Autodesk Community Leadership Conference
International Community Leaders Share Experiences, Challenges
The Autodesk Community Leadership Conference is a high level learning event for leaders and potential leaders of online and face-to-face communities of practice. This year's conference was held at Autodesk University in Las Vegas and offered to all registered AU attendees. This interactive event highlighted three keynote presenters who engaged attendees with the importance of leadership, the tools of creating and maintaining community, and establishing successful online community.
Not only did the international attendees (25 percent outside of the North America) learn from experts, they interacted by sharing their personal experiences and challenges, leader-to-leader. The attendees learned from each other, embracing the true sense of community.
A panel of community of practice leaders shared their groups’ structures providing various concepts of focus and practices. Panelists were leaders from a variety of communities – face-to-face groups, blogs, in-house communitues of practice, product-based groups, project/industry-based groups, online forums, Brazil communities and Hewlett-Packard internal communities.
This year’s event also had an added benefit of visual depiction through graphic notation. The entire 5-hour conference was drawn on large white paper around the walls of the ballroom.
Community Is A Verb - Take Part!
Community is an activity, not a destination. Community is a path to greater knowledge, higher skills, increased productivity and a wider professional network. After reviewing the resources below, join a community! Log on to a forum, vote on a product wish list, or look for a group in your area. Ask a question on the many Autodesk forums or provide an answer to a fellow product user like yourself.
Resources
To learn more about this year's conference, view these presentation screencasts.
Welcome Presentation Ray Eisenberg (Autodesk) and “Finding the Leader in All of Us” by Robert Green
Hear Autodesk’s dedication to community and an introduction to all Autodesk communities. Robert Green talked about how every leader is different and knowing your strengths and weaknesses as a leader will only make you better. After his presentation, attendees wrote out their personal leader strengths and weaknesses. Then attendees who were weak in a leadership characteristic partnered with someone at the table who had written it was a strength.
“Creating and Maintaining a Successful Community of Practice” by Bev Arnoldy
Bev gets into the gritty details of how to create a community from scratch and how to maintain it to be vibrant and productive for years to come.
Panel “Concepts of Community” (Autodesk, HP and Local Leaders)
Seven panelists describe their community of practice by sharing how often they meet, possible topics, structure, sponsorship, leadership roles, and more.
Shawn Hendriks explains his journey of setting up an online community that has now grown to over 350,000 members.
A Visual Walkthrough of the Conference
Tom Wujec, Autodesk Fellow, shows the conference through drawings of the 5-hour conference from start to finish. He calls them “doodles” but they are live, on-spot drawings of the topics and highlights of the presentations. As the presenters talk, Tom draws.
