At least from a knowledge and sharing standpoint, what happens at SourceCon doesn’t always stay at SourceCon, and it shouldn’t! This was my first official SourceCon. I did crash a dinner and the Hackathon during the Fall 2016 edition, but attending for the whole session was a very different experience.
For me, I’d been lurking in the shadows of the SourceCon community for a while. I had written a few articles, but mainly I was just taking it all in. I read everything from the community and tried to pull nuggets of information from each article that I could use in my career. When I crashed the party last year, I was a bit timid. If you’ve ever met me, you know that’s not a typical look for me. These were the people that had been helping shape my style for years. The welcome I received at that dinner was overwhelming. In a quote from Amybeth Quinn, “Don’t think of anyone as a “guru” we’re all just at different points in our career. Ask anyone, anything, at any time!” That welcome and the feeling of inclusion made me realize that I wanted to be a bigger part of the community.
Fast forward a few weeks to SourceCon Spring 2017.
I could give back to this community in a new way for me; I was on one of the breakout tracks talking about competitive intelligence and how we can use that to help partner more with the business. Throughout the whole conference, I got to hang out with my friends and mentors and do a knowledge share. I met new people and made new friends. After one of the sessions, a group of us brainstormed and helped someone new to sourcing find some candidates for a role they were stuck on. Life was good. I was sad when the end of the day on Wednesday came around. It was time to say our goodbyes and start coming off the sourcing high. Or so I thought.
What you get from this community is real connections with real people. People that are willing to bounce ideas and strategies with you and let you do the same. I’m still piecing together everything and will have a few follow up articles coming soon, but just know that if you have an amazing experience at SourceCon, it doesn’t just stay there. It follows you and becomes part of your life. If you’ve never been to SourceCon, you need to fix that. I’ll see you at the Fall conference in Austin. I even hear there are plans of several of our spouses to come hang out too so bring yours along and they can understand a bit more about you. It’s like a big family reunion with all your crazy aunts and uncles.
