I'm going to be heading to PEI for the week of July 19th.
I'll be speaking to local small businesses at the Charlottetown Chamber of Commerce. My working title and summary are as follows:
The Web, Open Source & Your Business: Leveraging digital to meet your business goals
We are in the middle of the hype cycle of social media -- everyone is talking about tools from Facebook to Twitter. While these can potentially help with marketing, the average widget manufacturer that sells to other businesses has trouble understanding what they mean to their business. Which tools are important? Which aren't?
Local communities, including their business ecosystem, need to work together to use digital tools and build knowledge worker economies through sharing, education, and experimentation.
Open source and related concepts like Creative Commons licensing for content and open data can help with this.
We'll explore some digital tools, and discuss which ones can help meet your business goals.
Update: this talk has now been scheduled with the Charlottetown Chamber of Commerce for Friday morning at 8am (also here on Plancast)
I'll also be addressing the UPEI community, where the focus will be more on my Drupal community experiences, open source, and innovation. The Islandora team have built a digital repository stack that includes Drupal on the front end for web integration. This will also build on my talk at the ACCT Canada 2009 conference.
I know (through the Internet) lots of great digital thinkers in the area like Rob Paterson, Peter Rukavina, the team at Silver Orange, and I recently met Dave Cormier at this year's Northern Voice. During my time, I hope at the very least to organize a geek dinner, if not a half day unconference to meet with these folks and others in person. I'm still finalizing my schedule, but it looks like Saturday, July 24th would be a completely open day.
Perhaps PEI ex-pats Will Pate and Daniel Burkha would be interested in coordinating trip timing to join in?
In any case, if you're interested in meeting up while I'm in PEI, leave a comment below or track the PEI Unconference on Plancast.