Wow! I can hardly believe how much has happened over the past week, but it seems we really hit the nail on the head with Social Media Club - and for once I am on trend instead of a year ahead of it! I must be slowing down in my old age!

In the New Media Release Podcast we did yesterday, I referenced that we would be holding an organizational meeting here in the Bay Area very soon. Today I received confirmation from Seth Mazow that we will be able to use the conference room at Interplast for this meeting to be held on Wednesday August 16th from 6-8PM. For some reason I thought it was Redwood City, but their offices are actually in Mountain View. I will post the details in another post once I get the Structured Blogging setup for creating an hCal Microformat post for the event.

At the moment I am talking to people in New York, Los Angeles, London and Toronto about establishing Social Media Club in those cities. I don’t know how much they want to say about their involvement yet since we are just beginning the conversation, but I can say that great minds think alike! Many other people see the bigger picture we see and I am excited for the opportunity to come together as a community.

This is why I have always felt it so important to do this as an open community process rather than trying to claim solo ownership on this endeavour. I really don’t know what its final form will be, I just know that there must be good intentions at the core of what we do and that shared values must drive all of our actions - regardless of our political, cultural or ideological differences. It is also the reason for taking it to the streets - for getting out of Silicon Valley and emrbacing a real global perspective on this new era of our economy.

I was just Skyping with Heather Gold of Subvert fame about some of the things that are happening in the business world today. She pointed me to an article about her approach to Open Source Management which was written up in WebMonkey. I think she is onto something here - it very much feels like the sort of approach we want to take with organizing Social Media Club.

If we are to make this thing more real than real, we will need to do it together and we can learn a lot from the practices of the open source community. It looks like a few of the first ‘co-founders’ are starting to step forward - I hope they, and the others that will follow understand this ideal and choose to engage with us together rather than going it alone.

There is a world of opportunity that awaits - let’s seize upon this today and make the most of it!