02
February
2006
|
17:39 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Rooster Club sign-ups!

Roosterreal.jpg

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher


My apologies for the late delivery of The Rooster Club sign up sheets (standalone journalism sucks BT!)


I've republished some of the introductions to the Rooster Club--which is a discussion/debate club for Silicon Valley North:San Francisco.


There is a tremendous community centered around San Francisco reaching across to the East and North Bay counties. Silicon Valley is no longer just about Palo Alto--it stretches North to Santa Rosa, South to Monterey, and all along the East Bay.


Silicon Valley is also a tremendous brand--it is a state of mind, a focus on innovation, and its spirit is felt in innovation centers around the world.


The Rooster Club is fortunate to have the support of the Churchill Club--which was formed 20 years ago by Tony Perkins and Rich Karlgaard. The Churchill Club organization has generously offered its support, which is great. But the Rooster Club will be an independent entity--a product of these times--and these times are defined by self-organization, and organic growth.


The way I envisage the Rooster Club is in the following ways:


I see the Rooster Club as a collection of "hen houses" and organized along the "birds of a feather" approach that is familiar in Silicon Valley and tech circles. Each hen house is organized around a particular interest, and chooses its own name, and that name can be a play on Rooster, such as Roo-starz, etc. You can have Linux Roosters, Opera Roosters--it doesn't matter what the topic is--it is a collection of two or more, like minded souls.


Each hen-house would organize its own meetings, it would manage its own affairs. The Roosters in each hen house are the communicators. They communicate within their groups and they communicate to other hen houses, to tell them what is going on in their worlds, what concerns them, what excites them.


I'd love to see the members of the Rooster Club involved in their local schools, to act as mentors and educators. It is an embarrasment that here in Silicon Valley, where we invent the future, that our public schools are broken.


Yet within a ten minute walk of each school there are more than enough community resources in terms of people and materials, to make those schools showcases instead of basket cases.


Roosters will be able to earn "tail feathers" for various achievements and the most respected tail feathers will be earned from becoming involved in local schools. I'd love to create a type of "Craigslist" around every school, something which allows a classroom to communicate with its community, whether it needs a box of pencils or just somebody to come in and chat to a class about the incredible things we are developing here in Silicon Valley.


I'd love to be able to provide hen houses, and local schools, with the simple collaborative technologies we have developed, such as wikis, blogging, forums, etc. If these technologies are as powerful as we say they are, then lets put them to work right here in our communities.


I know there are plenty of companies that would love to contribute their technologies. And I know there are plenty of people here that can make a huge difference in the lives of our local, and our global communities.


So please sign up for the Rooster Club, you don't have to be in the SF Bay Area, and let us know what type of hen house you'd like to create, or be involved in--any subject will do, let's also have some cultural hen houses--not just the usual geek subjects.


And we can have monthly meetings of hen houses--where we learn about what's going on in the hen houses. And where Roosters earn their tail feathers through five-minute presentations--and then we can maybe dance and shake our tail-feathers afterwards :-)


Roosters communicate just like bloggers communicate. And like Roosters, they see the crack of dawn--the light of the future day--before anyone else, and they will tell you about it whether you like it or not :-)


And as we move into a future of fractured societies and groups--we need communicators (Roosters) more than ever--so that we have a measure of our society and where it is going.


So please sign up now, and recruit your your hen houses!


Sign up for the Rooster Club and receive The Crack of Dawn--the Rooster Club newsletter. This will be the starting point and we'll figure out how to do this as we go along. Become a founding member today! You can also send an email to roosteradmin@SiliconValleyWatcher.com. Very soon the Rooster Club will have its own web site.

















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Here are my recent posts on the Rooster Club:

The Call of the Rooster


Twenty years on, Silicon Valley has expanded way beyond its birthplace in Palo Alto, it includes San Francisco and I would say it even reaches the outskirts of Santa Rosa, in the North Bay.


It would be fun to have a sort of "new" Churchill Club up in the city, where there are plenty of people interested in Churchillian type events but they can't get down to Palo Alto at 6pm because they are working until 8pm.


So, I've been floating the idea for the Rooster Club SF--[a salon of peers rather than podiums] over the past couple of weeks, here on SVW and elsewhere.


I mentioned it to Raymond Nasr, the new Churchill Club president who liked the idea. And it's not competition to Churchill Club, it's an SF affiliate. It is not either/or--but an and.



I've no idea how to pull such things together, Raymond and his team have plenty of experience.


I think that if Silicon Valley is going to make a comeback--and it is making a slow comeback--it has to have new institutions, new media voices and new organizations that represent and reflect these times.


And they have to come out of all this media disruption, this blogging movement.


And that is why it should be called the Rooster Club, imho, because the Rooster is a perfect metaphor for the blogger. Take a look:


-The Rooster crows away on its little patch of the farmyard, look at me, look how fine I am, my voice carries far and wide.


-The Rooster is all puffed up, all feathers and air, yet the Rooster is always the first to see the faint light of the future, the dawn of a new day, and proclaim it for all to hear.


-The Rooster always wakes you up way too early--and you curse the Rooster for it--but you can always fall back to sleep.


-A Rooster has to have cojones, by definition. But that is not a gender reference, it is a balls reference ;-) because men and women bloggers have to have the balls to put their ideas and writing out into the blogosphere, into a public arena where they can be challenged, ridiculed, and attacked.


-This was proposed in the Chinese year of the Rooster.


(And I was born in the year of the Rooster!)


- - -




Heeding the Call of the Rooster


We've had a wonderful response to the Call of the Rooster, an idea to create a debate society in San Francisco to serve "north Silicon Valley"--twenty years on from the founding of the Churchill Club in Palo Alto.


Take a look at some of the responses.


Let's hear from the rank and file not heat-seeking PR missiles says Sun's former comms chief Andy Lark


Great idea. Evenings are such a drag. I would also encourage you to only go off the beaten track in terms of speakers and content. I'm tired of the AO crowd and VCs. I'd like to hear more from the people changing the Valley and doing the work. Not the heat-seeking, PR missiles.

http://andylark.blogs.com

Charlene Li, Forrester's super star internet analyst says rooster club can reach out to SF's super smart women, a group that needs more inclusion in the valley.


I think the name is not nearly as important as the outreach to women. It’s pretty depressing to go to events like Syndicate, SuperNova, and Web 2.0 and see such an overwhelming number of men compared to women, in both the attendees and the speakers. There’s no better place to reach out to smart, techie women than in SF and I’d like to make sure that the word gets out to them.

http://blogs.forrester.com/charleneli



Bruce Lowry Novell's comms chief says count me in


I completely agree, Tom. As a North Bay type, I particularly like that you added the North Bay. There are some important tech companies up here - Autodesk being the biggest - but also a lot of startups doing interesting things (Mindjet comes immediately to mind). I like the Churchill Club events, but getting down the Peninsula is tough. Doing things in the City would be much better. When Churchill does do gigs in the City, they're always well attended. And, as a nascent corporate blogger, I'm a fan of the blogging component, too. Now if I could only come up with a good Rooster metaphor.

So count me in!


Debbie Landa, CEO of under the radar events firm IDB Networks is a big fan of the rooster


Tom, you know I'm a fan of this. Actually, many of our IBDNetwork members have been asking us to do events in the city again. Our events are definitely different from the Churchill Club, and there is always a need for the dealmaker events, but I'd be into the Rooster Club too.


Cisco's fast tracker Ron Piovesan says a more cutting edge discusion suits San Francisco's style


I like this idea. What is cool, I think, is that Churchill Club focuses on more established names. I think a "Rooster" club in SF would be good if it focused on new ideas, business models and so on (not that you can't find that in established names, mind you.) I think a more cutting edge discussion suits the personality of the city more as well.


Chris Dichtel notes that the rooster is often vane...but points in the right direction


Plus, a rooster is a common adornment on weather vanes, giving you that steady indication of which way the winds are blowing.


Please also see:



Emasculate the Rooster but keep the cojones!
-No unproductive reproductive organ discussions please :-)
















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