  Greatly appreciate their support to the community.