Going Solo

I’m always glad to learn that Going Solo inspired others to put something together to help local freelancers learn from each other. Flying Solo (in addition to being a book on going solo which the authors kindly sent to me to read) is a one-day unconference for solo entrepreneurs and freelancers which is taking place in South Africa.

• Cape Town: Saturday 26 July 2008, 9.30am - 5pm at the Wild Fig restaurant, Observatory
• Johannesburg: Saturday 2 August 2008, 9.30am - 5pm, venue TBA

If you’re in that part of the world, visit the Flying Solo SA wiki and take part! There is also an online community on Ning.

Update: the link “sign up right away” was wrong and gave the impression registration was not open — actually, I messed up and posted the link to the Lausanne ‘08 event registration (which is, obviously, closed). It’s corrected now, and you can really sign up right away

It took some time, but Going Solo Leeds (Sept. 12th) registration is open. Hop along to our partner Expectnation’s site to sign up right away.

Here’s the deal:

• Early Bird (first 25 tickets — hurry up some have already been sold!): £150
• Normal: £220
• Late Bird (will kick in approx. 10 days before the conference date): £300
• On-site (if you really want to play it ‘last minute’): £350

A comment or two:

• for the Lausanne event, the first 25 tickets were sold in under a week
• there will be advanced seminars (3h workshops) on the Saturday morning — more about them shortly, but know already that if you have already registered for the main conference when they are announced, you will get a special discount on them (they will be open only to conference participants)
• Jet2.com is a low-cost company that flies to Leeds-Bradford International airport
• Leeds is 2.5h from London by train (book early, and you could pay as little as £22.50 return)
• the programme for the main conference is going to be very similar to the Lausanne one (don’t change a winning team) — videos are online for you to have a preview if you wish
• the Going Solo team is pretty excited about all this!

Looking forward to seeing you in Leeds

As you might notice, things are slowly moving on the website. The Going Solo blog is not moving, but the Lausanne ‘08 site has been archived at http://lausanne08.going-solo.net and the Going Solo Leeds ‘08 site is (still in the making) http://leeds08.going-solo.net.

So, here we are: Going Solo on tour. Take the same concept, the same great speaker team, the same programme, but another city.

(When I say “same”, I mean “almost the same: little changes here and there, improvements based on lessons learned, but basically, the same idea.)

Going Solo Leeds will take place on September 12th, 2008. I’m letting you know straight away (I had confirmation this morning for the venue, the Old Broadcasting House (BBC) where met:space is located) so that you can book dates and start making travel arrangements if you want.

I’ll be publishing information about Leeds and making promotional material available as soon as possible. Registration will also open… as soon as I’ve set it up :-).

Now that Going Solo is going on tour, the website is going to have to evolve. Instead of having a 1D website (one event and that’s it), the Going Solo site is going to have to become multi-dimensional: add time and space, and you have a 3D site. Different cities, different moments in the year. Even if it is not “planned” that Going Solo will take place in Lausanne again next year (it’s not that kind of event), who knows — it’s perfectly possible that it’ll come back some day.

So, how do I archive the “Lausanne” event? This isn’t as simple as 2008, 2009, 2010 subdomains. Or subdomains with city names. “lausanne.2008.going-solo.net”? Blogs are easy, for that: just keep on writing.

Also, what about visual branding? Keep exactly the same logos and colours (and update city/date information on them), or make a subtle change (which one? add “Leeds” somewhere?) so that people realise it’s not the same event?

Also, tags: goingsolo, goingsololausanne, goingsolo2008lausanne, gs2008lausanne, gs2008leeds, goingsololeeds — heck.

I suspect I might have to move away from wordpress.com to find an acceptable solution. While I’m perfectly capable of hosting a blog (I do that for CTTS), it’s quite nice not having to worry about maintenance and downtime.

Ideas and suggestions welcome — for Going Solo Leeds as well as for the website.

At the risk of repeating myself, one idea which is at the core of Going Solo is that even though we may be soloists, we are never completely isolated. We learn a lot from our peers or mentors, and this is something that I wanted to achieve with the conference. Experienced freelancers sharing some of their insights, and a place to take the time to think about our business skills.

It became clear at the event that there was extremely good interaction between participants, be they attendees, staff or speakers, and in looking for ways to prolong this community richness online, the e-mail discussion list seemed the obvious way to go.

I am therefore happy to introduce Going Solo Together, a discussion list for web-enabled freelancers, soloists and small business owners to share stories, advice and problems with their peers.

Though of course the material provided through the Going Solo conference is going to be a topic of discussion at first, the objective of this discussion list is not be concentrate on the event itself, but more on the various issues that arise when being a soloist. Share tips, advice, or ask for them.

Archives are members-only, which gives some amount of “privacy”, but keep in mind that anybody can join the group. If something is really private, you should probably not be sharing it on a public e-mail list. However, we do ask list members to keep the issues discussed here reasonably confidential.

At the difference of the Going Solo Newsletter, which is a one-way form of communication (I send out newsletters, people read or hit delete), Going Solo Together goes all ways. Everybody can participate, so the traffic could become heavy. If it’s too much for you, be sure to visit the mailing list site and switch to “digest”, which collects multiple e-mails into one big one, thus saving you from inbox flood.

You may also subscribe by sending an e-mail to going-solo-together-subscribe@googlegroups.com.

Many thanks to Daniel Schildt who came up with “Going Solo Together”, a name I immediately liked.

It’s been a week now since Going Solo, and judging from immediate and more delayed feedback, it was clearly a success. I’ve been travelling a bit this last week (I’m now settled in Leeds until next Thursday) so I haven’t had as much online time as I thought I would — but all in all it’s not a bad thing as I need some time to recuperate. I came out of Going Solo positively boosted and full of ideas (almost too full!) about “what to do next”, so these next weeks are going to be a bit about sorting that out and making certain things happen.

A survey made with SurveyMonkey, which I found really easy to use, has been sent to all registered attendees. Most people have filled it in and I’m finding the feedback from the responses really interesting. If you haven’t sent in your responses, please do!

If you haven’t seen them yet, do check out the videos of the conference (all the talks are online now!), the interviews Charbax made during the day, live-blogging notes by Suw, Jaap and Urs, as well as the photos (official or not) — and give a hand with the tagging if you feel so inclined. If you understand French, you can also check out this interview of me on Culture Pod. You’ll find more posts about the event on del.icio.us.

So, what’s next? Here are some of the things floating in my mind:

• write a proper round-up of blog posts, videos, etc. related to the event and the talks
• collect quotes that make Going Solo look good (if you have something quotable, e-mail it to me!)
• secure venue and date for Going Solo Leeds so that ticket sale can open and discussions with sponsors can start
• discuss how the programme will evolve with speakers and advisors (it will be very much the same, but we can make it even better)
• get a discussion mailing-list started for freelancers in Europe, so that we can continue exchanging tips and experience in the spirit of Going Solo
• think about how the Going Solo blog can evolve into a real community ressource
• write about the Big Wifi Adventure (both a disaster and a success story for Swisscom, from different angles)
• analyse the survey data
• see if my workshops-the-next-day idea leads somewhere (and continue tossing around other similar ideas for Going Solo development)
• tie up some loose administrative strings (welcome behind the scenes) like paying bills, etc.

Anything I’ve forgotten?

A quick quote sent to me by my friend Kevin Marks. To be honest, I’m too knackered right now to read the whole article, but it looks interesting:

The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today’s high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.

An upcoming wave of new workers in our society will never work for an established company if they can help it. To them, having a traditional job is one of the biggest career failures they can imagine.

Much of childhood today is spent, not in organized sports or organizations, but in ad hoc teams playing online games such as Half Life, or competing in robotics tournaments, or in constructing and decorating MySpace pages. Without knowing it, we have been training a whole generation of young entrepreneurs.

And who is going to dissuade them? Mom, who is a self-employed consultant working out of the spare bedroom? Or Dad, who is at Starbuck’s working on the spreadsheet of his new business plan?

The Next American Frontier

Quick news: the main session videos are up; help us tag the photos on Flickr; a survey has been sent out to participants (let me know if you didn’t get it) — thanks for filling it in as soon as possible; if you wrote about Going Solo and it’s not in the coverage list, let me know (e-mail or Twitter message); make sure you’ve signed up for the newsletter if you want to be sure not to miss news about the upcoming Going Solo Leeds (and elsewhere!) and the online community developments we’re planning (I’ll blog about it too, but right now I really need a nap… tiredness of these last months is really kicking in!).

Wow. I think I can say that. Your response to Going Solo exceeded all my expectations. I’m taking the week-end off but will be back on Monday with online news, cooking up a survey for participants, and collecting links to blog posts and photos.

In the meantime, check out:

• talk videos on DailyMotion (more being uploaded this week-end, thanks Sébastien!)
• official photos on Flickr (thanks Guillaume!)
• live notes by the legendary live-blogger Suw Charman
• live notes by Urs
• live notes by Jaap
• more links
• sign up for the newsletter or join the Facebook group to keep in touch with the Going Solo community if you haven’t yet

Thanks to everybody who came, everybody who helped out, and everybody who supported this project during the last months. I couldn’t have done this without you.

A special thanks to the speakers, who delivered a really really great programme.

See you in a few days!

So, here we are. Going Solo is now. Some practical information and links, for attendees and those of you following from afar.

• media coverage & backchannels (IRC, Twitter, goingsolo tag)
  
• be nice with the wifi
• info for the evening
• watch the talks on DailyMotion
• goingsolo tag on Technorati
• links to going-solo.net on Technorati
• photos tagged goingsolo on Flickr
• the programme, session descriptions, and speaker bios

Make note of the wifi access code before you hit the venue (it’s a long story, please don’t ask until next week):

• network name: lvm-73326
• WPA Personal key: 59jh-uwmn-hc2s-xtew

Just a quick reminder: everyone, registered or not yet to Going Solo, is welcome tonight at Darling Pub in Lausanne for a few Pre Conference Drinks.

Weather is un peu printanier aujourd’hui en Suisse, as we say in French. Les averses et les éclaircies se succèdent capricieuses dans un ciel aéré. Il reste un peu de neige sur les sommets. Les tulipes ont fané mais les glycines sont en pleine floraison.

Le pire est attendu pour samedi, qui devrait être bien pluvieux. Plutôt un plan musées à prévoir pour ceux qui auront la chance d’être en ville encore le jour après la conférence que barbecue au Parc Bourget, a priori. Mais sait-on jamais…

De nombreuses animations sont prévues à Lausanne en cette fin de semaine. Quelques suggestions: Samedi, il y a le marché en ville. Un des plus anciens d’Europe croit-on. Avec le Guet de la Cathédrale, qui sonne les heures depuis le Moyen Âge, c’est une de nos jolies traditions qui perdure dans les rues piétonnes du centre-ville. Faire le plein de légumes frais ou de fleurs pour vos mamans, flâner dans les librairies de seconde main et musarder sur les terrasses est toujours un bonheur.

Vendredi après-midi et samedi sur la Place Saint-François, une quarantaine de vignerons vaudois viennent faire déguster le nouveau millésime. Le Luna Park est ouvert à Bellerive, les piscines aussi. Si le temps s’arrange, pourquoi pas un petit tour en bateau solaire Aquarel sur le Léman ou sauter sur un navire de la CGN pour admirer le rivage? Sans oublier Balelec pour les braves.

Quel programme… Sans mentionner le Off Programme de Going Solo!

A tout à l’heure, see you tonight at Darling!

Anne Dominique