Silicon Valley Watcher - reporting on the business of technology and media

Rooster Club meets this Friday, June 20 at the de Young museum in the gardens out by the cafeteria. From 6pm to 8.30pm, all welcome. Free entrance.

Friday Nights at the de Young

On Friday nights the entire museum is open until 8:45 p.m. Friday Nights at the de Young offers a variety of interdisciplinary arts programs, including live music, poetry, films, dance, tours, and lectures. The cafe is open with a special Friday Nights dinner menu, and a no-host cocktail bar is serving drinks. There are art-making activities for everyone.

Wilsey Court
Chihuly-Inspired Fashions by Stormy Leather
Stormy Leather mingles with museum visitors wearing family-friendly outfits inspired by the art of Dale Chihuly. Wear your own Chihuly-inspired fashion this evening!

Live music by the Minks. Girls … in boots … playing songs by the Kinks. Everybody’s gonna be happy!

Jeff Nolan and his team at Newsgator put together a great media widget for my sponsor Intel (over in the right hand column). This is much better use of this space than a banner ad or skyscraper ad that repeats a marketing message.

The Intel media widget showcases Intel's new/social media and it changes all the time. It shows off the human face of Intel rather than a slick ad with a slick marketing message.

I'm looking for one PR company that would like to become a sponsor of SVW and use the media widget format to showcase themselves and their clients. I only want one PR company for this slot - I need a Rooster PR company, one with cojones :-)

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MediaWatch: Media Widgets Will Be The New Ads... Are You Feeling Innovative?

Will Online Advertising Turn Into Rich Media Widgets?

Silicon Valley Watcher Sponsors' Social/New Media Widget

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We'll be sneaking in news and insider info only available to SVW Roosters.

We'll also be organizing various events as part of the Rooster Club - salons of peers not podiums. You'll be the first to know, the first to be invited.

Make sure you know which way the wind blows in Silicon Valley and sign up for SVW's newsletter!

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.

Here are my recent posts on the Rooster Club:

By Tom Foremski for Silicon Valley Watcher.com

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.

[Please see The Call of the Rooster...]

The rooster club idea seems to have found a large hole in the zeitgeist, and one that seems more than ready to be filled. The response was so good that it might have had something to do with losing our server Friday for a few hours.

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.

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.

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.

And there are a ton of emails to go through...

I'm going to move the rooster discussion to its own place but in the meantime, I'm tagging rooster related posts and will publish your rooster pieces if you'd like to email them to me: tom at siliconvallewatcher.com. I will also update the Call of the Rooster post, adding more metaphors and guiding principles sent in by our readers.

How about: Don't scratch at the door of the future--come into the henhouse and help make the future--join the rooster club! A salon of peers rather than podiums.

Sign up sheets are coming...

Oh, and I just realized that I was born in the Chinese year of the Rooster.

Here is the genesis post: The Call of the Rooster

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

By Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher.com

In proposing the rooster club, twenty years on from the birth of the Churchill Club, I chose the rooster as a symbol of gender-neutral qualities that are admirable, that describe our times, and can be applied to all people.

[Please see: The Call of the Rooster...]

Yet we live in a society that is still divided along gender, ethnic, economic, and other lines. Those divisions are being dealt with in many ways, through many organizations and the vast goodwill of many people.

I'd rather not drag those divisions into the rooster club which is a place to focus on meritocracy, a salon of peers-not podiums. And meritocracy is a key element of the unique culture of Silicon Valley that should be highlighted.

Mobile, fragmented, and unrooted

These days our culture is becoming more mobile because we have a vast torrent of mobile digital devices and the infrastructure to allow us to be more mobile, to become more nomadic.

We are no longer tied to the desktop PC, nor to the laptop; and we will soon have access to our digital lives from any device anywhere, anytime and anyplace. We are becoming digitally-enabled mobile/nomadic peoples.

We are also more mobile in our thinking, more able to spot the obstacles to progress that gender, ethnic, and economic divisions create.

But we live in an increasingly fractured world because we belong to distinct groups/tribes defined by our employer, our friends, our professional associations, our ethnicity, and our sexual preferences.

Hopefully the rooster club will be a meeting place, online and offline, that can bridge our fractured worlds.

A return to our nomadic roots?

The first human cultures emerged from the nomadic tribal communities where it was common to celebrate the qualities of an animal, its spirit, its qualities, its energies.

We seem to be going back to our roots and becoming nomadic peoples again--or rather "nomadig" people: living in digitally-enabled groups but not necessarily *technology* focused in the same way as when the Churchill Club began 20 years ago.

And this time around, we are no longer tied to a particular geography, and nor is our thinking. Much of the culture of innovation is no longer tied to Silicon Valley, there are centers of innovation all over the planet.

We are mobile and seemingly in constant motion, travelling thousands of miles in a day, in a week, in a month, yet we remain rooted within our online worlds as if we hadn't budged an inch. Our physical address changes more often than our online address.

And our digital technology is disappearing into our surroundings, becoming embedded and almost invisible; as the word "digital" is embedded and almost invisible in the word "nomadig."

The call of the Rooster

In the time-honored tradition of when the first nomadic tribes adopted animal spirits and celebrated their unique qualities, I ask you to join me in the rooster club, and let us celebrate the rooster's best qualities--not its gender.

Do you dig? I know you that you do :-)

Look out for the roo-star sign up sheets...coming very soon!

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 cajones, 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 is the Chinese year of the Rooster.

. . .

Let me know what you think, we'll pass around a sign-up sheet very shortly. Also, send me some of your Rooster/blogger metaphors, we can compile them here :-)