Wonderful meeting everyone. I thoroughly enjoyed the lectures, informal "networking," my new friends, and I pretty much want to live at Stanford Sierra Center.

For those from this afternoon's demo interested in GoCrossCampus, here's the link to the Alumni Futures discussion:

http://www.alumnifutures.com/2008/09/come-join-the-n.html

Adam Miller then led a fast-moving session on Web 2.0 media and social networking that carried on over lunch. The key takeaway for me: as alumni offices mull over the social community offerings available to them through an increasing number of vendors, they should always inform their decisions by looking at the utility that adding these products would add to their alumni users. If the added utility is not clear and significant, alumni are unlikely to use these new offerings, even if they're available.

And another stimulating morning at Minary wraps up. I had the pleasure of co-facilitating a session on working with faculty with Kim Cole of MIT, and I hope we left attendees impressed by MIT's faculty survey and convinced that it's worth investing as much time and effort as possible in professionalizing interactions with members of the faculty. Mike Teskey then led another discussion of volunteer engagement, and one of the real surprises for me this conference has been the degree to which people are talking about volunteer involvement as an unambiguously good thing. Even three or four years ago, the tenor of the conversations about volunteers here were very different, and skepticism about the utility of long-standing volunteer structures still abounds in some areas -- see http://www.alumnifutures.com/2007/07/alumni-voluntee.html.

It's early morning at Stanford Sierra Camp, and the East Coasters are beginning to stir, stumbling in from the cold in search of caffeine and companionship. Yesterday, we dealt with big strategic topics, and today, we drill down into details -- working with faculty, metrics, and so on. I'm particularly happy that Adam Miller, from Stanford, has made an appearance to talk about social networking. I'll definitely post an update on his session later in the day.