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Next week we are very pleased to co-host the 11th annual Web of Change conference at Hollyhock. When we founded it back in 2000 we never could have imagined how vibrant and relevant it would still be today.

You see Web of Change has evolved to become so much more than merely a conference. Of all the projects I’ve been involved with, this is the closest to a real, generative community – with both online and real world touchpoints – that I’ve come across. You can read more about why we started it and how it reflects what we’ve come to see as deep web values in our case study here.

For the 2011 gathering our core theme is engagement, exploring how organizations can set up to do this well and how embracing the idea of listening and empowering constituencies drives fundamental changes in our campaigns and institutions. We’ll also be exploring the power of storytelling, as our work in digital forces our employers and clients to get more clear on who they aim to reach, what is meaningful to those people, and how to connect emotional stories to sustained action in support of our movement building goals.

Deeper than those is an ongoing, challenging discussion about impact. How does the work we do make a real difference on the issues we care about most? Can we really be satisfied with our online campaign metrics when most of the issues we care about continue to backslide, in some ways dramatically? We don’t shy away from the tough questions our movements needs to wrestle with!

The view of the ocean deck during Web of ChangeOur overarching frame – spurred by its stunning location at a retreat center in the wilderness of British Columbia – has, uniquely among the growing field of digital change gatherings, always had a focus on relationships, leadership, and personal development.

It probably seemed odd 10 years ago for us to bring a bunch of techhies here and teach them communications, personal awareness, and leadership skills. A conversation I had with the VP Communications for a large US ENGO last week fully validated this approach. She said that her digital director position (currently vacant) was both the hardest and most important position in her department, because it is the hub of supporting everything, and is the driver for innovation and improvements across nearly everything they do.

The needs of this position to have mastery in management, leadership, and communications skills – on top of the expected subject matter expertise in digital campaigning & technology – make it a very difficult role to staff well. I hear this over and over again from senior leaders, and it’s a huge reason why we (and many others) continue to invest so much in this community, and why our work is so important to both the digital community and the wider movements we aim to serve (and, increasingly, lead).

The exciting news is that, after helping grow a field that practically invented open processes in other organizations, we are about to embark on one ourselves for the future of Web of Change. After 11 years of being a project of Communicopia and managed by a distributed team of high capacity volunteers, the growth of our field and the expectations it places on the quality of the event make it time for us to explore radical new visions for where to take our work and how to resource and structure it beyond what the current model can manage.

Web of Change 2009Over the next 6 months I’m going to be facilitating a community driven process to open ourselves up for ideas, volunteers, and support to shift our model to its next iteration while maybe even deepening our impact. It’s a bit scary to do this in an emergent public process, but being community driven has always been in our DNA so this is really just cranking that up a notch.

Watch the WOC site in the next few weeks for some of great content on storytelling, engagement, impact, and leadership that comes from the event. And I will continue to blog about how the community renewal process shapes up and lessons we learn along the way. Always onward!

You can watch a video from last year’s Web of Change here .

Jason Mogus is Communicopia’s principal consultant and is the founder of Web of Change. He has been developing digital strategies for social change organizations for over 15 years. You can follow him at @mogusmoves.