January is a month of quickly-dissolved resolutions and unrealistic plans. How about yours then? Have you already started making travel plans and scrolled down the lists of (un)conferences you’d like to attend? As a Communications Specialist for the TechSoup Global European office and the Community Driven Innovation team memeber I am looking for fun travel opportunities (that link with the learning and networking ones). Give me a hand! 

Europe. Unsynchronized

From my European point of view, it is difficult to make plans regarding conferences, unconferences and camps now, simply because they are rarely planned and announced by January -- they rather roll out through the year. In this regard it seems that tech-related gatherings, and especially the community driven ones, are a bit like technology itself: they emerge out of nowhere, they change dynamically, and you need to be very flexible to keep up with them.

Travelling abroad for conferences broadens your horizons in a lot of ways – you learn because you meet new people, because of the topical discussions, and presentations, but the entire social and cultural context adds to it as well. Still, to fill one’s calendar with travelling for events seems like a lot of hard work. 

Then there also is a problem of no specifically European focused sites that would aggregate the variety of local, regional and international events in this part of the world. Plus, a European conference could take place in Oslo, Bucharest or Paris – sometimes you never know it is even going to happen if the event is not internationally promoted, and if it is – where to search for information? 

Tech Events

To add to the list of obstacles that one faces when looking for the field’s relevant events is – what are interested in? Are you looking into the tech focused section exemplified by?

• Le Web (France) -- the event that puts forward innovate start ups and stars that attend it
• SIME (originally takes place in Sweden, but this year will spread to Austria and Spain) – a conference that spreads knowledge about the Internet and digital opportunities
• or Thinking Digital (in the UK) – according to The Guardian a calendar 'must' for the digital and creative sector that showcases some of the world's most innovative ideas, technologies and people 

That is great. However, if you work in the intersection of social change and technology you should thinking beyond just tech and  keeping in mind  more-specific topics and themes that speak to your passions.  

Youth and Tech

The first category would be meetups referring to youth and technology – obviously only if you really want to be up to date. My events list includes:

• Berlin Web Week (in Germany) – “the biggest and coolest of the digital scene in Europe”
• WebFest (in Serbia)  -- The largest regional (Balkans) festival mixing the digital and music
• and Technology Academy (in Finland) – attention: you are eligible only if you were born between ’93-’96!

E-literacy and Civil Society 2.0

Then what about the basics such as e-literacy events, and the ones that focus on civil society 2.0? If you are interested in those you should check out:

• Social Innovation Europe events
• Trust: New Technology for Philanthropy and Development
• European Foundation Centre events – make sure to monitor the EFC website

... Have you heard of or planned to attend any others? 

Social Innovation and Social Media

On top of that, there are also all sorts of social hackathons that shouldn’t fall off the radar:

• Social Innovation Camps
• Rewired State events and more.

Oh, and don’t even get me started on tech for democracy and transparency camps and conferences such as:

• Free Society Conference – the Nordic countries' largest gathering for free culture, free software and a free society
• Open Government Data Camp – the host country is still to be defined
• Open World Social Innovation (Czech Republic) – focusing on underrepresented socially relevant topics presented via different medium, be it via a documentary or social media
• and The Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (Ireland) – probably the largest European meeting of web content specialists and researchers

Now, this is just for starters. 

More?

So – what about you? Have you filled in your calendar? What have you heard and read about? Are your friends anyhow linked to the above mentioned (or completely different, but relevant) events? Let’s use the power of crowdsourcing to brainstorm about 2012 together! We (as the entire net2 team) will be tweeting about our conference plans for 2012. If you want to join ur twitter conversation give #GoingAnywhere a go!