[Acm-announce] Flourish! Open Source Conference 2012 - A call for volunteers!

[Stephen Liang]

Hey guys,

We all know that Flourish is coming fairly soon in a couple of months and
since a conference is not created overnight, and since a lot of planning is
involved, I'd like to start looking for potential volunteers who can help
make this incredible conference even more incredible this year. For those of
you who do not know what Flourish is, let me give you a brief introduction
to the conference.

Flourish is an Open Source conference that is held annually in Chicago at
the University of Illinois at Chicago. It is a conference that is put
together with help from both the Association for Computing Machinery and
from the Linux User's Group with funding from the Department of Computer
Science and other sources. We put together this conference with a fairly
small budget and yet we are able to make an impact in our local community
and we have helped show that Chicago is a truly technologically powerful
city full of brilliant minds and great ideas. In the past, we've had great
speakers come in and give presentations, we've had workshops where people
can come and learn something new by actually working it hands on, and we've
even had hack-a-thons where people get together to put lots of code together
in a fairly short amount of time. By putting all of this together, we create
a conference that is not only satisfying but also intellectually
stimulating. Keep in mind, that Flourish is not only a conference about
technology, but it is also a conference that includes people ranging from
law to political activists.

So where do you come into the picture? We need people who can come and help
plan the conference. We need people who can go out into the big world wide
web and help us find speakers and keynotes. It does not matter if you do not
know many people, this is a perfect time to start networking! If you'd like
to help piece together this conference, please fill out this following
google speadsheet and I will get back to you when we begin our first
official Flourish meeting. While we do not have any meetings planned yet --
we are certainly still looking for potential volunteers! We plan to start
having regular Flourish meetings beginning late in this semester and
continuing from then on (bi weekly) until the day of the conference.

So please sign up for the volunteer list and I'll get you enrolled into our
Flourish listserv and help you get set up in terms of getting volunteer
access and such.

Oh, and here are some of the perks of being a volunteer (from the start):

   - You get a special T-Shirt that signifies that you are Staff or perhaps
   we may even get one that says STAFF on it this year
   - You get to network with people from the open source community and even
   the industry
   - Your name appears on the brochures and pamphlets we hand out
   - Great resume builder!!!!
   - You'll be burned into Flourish history as part of our website archives

Also, don't be afraid to sign up even if you can't help us in terms of
finding speakers. We could always use people who can help us design the
website, provide technological support, help with budgeting, etc. Please, if
you have time, please sign up!

Google Spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDhoajQtdllBZWpFZlhTSFF0ZWpBeFE6MQ

Finally, I put together this preliminary website for Flourish 2012 fairly
quickly, but it's a good start. Check out the Flourish 2012 website!

http://flourishconf.com

Hope you can help us create a great conference!

Stephen
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