As part of the new GeekRetreat at Stanford in the Western Cape, the fabulously talented Jackie Scala (Scala Designs) volunteered her time to develop a new shiny home for the GeekRetreat. Guy Taylor (Telamenta) took Jackie’s design and built a Drupal implementation around it (helped by Noto Modungwa and Skip). We’re slowly starting to find jobs for ourselves as the GeekRetreat community matures. We have a small team working on ‘public relations’ and there are individuals working on sponsorship, nominations and helping out to develop themes and content areas on the wiki.

After working on this kind of self-organising community work for so many years, I still feel that it’s a process with very few rules, and that each time I do this, I feel like I have to start from scratch. So this time, I’m trying to build a process that someone else could follow. It’s not easy, because it seems like every new event will be different, but I’m really determined to at least get some of the way by building templates for invitations, processes, and communication.

It’s been fascinating watching the DrumBeat community at Mozilla go through a similar process. I feel like there is so much great research to do on analyzing these communities and finding easier ways of getting things done in decentralized groups. Maybe *that* would be a good follow-up for GTD in the brave new world of online communities 🙂