Good morning from the back of this very large room!

I’m Zhenelle Falk, a producer at 1st Playable Productions in Troy, New York, and I too will be live blogging several sessions over the course of this Leadership Forum, including:

• Day 1 – 9am – Keynote, Curt Schilling – MVP Leadership
• Day 1 – 11am – Workshop: Personality Analysis
• Day 1 – 4:15pm – Leadership from the Trenches
• Day 1 – 5:30pm – Reducing Turnover: Keeping Teams Intact
• Day 2 – 11am – Methodology Cases: PMI / Agile / CMM PSP

I’m looking forward to sharing my notes with you all – it’s going to be a great conference!

Oh, and only because Jason asked and I know Z’s are scary, the “Zh” in my name is said like Zsa Zsa Gabor, or the “S” in leisure. ;)

We’ve got another fine squad of volunteer bloggers who’ll be taking notes during each session, and posting the notes (more or less) in real-time. This was massively appreciated last year, and we’re super appreciative that these fine folks have stepped up to handle live-blogging the Leadership Forum this year.

• Alan Bell – Sidhe Interactive
• Alison Beasley – Lincoln Beasley PR
• Andy Jih – Schell Games
• Ben Hoyt – Paramount Digital Entertainment
• Brett Douville
• Jason Schklar – Jason Schklar Consulting / Initial Experience
• Karin Groepper Boosman – Aspyr Media
• Lulu LaMer – 2K Marin
• Michael Lubker – Axelo Development Corporation
• Mike McSchaffry
• Robin McShaffry – Mary-Margaret.com
• Zhenelle Falk – 1st Playable Productions

Thanks!

Looking to roll up your sleeves and dive into the Leadership Forum? Here are a few areas you can participate/contribute:

1 – Swap topic ideas
We are running two “ideas swaps”, one for the Project track and the other for the Management track. These fully interactive group driven session are like speed-dating for ideas. Tables will focus on different related topics determined by you ahead of time. Several group/topic rotations will be done so participants can explore various topics of interest, and interact with many different peers along the way. Room-wide report outs and summaries will close out the session.

So, have any topics you’d like to explore more deeply with your peers? Topics should be either related to Project Leadership (ie, the nuts and bolts of game production) or Management Leadership (ie, broader scale topics that go beyond a single team or project).

If you have some ideas to propose for our list, either email Jason directly at jason @ igda.org, or post your ideas a comment to the following page:
http://www.igda.org/leadership/?p=91

2 – Book reviewers
We are running a “book review jam” as a session in the Personal Leadership Track, where ten participants will each provide a rapid-fire 5-minute review+summary of a book related to leadership, management, game production, etc.

If you would like to be one of our jammers, please email Jason directly at jason @ igda.org with the title of the book you’d like to present. In turn you will be provided with a “template” to help guide your review (and keep you on time).

3 – Blogging volunteers
Any bloggers among you?

One of the cool things we do is to “live-blog” the Leadership Forum (ie, post a brief summary of each session to the conference web site more-or-less right after each session).

We would like a handful of such volunteers, so we can get full coverage without burdening any one person.

There will be wifi at the conference, but you’d have to bring your own laptop. Also, FYI, we’re using the oh-so-user-friendly WordPress, so should be quite easy to post, etc. We’re not looking for transcripts or super long/detailed posts (well, unless you can type crazy fast). More just summaries of the key points; to give a sense of what was said overall, etc.

If this is of interest, please ping Jason directly via jason @ igda.org.

We’ve recruited a team of volunteers to serve as “live” bloggers for the Leadership Forum. They will write up summaries/notes from each session and post to this blog/site more-or-less after each session.

Our brave team of live bloggers is:

• Karen Clark – Director of Customer Experience, GarageGames
• Clinton Keith – CTO, High Moon Studios
• Mike McShaffry – freelance developer
• Alison Beasley – President, Lincoln Beasley PR
• Todd Northcutt – Director, GameSpy Technology
• Tim Longo – Creative Director/Senior Designer, Crystal Dynamics
• Jacques Pavlenyi – Segment Executive: Small and Medium Business – Communications Industries, IBM Corporation

Additionally, we encourage anyone doing their own blogging (or photo posting, etc) to use “IGDA-LF07″ as the content tag.