Rachel Sklar, Rachelle Hruska and Anas­ta­sia Liapis at last February’s Social Media Week.

SF, Lon­don, Berlin to be part of wide-ranging global teach-in

Spent an hour on a con­fer­ence call this morn­ing where it was announced that Social Media Week, inau­gu­rated last Feb­ru­ary in New York, will expand to include San Fran­cisco, Lon­don, Berlin, Toronto and São Paulo, Brazil.

The week­long event will take place Feb. 1–5, 2010. The goal is to “explore the pro­found impact that social media has on cul­ture, busi­ness com­mu­ni­ca­tions and soci­ety at large … and to cre­ate a global plat­form for con­ver­sa­tion, con­nec­tiv­ity and learn­ing,” said event orga­nizer Toby Daniels, who was on the call.

While the Socialmediaweekny.com site talks about a five-day con­fer­ence, it’s less a con­fer­ence than a sprawl­ing series of loosely con­nected events all related to the theme of social media. (I like to think of it as a “teach-in,” though per­haps that’s too retro a term.) Events will span a vari­ety of for­mats, rang­ing from talks, pre­sen­ta­tions and panel dis­cus­sions, to inter­ac­tive work­shops, sem­i­nars, net­work­ing events and drinks recep­tions. Some will be free, oth­ers will have an admis­sion charge. Some will be put on by mar­ket­ing groups, oth­ers by non­prof­its and social change orga­ni­za­tions. They’ll all be listed in a pub­lic calendar.

In San Fran­cisco, Chris Heuer of the Social Media Club will be the local orga­nizer, natch, and there will be a day­long jobs retrain­ing sum­mit as part of the event. Chris is set­ting up a Base­camp site for vol­un­teers to help orga­nize the events.

The full pro­gram of events for each city will be pub­lished in the com­ing weeks. In the mean­time, Social Media Week orga­niz­ers are invit­ing the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ties in each city to get involved by reg­is­ter­ing events, sub­mit­ting speaker pro­pos­als and by reg­is­ter­ing space that can be used to host events.

You can get involved here. Or if you’d like to help out with SF-related events, con­tact Chris directly.

Cross-posted to Socialbrite.org.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.