For those who missed it, here’s the content from last Friday’s newsletter.  We’re due to release another newsletter tomorrow, so if you have anything you want to raise in the newsletter, or any sessions you want to outline in a bit more detail here, then please get in touch with our newsletter magpie as soon as possible.

Welcome to Amplified08
by @loudmouthman and @joannejacobs
Thank you for registering your interest in Amplified08, the network of networks event being held at NESTA from 4-8pm on Thursday 27 November 2008*. Although we kick off at 4pm we chose the timing so people could also pop along after work. Of course there’ll be plenty to get your teeth into at 4pm, but as we’re running multiple sessions through the event there’s plenty still to do if you arrive later or indeed have to leave early.

This newsletter is designed to keep you up to date about the sessions and people involved in the event, and to clarify for those who are still wondering, the focus and purpose of the event. Normally it won’t be as long as this newsletter, but we aim to get these out about twice a week.

Essentially, Amplified08 is an opportunity to bring together those who meet in various UK social media, technology production and mobile media and related fields to come together to share your ideas and projects, to discover new ways of working together, and to break through the generation of silos among social media communities.

We also have a lot of interest from groups who still come together virtually via Twitter and the like who will now have the chance to chew ideas over, face-to-face for the first time. We’re also welcoming groups and individuals who are quite new to social media but want to learn while adding to the experience. Importantly we’re reaching out first and foremost to practitioners who are already full of ideas and opinions.

Some of us attend social media camp, some are Tuttlers, some are bar campers, some are wiki wednesdayers and some social media mafia. Some of us are doing fascinating work with social media in education. Many of us belong to several or all or still other groups. But all of us want to make the best of the skills and innovation present among the social media advocacy/production/development community. We’re all interested in social media so it simply makes sense to meet together as representatives from a range of groups and to cross-pollinate.

We’re hoping that mass events like Amplified08 and its successor, Amplified09, will give us the opportunity to explore issues of interest, and to set up the basis of an ongoing annual event for the movers and shakers of the UK social media community. We don’t expect the Amplified events to replace any of the great work and social communication happening in all those communities out there; we just want to capture and celebrate the skills, resources, ideas and projects that are developing in those networks, and to share them across those communities. A true ‘network of networks’. And we want to do all this for free, for all those interested in participating (thanks to the sponsorship and volunteering of the Amplified08 community).

Our aims are high. NESTA have invited us to build an Amplified 2010 event that will run in conjunction with their own Innovation Edge conference. We’re building towards 4,000 attendees that year. Combine that with the NESTA attendees and a fringe festival and we’re looking at 10,000 practioners from across the UK. Amplified 09 will be nationwide and begin to build those numbers up. A large part of the focus of Amplified 08 will be how we take the topics discussed and amplify them to that level. We’re aiming to construct an opportunity for real change, but we’re starting with three simple questions:

What works? What doesn’t? and what next?

By applying these questions to our own ares of expertise we should begin to build a unique picture of social media and creativity in the UK. So the objective is to meet, share, discuss and generally find out new things about the industry. If you haven’t already done so, please consider some sessions you may want to participate in or host via the Amplified08 wiki.

* Yes, we know it’s Thanksgiving in the US that day but I’m afraid this is the only day we could get everyone together in the late afternoon.

The basics
Who is organising Amplified08? Basically it’s a bunch of people who do participate in a range of social media communities, but it’s not a closed group. If you want to be part of the Amplified08 organisational group, just let us know on the wiki.
How to participate
You can participate in the Amplified08 event by turning up, by adding your ideas to the wiki, by presenting the event, by covering it in your blogs/twitter posts/news media, and by live streaming the event while you’re there. The more channels we use to bring people together, the better the chances are of following up on your great ideas.

In the next newsletter
We already have a few sessions proposed for the event, but in the next newsletter, we want to offer people the chance to give a brief rundown of what they would like to achieve and how they would like their topics to evolve. When everyone has had a chance to articulate what they wish to glean from the event, we can come to some consensus on our Topics for the Day. If you’d like to submit an entry into this newsletter, please feel free to contact our newsletter magpie.

Register!
Many of you may have entered your expression of interest on the wiki.  Now’s the time to register for the event itself via our EventBrite registration process.  Please register now to ensure your place at Amplified08.