Going Solo

Last week, I went to Lausanne, to attend Going Solo. I’ll remember it warmly.

First, I crashed in Cecile appartment. Cecile is a wikipedian who I had already met in Nancy over a year ago, during the RMLLs. My memory of that first meeting was a woman all dressed in black and telling me stories about Stallman (which made my hair frizzle on my head). I really enjoyed the egg party the last morning with Cecile and Rama 🙂

The evening before Going Solo, 13 wikipedians from all over Switzerland gathered in an african restaurant, l’Abyssinia. Strangely enough, many pictures were taken, but it seems that none were uploaded but for mine (weird…). Rama took a LOT of pictures, some of which resulted in very nice shots 🙂 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Rama/Anthere.

Going Solo was a success. Stephanie was fresh, efficient and friendly. The program was solid. The speakers were good.

I got many useful tips and some ideas. For example, regarding time management… and in particular links management, I realized it would be very useful to tag every new link on my Del.icio.us, not only with its usual topic categories, but also with a tag identifying the month of posting it to del.icio.us. This way, it is pretty easy to clean up lists of old and unused links… okay, that’s a minor detail 🙂

Fun event… I got selected and won a free freshbook package (tool to track time and invoice clients).

The advices I probably thought the most useful are quite nicely summarized here by Stowe, along with the 10 days rule (or whatever day number fits us best). Interesting notes from Suw Crash course in business realities and original blog explaining how Stowe rolls.

Reflecting on the marketing/networking side of it though, I again wondered what the best option was: sticking to one’s native language or switching to international english (or how to accomodate in between options) ? Reading about those people twitting or blogging, it is easy to see that most is written in english. Social media is primarily in english or in chinese. Sticking to english, benefits are a much larger network. However, switching to French means addressing an audience essentially starved from information related to participatory web.