One of the major discussion points over the #geekretreat weekends was on the rockstar elements of geeks, the thing with rockstars is that they're not really the value.

It doesn't matter to the audience that stars get laid, screwed up on multiple substance, and then pass our in a puddle of their own vomit. Well, to a lessor degree, what matters to the audience is that they're getting the song. The band is not the product, the song is the product.

I think this is what's missing from a number of perspectives. I recently had a rant on a mailing list I'm subscribed to, defending personal brand, but the more I think about it, and my thanks to Sarah Rice for helping with this thought, personal brand is just another packaging, just like the rock band.

If geeks spent more time practicing, honing their skills, getting good product out, then maybe, maybe, given a little luck they might obtain the status.

I think before we even think where are the rockstars, answer me this: "What's happened to the music"

I think it's important to qualify this post, I'm not a journalist, I'm not even really a blogger, for the last bit I've used these pages as a bit of a personal mind dump, rather than putting out event dependent news and opinions, however this weekend was something special and the reflections on it will be as important as a mind dump as any other book or text that I've read that has made it on here.

It's been a long time since I've been around a group of people that have directed their minds and energies in such a beautiful, open and gracious way. Arriving on the Friday night, I bumped into several of the journalism community I know so well, I figured, like with so many other conferences, that the trend would be for people to gather around their old friends and like so many other conferences we'd walk away a little closer only to those we were close with initially. I'm wrong a lot more than I'd like to admit.

The conversation hit important mental high ground immediately, and inclusion seemed to be the theme. With rockstar personalities across the journalistic, internet and entrepreneurial board it was refreshing to see that every single one of these individuals was here to contrib to something much bigger than themselves, we were taking the best of the South African crop and focusing on how to make our country richer as a whole.

There are a number of points that need to be chunked out, and I intend to write a post on each one. As such my promise to you is to give feedback on the following topics over a period of the next week:

- The geek community
- Entrepenuers locally
- The one element that drove me a little nuts (A suprise)

In the meantime, I strongly urge you to look at the following posts, and I will be putting up further posts and links as they come out:

Elon Lohmann's Impressions of #geekretreat
First thought's from Vincent Hoffman
Toby Shapshak's commentary on the rockstar aspect of the geek community>/a>
Heidi Schneigansz and Scott Gray on working together to improve digital skills & education in South Africa
Jason Norwood-Young's amazing session on tomorrow's media
Notes from Gareth Knight's session on bootstrapping a startup, my favourite session of the retreat
Gareth Knight's views on the geekretreat

Pictures from the social side of things can be found here:

Thanks to Scott Gray - Link now fixed
Pics from Heather Ford
Gregor Rohrig's elephant shots
Gareth Knight's Flickr set

There are a number of outputs that are being put together by the geeks that were there, as these become clearer, and the projects start rolling off, I'll be linking to these too.

A special thank you to Heather Ford, Justin Spratt and Eve D for an incredibly weekend. From a purely personal perspective, it helped me further create a resonance with the community, and helped my head deal with several incredibly large issues that I had been grappling with for a while.

Watch this space for more information coming up over the week. Due to an unfortunate incident with a flu bug in the night, I require a little more sleep than usual, and I'm not processing optimally. As soon as I am, I'll be getting out the important stuff.