This started as a quick comment on Alex Hillman’s post Creative Agency, which quickly grew so long that I realized that I had begun writing a post of my own, so I’ve shifted it to my site so I don’t hijack Alex’s discussion (plus I don’t post often enough).
Please read Alex’s post prior to reading this one.
So, Alex’s ideas set my mind-gears a’spinnin’. He covers several aspects of building a community that is beneficial to its members but also to its clients, uniting several concepts that drive me personally, and I believe drive communities around the globe.
A couple of coworking initiatives (LaunchPad, Conjunctured) are growing here in Central Texas, which I think will mesh well with our various Web and creative groups like Refresh Austin, which in turn play a large part in sharing knowledge and connecting members of the professional creative and Web communities. That said, we’re a disparate community, which can be both good (an abundance of creativity and different perceptions and solutions of challenges) and bad (harder to spread the word and unify), and often times the individuals, whether they work for themselves or sit amongst hundreds in large enterprises aren’t able to rely on each other to augment their strengths.
Some love design, others front-end development, or back-end coding. Some dig deep into the perfect turn of phrase, while others concentrate on the most effective way to monetize a product or service. Some of us like to translate between the various cultures. We’re different, which is very good. But we could do more to help each other.
Alex highlights some of the most glaring gaps amongst our profession:
- Creatives who don’t take responsibility for “leading the client just as much as we are leading the project and the result that the end user experiences”
- Independent creatives who may not have the business background, the time or the personality to look out for themselves on the business front
These are large gaps, but they are addressable by the right communities, some of which exist, others of which we need to being forming.
Bridges
So, we need to connect these communities:
- Independents and corporate designers/developers - it’s amazing how different these experiences can be, and both groups will benefit from the sharing of knowledge
- Experienced and new professionals - connect the energy, vigor and will-not-stop drive with experience and knowledge (business, and yes some political). We have to tap into the excited professionals - no cynicism
- Business professionals and creative professionals - business folks would love to tap into the fountain of ideas that make up a creative world and the designers and developers will gain valuable skills from their counterparts making it much easier to navigate the world of contracts, time lines and expectations
- Open source developers/communities and businesses - As Alex notes, “being an open source software developer does not, and should not, condemn ones self to a life of poverty”, which follows up on Whurley’s Opensville post.
Chief among my questions to the community is to learn what are the first steps we should take to move forward building this new creative agency platform and the other pieces required to move our communities forward? CitizenAgency and Indy Hall have an edge as established, physical spaces with strong communities, but I think Austin is an ideal setting for this as well and could quickly contribute.
So where to?
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I’m going to stick by my guns and say that the established community first is key. The physical space is secondary (convenient, but secondary).
I firmly believe that going through an active regiment of community building, combining social, educational, technical, and coworking, will lead you to the end that you desire the quickest. Someone needs to step up and be prepared to play cruise director, though.
The best thing in the world is to give the different slightly overlapping circles of interest that we’re talking about chances to mix and mingle. A lot of the other stuff you’re talking about will happen on its own, given the chance.
So make YOUR job, giving it a chance to happen.
I agree - we have an established community, well I guess we have a few that overlap pretty heavily - Refresh Austin, Geek Austin, Jelly, Austin on Rails and some others and we are on track to get the physical spaces in the not-too-distant future.
The last year has seen major growth within Refresh Austin based on membership and participation, and from what I’ve seen and heard anecdotally, the same has held true for the other groups.
We have begun to improve the mixing and mingling, both formal via planned happy hours, meetings and the work put in by the folks behind Jelly and informal by encouraging the random lunches and happy hours. We can, and definitely will do more to promote that.
I do my best to not only encourage the discussion, but to actively make the connections and blur the lines between the communities and there are many others within Austin working even harder, but it feels like there is more that we can do.
Questions for everyone:
What can we do to make it easy for folks who connect once to connect again?
Which tools can we provide our communities to make it easier for them to grow and help improve the community?
How do we pull in the business folks who are interested, but may not have the ability or schedule to attend gatherings like Jelly or Refresh?
Don’t forget to connect with the community at large. After all, the majority of what you build, design, market etc is actually for them. You can have more skills than anyone. If you don’t know what your audience wants and are bad at communicating with them, you are wasting your time and theirs.
Great post Alex! So I believe what you’re describing is what we’re trying to create with Conjunctured. The “platform” we dubbed a “co-company,” our particular implementation is “Conjunctured.”
For us the Coworking space is basically HQ. But the problem we’re trying to solve is, how do we leverage the power of the community to help the individual. We’re an agency/coworking space/incubator.
One big thing we’re big on is community building. To help with that we followed the lessons from open source software to create our manifesto. http://conjunctured.com/manifesto/
Also, check out this post for further explanation of what we’re trying to do: http://tinyurl.com/6ngve6
Interested to hear what you think! Let’s build a platform! :)
Dusty, Conjunctured looks a lot like what I have bumping around in my head, and I hadn’t dug into it deeply enough to the ground work y’all have already made. Amazing work! It’s a shame that I wasn’t able to make your presentation at the Bootstrap meeting last night, but I joined the Google Group and hope to help build the platform.
Great job all around.
Michelle, I agree 100% Having read through the manifesto, and talked a bit with some of the people driving the coworking movement, I think it’s all about communication and transparency. As Alex Hillman noted in his original post and as the Conjunctured manifesto shows - communication, teaching and sharing are at the heart of the effort, which is one of the reasons why I love the direction they are heading and want to jump in.
Alex, it’s great to hear that people want exactly what we want for Austin. I’m one of the cofounders of Conjunctured and like Dusty and everyone else here, I can’t stress the importance of community. Too bad you couldn’t make it out, but hopefully the Conjunctured site gave you enough info to get you started.
I love your idea of bridges; within a siloed, fragmented community, the thing that will bring them together are these connections. Beyond internetal (haha) interactions, what better than getting out into the community—physically—and getting to know these like-minded people? I think once this happens, you sustain these relationships online (via Twitter or a strong Austin blogger network) and then physically have a coworking space to congregate.
I invite you (and anyone else interested) to check out *three* events we’re having this weekend (each coincidentally headed by a cofounder of Conjunctured): http://moourl.com/kaphh. We’re usually out, so if you see on Twitter that we’re somewhere, send an @reply.
Hope to meet you in person soon!
Thanks Cesar! It’s exciting o see all of the energy behind these ideas. It appears that many of us have been working on solutions to these problems, but are only know meeting each other and getting to a point where we can team up and accomplish more.
I plan to attend the Social Media Club meeting at Cafe Caffeine tomorrow, so I’m sure I’ll get a chance to meet those of you I haven’t met in person yet, and catch up with those of you I have.
shoot! i missed the SMC meeting today for the dumb funding symposium.
looking forward to meeting you SOMETIME soon.
love love love all the thoughts here. !
Sorry to have missed you John Erik, though your tweets about the funding symposium were interesting and reminded me that I need to learn more about our local angel/VC/funding players.
We’ll definitely meet up soon!
[...] is asking for input on how to bridge the high-tech creative communities here in Austin. We’ve got several growing, active tech circles, Refresh Austin, Austin on Rails, Geek [...]