Today I’ll be blogging live from the first ever Cultivate Conference in Chicago.  Cultivate is being described as less of a conference (which tends to be a few people speaking and the vast majority sitting back and listening) and more of a series of “organized conversations” for participants to discuss issues related to church communications.

The list of facilitators is like a who’s who of the Christian Web Trends blog roll (if we had one.)

According to the schedule, there will be 4 main sessions plus 4 “custom” sessions, which I presume are smaller, breakout discussions.

There’s also a 2-hour lunch “break” and an after party planned.  I put “break” in quotes because Cultivate feels kind of like the Superbowl in the sense that I’m looking forward to what happens in the breaks as much if not more than what happens in the sessions themselves.  During the Superbowl I don’t know when to use the bathroom cause I don’t want to miss commercials.  During Cultivate, I won’t know when to use the bathroom cause I don’t want to miss the opportunities to have those hallway conversations with people I’ve interacted with online but never met in person.

The “offline” part of the conference has already been great.  Last night I met up for dinner with Chuck, Chum (yes, that’s his real name), Mike, and Evan.  And then later met Rhett, Drew, and a few other guys whose twitter profiles I can’t find right now.  How many times do you end up going to Giadono’s and Gino’s in the same night?  We gave our left over pizza to Chris, a guy with one leg who was on the street asking for money, and then circled lower, upper, (and is there a middle?) Wacker Drive about 4 times until we found a level we thought we wouldn’t get assaulted on.  Good times.