Your commitment to unorganize a KinkForAll must be made publicly by indicating your interest on your event's local KinkForAll wiki page (if one exists; if it doesn't, you should create a local KinkForAll wiki page), and by joining the mailing list and introducing yourself along with your intention to unorganize. From there, the best way to begin building your event is to reach out to your own community. To put it another way, talk the talk and walk the walk.
Unorganizers are expected to proactively coordinate their efforts with other people and are self-selected leaders—if you do not have the time to do this, despite your best intentions, then do not list yourself as an unorganizer (you don't lose points for this and you can still help out in other ways). KinkForAll participants are encouraged to blog, tweet, email, post handbills, distribute flyers, and use every channel available to them to spread word of the event. As an unorganizer, always lead by example: use all your own outlets (whatever they are) as a resource.
Although it is absolutely vital that KinkForAll remain a cross-community event, leveraging your own connections to create an initial flow of interest will help your event to gain traction. However, you must quickly turn your own resources to engaging those outside of your immediate circle, as it is these people—not your immediate circle—who will require most of your attention.
To start planning for a local KinkForAll, you're encouraged to use the infrastructure provided by this wiki. Every KinkForAll event should have a homepage in the form of KinkForAllLocation, where "Location" is replaced by the name of the locale (without spaces). There are a number of templates available from which you can copy that can give you a good starting point. For more information about wiki conventions and available templates, please see UsingTheKinkForAllWiki.
The FrontPage of this wiki has a definitive list of all upcoming KinkForAll events that have a wiki homepage. After you create a local KinkForAll event homepage, you can then add a link to that page in the list of Upcoming KinkForAlls. During pre-planning stages, simply providing a link of this sort is sufficient.
As momentum builds, however, it's useful to modify the HTML markup of the link itself so that it appears on the global calendar feed of KinkForAll events worldwide. Even if you're not anticipating hosting participants from far away places physically, many of these geographically distant people can add a lot of value to local KinkForAll events by participating via chat rooms or other networked backchannels, so it's still useful to make sure they can see the local KinkForAll in their calendars.
To do this, you need to modify the HTML source code for the event on the front page such that it is a valid hCalendar microformat.
The fundamental method of building interest involves keeping others aware of what you are actually doing. Use the KinkForAll mailing list and your personal outlets to discuss possibilities, and then use the wiki web site to keep track of vitals once they have been finalized. From the very beginning, be sure that participants are signed up on the local KinkForAll wiki page, and encourage them to join the mailing list.
Having participants sign up on the wiki and join the mailing list is vital to creating a sufficient local community buy-in to get your event off the ground. KinkForAll events require a critical mass of dedicated people before the event can take place. Herculean efforts by key individuals are both insufficient and contrary to transparent modes of operation.
Encouraging wiki sign-ups is important for many reasons:
All of the event planning must be publicly recorded. If it isn't publicly documented, then it didn't happen. If you and a fellow participant have a great idea over coffee, you must take that idea back to the mailing list and then (eventually) to the wiki, and let everyone know what's going.
Build interest in your event by reaching out to both individuals and organizations covering the full spectrum of sexuality topics. As an unorganizer, it's vital that you focus the bulk of your efforts on communities you are not a part of. As you do this, be certain to keep the mailing list apprised of your progress. Proactively approach strangers and encourage participants to leverage their own social contacts (and networks).
Keep with a grassroots spirit of energy and enthusiasm, and seek out innovative ways to spread the word. Do not pay for advertising, as free word-of-mouth information sharing is not only available, but far more effective. Do not wait for the details to come together before publicizing an event—announce it immediately and update your broadcasts with details when those details (time, place, etc.) become available.
Bear in mind the fact that KinkForAll events can be conceived and executed in a dramatically shorter time frame than most traditional events. In order to make this happen, you must maintain sustained activity to put the event in motion—lag time will easily ruin your efforts. If you find yourself overwhelmed by preparation, do these things:
As the event becomes more fully formed, keep to the unorganizing model and begin to delegate responsibility to participants who have demonstrated autonomy and leadership. Encourage participants to proactively solve problems themselves, approach new groups, do research and discuss the event in their own social circles. Your approach should be empowering and encouraging, not managerial.
There are lots of different ways to promote your local KinkForAll event, and it's very important to do so. The key to all grass-roots promotion is word of mouth. Talk to people face-to-face, share contact information, and then follow up with an email in which you provide a link to an online resource such as a KinkForAll video you think they might like, and your event's wiki homepage on this site so they can sign up.
Once your date and location are confirmed, print up flyers (tear-offs are nice) with the time and location of the event, the tag line and the website info, and put them up in your town. Flyering is best done at least a week before the event, but it's always useful, so don't skip it just because you got there late. Some places you might post flyers:
There are also a lot of web-centric ways to promote your event:
This is one of the hardest parts of preparing for a KinkForAll, and one of the most important. The success of the event is tied to its ability to bring together people from different backgrounds and communities to share their information with each other. The easiest people to reach are those in your own community, but the more diverse the people you bring to the event, the wider the span of knowledge shared.
Build interest in your event by reaching out to both individuals and organizations covering the full spectrum of sexuality topics. As an unorganizer, it's vital that you focus the bulk of your efforts on communities you are not a part of. As you do this, be certain to keep the mailing list apprised of your progress. Proactively approach strangers and encourage participants to leverage their own social contacts (and networks).
What are some ways to ensure that you are effectively crossing community boundaries?
One of the most important considerations for running a successful KinkForAll is its venue, the location where the unconference activities takes place.
Your venue should have enough space for presentations to occur without interfering with one another and allow for a free flow of people. "Breakout" rooms are much more important than a main, central presentation area. Participants will constantly be in motion; any space that does not have a presentation will be full of chattering people and activity.
The Venue page has additional information.
CONTENT TO COME.
Although the vast majority of resources needed for a KinkForAll event are best obtained by participants themselves, sometimes money is simply required. To crib from a famous marketing slogan, "Some things contributions can't do. For everything else, there's fundraising." Asking for financial contributions for KinkForAll is a somewhat delicate matter. Learn more about it by reading the Funding page.
If you're lucky, you may have found a venue that comes equipped with an Internet connection that you can use during the KinkForAll event. If this isn't the case, you'll need to find another way of establishing an Internet (WAN-side) connection to share locally. In either case, you'll still need to provide some way for participants who are physically present to connect to the network.
At a very minimum, you're likely to need:
If no cabling is available for a connection to the Internet, it's also possible to utilize a wireless 3G network card that you can plug into a laptop computer as the Internet (WAN-side) connection, and then use the laptop itself as the Wi-Fi router, since all modern operating systems come with the capability to "share" an Internet connection. Documentation exists for sharing an Internet connection on Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Linux (Ubuntu) systems.
This section will cover ways in which you can use new-fangled media outlets such as micro-messaging services like Twitter and Identi.ca to create a conversational backchannel during the course of your event.
CONTENT TO COME.
Some people are concerned that providing backchannels for communication during a KinkForAll itself, and especially during presentations, will be distracting or annoying for presenters or participants. These concerns come largely from innocent ignorance or misunderstanding, so your best bet in allaying these fears is to discuss the benefits of a backchannel. Some such benefits include: