Taylor Davidson walked into Launch Pad yesterday, and I knew TribeCon had arrived.  I don’t quite know why, but after all the work that has gone into this, having Taylor walk in was a powerful and emotional trigger for me.  Not that seeing Nathan Heleine and Michael Karnjanaprakorn was too shabby, having them show up yesterday was great too.

But something about seeing Taylor. Probably because of our shared experience at SXSW and the fact that he has traveled the world since he was last here.

Anyway, TribeCon has arrived, and I am soooo ready for it.

I can’t wait until the other speakers and friends start rolling into town over the next two days.  I can’t wait to toast the first NOLA Brew Houpitoulas on Wednesday night here at the Launch Pad and kick off the weekend with our Tribe.  I can’t wait until everyone strolls into the Bingo tent on Thursday morning to see what an amazing atmosphere we’ve created for this conference. I can’t wait til you see the t-shirts, stickers, and all the beautiful collateral that Justin Shiels designed. I can’t wait to hear so many of the wonderful speakers take the stage and share their inspiring stories and messages about community building.  I can’t wait to break bread (well, actually Jambalaya) with everyone at lunch, sitting at a 200 person picnic table under the oaks in City Park. And I can’t wait to hang with everyone in the TribeCon Lounge all weekend, our very own oasis in the center of Voodoo.

If you are still on the fence, take it from Champ Superstar, (and trust me) TribeCon is going to be an amazing experience.  You will learn, share, connect, and be inspired.   If you are committed to this community, to our community, to New Orleans, I’m asking you to join us for TribeCon.  We’ve worked so hard, come so far as a community.  Come share this experience with us.  It’s very personal to me, but this is about all of us.  If you haven’t yet, I am asking you,  please buy a ticket right now and Join the Tribe. If you have, thank you.

Thank you to everyone who has worked so hard to make this a reality.  Thank you to all the groups that have supported us along the way.  And most of all, thank you for being there with us on Thursday.

I’m excited to share more details about TribeCon, a conference about communities – both online and offline.  Tiffany Starnes and I have been working for the last six months to put it together along with a lot of help from our Tribal Council and a lot of friends from Net2NO.

We’re producing the conference in partnership with the Voodoo Experience.  TribeCon will be the official interactive component of the Voodoo Experience.  This is a tremendous opportunity for TribeCon. The Voodoo Experience has grown into a huge annual music festival, and together we can build TribeCon into a integral part of the experience and a major interactive conference.

So let’s get to the details:

• What: TribeCon is a conference about building communities, online and offline.
• When: October 29-30, 2009
• Where: Voodoo Experience – City Park, New Orleans, LA
• How much: $169 for TribeCon includes single day Voodoo Experience ticket. $269 for TribeCon includes three day Voodoo Experience Ticket.
• Who: The speakers are all people passionate about building communities.
• Why: Building a community around your brand, cause, or mission is the most powerful way to grow.  Today’s social networking tools make it possible to reach your audience in powerful new ways to build a movement.  At TribeCon you’ll learn how to build community online to effect action offline.

Why does TribeCon need New Orleans?

One of the things I’m most excited about is bringing the conversation about authentic online communities to New Orleans.  Having the Voodoo Experience has a partner enables us to make this truly a world-class conference.  TribeCon connects with New Orleans because we have such a deep sense of community here.  From the Mardi Gras indian tribes to front porch neighbors, New Orleans culture is rooted in community.  Andrew Larimer, Tim Soslow and Matt Tritico will be curating a special panel presentation that will be a celebration and exploration of community in New Orleans.

Inspired by SXSW, and now TribeCon is just six weeks away.

The idea for TribeCon was inspired on the Y@ Pack trip to SXSW organized by the Net2NO community.  We had such an amazing experience together, and it was truly amazing what a motivated community can accomplish.  On the bus ride back from SXSW in March, we hatched the idea for TribeCon.  We pitched it at the GNO Inc Digital Media Alliance meeting in May, and though I regrettably made a couple of miscues in my pitch (ugh), we started to line up support and Robbie Vitrano helped us line up meetings with Rehage Entertainment.

So after a long summer of laying the ground work, here we are, just six weeks away from the inaugural TribeCon, with a supportive partner in the Voodoo Experience and a tremendous slate of speakers. Tiffany and I are both getting much less sleep these days, but we’re doing it, and really excited about producing TribeCon.

TribeCon is important to the tech community, and important to New Orleans.

So, you’re interested in getting involved?

Fantastic.  We need your help to make this a success.

• We’re bouncing a lot of ideas off our friends and supporters in the Tribal Council.  Everyone on it has been tremendously helpful and it has really shaped what this conference is, in addition to helping us make decisions on branding, marketing, content and more.  Membership is open to all, so join the Tribal Council.
  
• We will be looking for volunteers to coordinate a number of things for TribeCon.  If you’re interested getting to TribeCon for free, please contact us.
  
• We’re also looking for sponsors to support TribeCon and connect with an audience of community activist and online influencers.  We have a sponsorship package that we can send you, please let us know if your interested, or know someone for us to reach out to.
• Stay updated with all of the latest, follow @tribecon on Twitter.
  
• Ready to sign up? Great, head on over and buy a ticket to the conference.

Thanks to everyone for all your support.  We’re excited to present TribeCon and connect with the community.

Have more questions? Hit me up in the comments! Thanks.

We’re back from SXSW and I was invited to present a review of the Net2NO Y@ Pack’s efforts at the Digital Media Alliance (DMA) yesterday. It is great to see the DMA gaining steam and taking an active leadership role in the New Orleans tech community.

While I was tapped to present the results from the SXSW road trip, I have to say that it was a total team collaborative effort. The leadership of Damien Lamanna, Jessica Rohloff, Adele Tiblier, Tiffany Starnes & Andrew Larimer was what made this trip possible. And of course the support from GNO, DDD, City of NO, and all our sponsors. We’ll be posting a case study that is being put together very shortly with success metrics, but I wanted to convey how impactful the support of the trip was in terms of raising awareness about the New Orleans tech scene.

On the way home from SXSW, Tiffany Starnes, Adele Tiblier & I spent eight hours brainstorming on a bus about what we wanted to do next, how we were going to capture and build on this momentum. We kept coming back to community. We got home and tore through Seth Godin’s Tribes, and started bouncing the idea off people we respected, forming a Tribal Council. Today, we’re pleased to present our conference idea that heretofore has been under wraps.

What is happening in New Orleans right now is just a microcosm of what is happening all over the world. Traditional organizations with top down power structures are giving way to grass roots community-driven movements. Let’s call them tribes. These tribes self organize and galvanize to action. Let’s put a conference on to explore this phenomenon:

The Tribe Conference is a conference for people passionate about building communities. Over the last several years there has been an explosion of grass roots organizations that have been built through connecting people online with the mission of spurring action offline. These communities have developed organically and have consolidated national and international presence through websites, wikis, and branding. The communities are very grass roots and inherently local. As these communities evolve, there is a further need to facilitate a sharing of ideas, best practices, and development of a national community for the growth of all of these movements. The Voodoo Tribe conference mission will be to educate and connect communities, with a focus on the exchange of ideas about common ties of community-building, rather than a focus on what the communities do.

When we look at the ideal time for a conference like this in New Orleans, it fits well with the Voodoo Music Fest which is a great music festival around Halloween each year. The ethos of the music fest fits well with the idea for this conference too. I’d be interested in feedback on whether that timing is a draw or a drawback. We believe people like to come to New Orleans around great events like that to get some of the New Orleans cultural experience in addition to the conference.

The communities we would be interested in reaching out to are the ones that share these common threads:

• unconferences / unorganizations / movements / tribes
• web-based self organization through twitter, facebook, wikis, meetup.com, google groups, etc
• grass-roots but part of a larger national & international movement that people have simply picked up and run with
• Examples: Net Squared, BarCamps, WordCamps, Co-working, Ignite, Social Media Club

Want to learn more? Contact me, Tiffany or Adele. Want to be a part of the movement?  Join our Tribal Council.  Let’s make this happen together.

You: Make women swoon and grown men cry with your website designs (or maybe vice versa).  More importantly you “get” web usability and clean, creative design.  Your designs are bleeding edge, pushing the envelope from Web 2.0 to the future.

• xhtml/css experience not necessary, but must have a solid understanding for designing for the web.
• ability to design web sites where content is the primary focus and graphics engage users to experience the content.
• post-Web 2.0
• clean, crisp and detailed down to icons, bullets, character spacing and line heights

Voodoo Ventures: Looking for a web designer for a specific project.  This is a contract gig, but we hope to establish a long-term relationship, as we have a lot of work that comes through Voodoo.

• Requirements: Produce layered PSD’s for a website based on wireframes & concepts we provide.
• Location: Anywhere. Preference = New Orleans > Louisiana > Anywhere
• Compensation: We’ll provide requirements and will need a project cost from you.

If you’re interested, send us the following:

• Portfolio
• Hourly rate

Get involved with this cool project we are working on.  We’re doing some cool things and want you to be a part of it. Don’t be shy, apply.  We want to see what you’ve got. Contact Mary Ann at maryann@voodooventures.com or apply on Hirefly today.  Be sure to include the above to be considered.

We’re thrilled to be launching the new Flatsourcing Dashboard at the TC50 DemoPit.  We’ll be in the DemoPit tomorrow, and are will be doing it up New Orleans-style with Mardi Gras beads and bottles of Tabasco.
It’s been a lot of work getting the new Flatsourcing Dashboard ready for launch.  Oleg, Alex and Timur have been working really hard to get everything prepped.  We’ll be releasing it to all clients next week.

Hurricane Gustav threw us a curveball this week and unfortunately Will Donaldson isn’t able to come along, but my good friend Gerard Ramos has stepped up and will be helping me out.  I’m excited to spend time with the former local New Orleans developer who’s stepped up to the big leagues now in San Francisco.

Everyone has worked really hard to get the Flatsourcing Dashboard ready, and it is something that we’ve been thinking about for a while now.  We felt a need for a central location for our clients to collaborate with us.  But, we didn’t want to lock clients into a proprietary project management tool, we pride ourselves on working within existing project management protocol.

The Flatsourcing Dashboard (login:voodoo password:123456) accomplishes some of the things we feel are important when collaborating globally:

• Get to know your team with avatars
• Keep up on your project with a “news feed” of all communications in Basecamp or any other project management tools.
• Keep track of your contract and invoices all in once place.
• Get in touch with us in an emergency instantly and easily.
• Learn the best way to work with us with FAQ’s and a client manual.

All of this is in the Flatsourcing Dashboard, providing “outsourcing insight” to our clients and taking our services to a whole new level.

I’m so excited to be out here at TC50.  If you’re in town and want to meet up, email me at cschultz@flatsourcing.com.  Follow me on Twitter for updates.

I love attending the SXSW Interactive conference every year.  It’s my favorite conference of the year, a chance to learn, catch up with old friends, meet new ones, and of course have a great time.

Last year I pledged to myself that I would try to get further involved and organize a panel for this 2009.  So I put together a panel submission covering a topic that I have a little expertise on and I think people are interested in hearing about.

Let me start by saying, my goal for this post is that you will click on over to the SXSW Panel Picker and vote for our panel and even leave a comment about how much you want to see it. OK, so now that that is out there, let me tell you why you should do that.

Our panel is called: Outsourcing 2.0: Is the World Flat or Not?

The topic of the panel stems from a discussion I had last year with Sandeep Sood of Monsoon Company, a fellow oursourcing firm, about the challenges of outsourcing web development work, whether the pain of working with a team thousands of miles away is worth it, and how to develop personal relationships that bridge cultural and geographical borders.

I am fortunate to have rounded up some great co-panelists for this discussion all of whom bring a different perspective to outsourcing and each of whom run a successful development firm:

• Sandeep Sood – Sandeep runs Monsoon Company in Berkley with teams in India. He authors the Doubsourcing comic (recently featured in WSJ) and sends his apologies to Thomas Friedman that he believes the world is not yet flat in Forbes.
• Qasim Mueen – Qasim is in Pittsburgh with teams in Pakistan. He is the co-founder and CEO of Zigron.
• Andrea Azdril – Andrea is Los Angeles with development in Beijing, China. She is the CEO of StarTech Global and frequently travels back and forth from China.

Some personal thoughts on this panel that I’d like to share:

Submitting a panel topic about outsourcing web development work to a conference full of web developers feels a little like trying to sell ice cubes to eskimos.  It definitely is a topic that may be somewhat taboo, certainly considering these economic times and what you hear in the media about jobs going overseas.

Along the same lines, I sometimes feel challenged talking about our business structure, and our Flatsourcing team with colleagues in New Orleans.  I am friends with talented web developers locally who are looking for work, is it parodoxical to be passionate about supporting the local community while taking my work and having it done in Russia?

I think reconciling these feelings is a lot of why I believe this panel topic to be so important.  There are real tensions and preconceptions about outsourcing, and the controversial nature of the topic is exactly why I believe we need to discuss it.

I fully expect to have the question thrown at me “Why are you hiring guys 3000 miles away instead of guys in this room?” And that will be a tough question to answer.

When I think about that question, it boils down my personal feeling that the world really is getting smaller.  Imagine a world that truly was flat, so a business partner or employee on the other side of the world was as easy to work with as your neighbor across the street.  Collaboration tools, broadband, and common language of software means you can work with whomever you choose.

In 2001, I met three guys over eLance because I needed someone to build a website for me, and I couldn’t do it, and I didn’t know anyone personally who could.  They did a great job, we continued to build our partnership, and a few trips to Russia and eight years later we’re in business together.  And asking me why I’m working with them over someone local simply boils down to the fact that this is the direction I have chosen, it is working, and the value of our relationships is not something that I measure in terms of how far away they are.

This may be the case for you, Chris, but what about if I am evaluating outsourcing now, with no personal history.  I’m working with a clean slate?

Well, this is the discussion I have almost every day with clients.  Outsourcing exists because there is global demand for talent and there is a global marketplace.  Release the bonds of locale, and your hiring pool is global.  Wouldn’t you want to explore the opportunity to hire top talent, anywhere in the world?

That is the reality of what you can do today.

It’s not about low cost, its about value.  And value is driven more by quality than cost.  Web development in particular is a marketplace that is fully globalized. It opens up a world of opportunity to build new “virtual” companies that transcend borders.

So, that is a sneak peak at some of the thoughts I am looking forward to sharing on the panel.  I’d love you hear some of yours in the comments.  Ask me the tough questions, I hope to be able to answer them.

I genuinely hope that we have the opportunity to discuss this at SXSW.  You can help by voting for us here.

Thanks.

I just got back from visiting my partners in Flatsourcing in Kazan, Russia. This was my third trip to Kazan, and by far the most exciting. This stems from both the growth we are experiencing with Flatsourcing, but even more importantly the changes that are taking place right before my eyes in the city.

On arrival in Kazan, one of the first things you notice is that the whole city is under construction. Since last year a major road repair program has taken place and pot-hole lines streets have been replaced with paved, widened highways. Soviet-era block houses are being replaced by new apartment buildings. I was fortunate enough to stay in a new apartment that Oleg’s family has purchased. In the last three years mortgages have become commonplace in Russia, and cars and apartments are fast becoming part of the middle-class lifestyle. Speaking of cars, as we drove to work each morning, we passed dealerships for Honda, Toyota, and Hyundai as well as Mercedes and BMW. Word is that the Chinese auto manufacturers will be invading next year. They already have their fleets on the road in the form of big beautiful city busses. Just last year the city bus fleet was ragged, its been upgraded by Chinese manufacturers like Golden Dragon.

Shopping malls are all over the place. Kazan actually has more shopping malls per capita than Paris. We ate lunch at a shopping mall food court at a Russian fast food chain ironically named CCCP (translated as USSR). I asked the guys if this was offensive or threatening to anyone. Nope, they said, they Soviet era has been relegated to nostalgia by modern capitalism that is fueling the country’s growth. CCCP now is simply a fast food joint serving the world’s biggest brand, Coca-Cola.

You can’t help but notice how IT oriented the city is. One of the things I trumpet about Kazan is that there are more than 20 universities, most of them technical. This is a university town graduating the next generation of computer programmers annually. Kazan, and Russia as a whole has a culture of IT. The coolest job you can have is a computer programmer. Being high tech opens the doors of opportunity, including working at Google in St. Petersburg, or eventually working in the US if you are good enough.

Billboards around the city advertise HP desktops and laptops. The government has just invested in a beautiful IT startup “IDEA Park” to provide office space to startups complete with furnished desks and computers. The rent is discounted 50% for winners of an annual business plan competition.

Two years ago Fujitsu moved an entire office from the UK to Kazan through a partnership with a Russian based IT company, ICL. Since then, IBM has moved in and is partnering with Kazan State University and there were rumors when I was there that Microsoft is next and that top talent is starting to be recruited by Microsoft.

I can’t wait to see what Kazan looks like next year. One thing is for sure, the Flatsourcing office will have quadrupled in size and we’ll be hiring more!

Finally, the hottest gadget in Russia by far is the iPhone. I brought three of them over for Oleg, Alex, and Timur and they were promptly unlocked and filled with some of the most amazing software that we’ll learn about over here in the near future. I ended up leaving my personal one behind as well. Even though carriers don’t sell them yet, and they go for upwards of $800 on the black market, our last night there we were surprised to see the women at the two tables on either side of us to be taking pictures of each other with their iPhones. An apt metaphor for falling borders in this ever-flattening world!

Back in the heyday of the NBA I used to love watching Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. No matter what kind of game MJ was having, Phil Jackson would rest him at the end of the third quarter and for the first few minutes in the fourth. He’d come off the bench rested and ready, and go on to do the most amazing things I’d never seen basketball court, more often than not leading the Bulls to victory.

And sometime during the fourth quarter, Marv Albert would remark “he lets the game come to him.”

Sometimes as an entrepreneur you have to let the game come to you. Things don’t always move as quickly as you want. Software doesn’t get developed overnight. Search engine rankings take time. And user adoption of your product doesn’t happen overnight.

About a month ago I felt myself pressing. I was pressing too hard to get siteMighty to the next level. I was pressing too hard on my team, our partners, and our business model. I realized this one night when I literally laid in bed all night with my mind racing and unable to sleep. I was pressing too hard.

So I made the decision to step back. I let the team step forward on siteMighty, and instead of trying to press so hard to grow fast, let things take their natural course for a while. We have a fully developed product, our users like it and are finding success with it, and we have a great team behind it at supporting it.

It was an incredibly freeing moment when I realized I could take a break from siteMighty and stop pressing so hard.

So that’s exactly what I’ve been doing, I’ve been focusing my energy on building the business infrastructure for Flatsourcing which has been going incredibly well, and is something thats been waiting for my attention for a long time.

And today I realized that the game was coming to me.

• A good friend of mine signed up for an account with siteMighty and gave me some great feedback on it.
• I looked in on our support tickets and stats that I’ve been purposely ignoring for the last couple weeks. They’ve been handled excellently by our support team.
• Today we received a revenue-share check from a partner it was literally 10x what it was last month. That means we’re growing but more importantly our users are growing. Wow, if that’s what stepping away will do, I’m heading to Panama.
• Most of all, I’ve been having fun again.

Letting the game come to you feels great. Pressing too hard feels stressful. It’s a lesson in entrepreneurship and I won’t take lightly.

Thanks for the life lesson MJ.

So we’ve been working hard on the redesign for Flatsourcing.com and really thinking about what are goals are with the site. It is going to be a Wordpress-based platform, but it needs to function as more than just a blog. We asked ourselves what we are trying to accomplish with the site (I know, a rarity that we actually think about our goals before plunging headlong into design, I should have been doing this years ago):

1. First and foremost, we are soliciting business for Flatsourcing, so we need to both communicate what we do, and enable visitors to the site to easily contact us.
2. We are communicating both our skills, but more importantly, demisifying and personalizing outsourcing. We want to use social media (twitter, video, profiles on LinkedIn & Facebook) to enable clients and potential clients to really get to know our team in Kazan. We need to put a face on the business over there, and bridge the cultural, time, and geographical distances to bring our team as close as we can to our clients.
3. We want to make sure that our current clients have the tools they need to work with us. They will have an (eventually private) area to login to with access to all the tools we use. Basecamp for project management, Freshbooks for invoicing, Skype for voice chat, and Adobe Acrobat Connect for video conferencing.
4. We want to communicate our expertise in our field. We’ll do this through the blog, so that the site is a living breathing expression of what Flatsourcing is, not just a corporate presence placeholder.

So, with those goals in mind, we drew up mockups for the design of the site on both sides, New Orleans & Kazan. I’ve included the pictures below. Are we on the right track? What would you like to see from us on Flatsourcing.com?