Thursday, April 30, 2009

Building a Community

I'm not an expert on building community. Certainly not like Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community manager and author of the upcoming book The Art of Community.

Instead, I'm still in the process of building a tech community. I'm trying to group my local group from something small to something great. To me that means, among other things:

* Great presentations from our members
* Ongoing collaborations between members on projects
* A path to grow from a new community member into a guru
* Members contributing to national conferences
* A feedback loop from local corporations using our tech to our group.
* Coding sprints, local conferences, national presenters

Working towards getting all of that set up is a challenge! Mostly, however, I want there to be a level of energy that is self-sustaining. Right now I'm contributing a lot of energy in order to get that level going, but I'm trying to figure out how to transition that to something where my position is tangential to the longevity of the group. So that's one challenge.

Of course there are many, many other issues. Many of them are to generic to _all_ communities, but plenty of them are specific to technical user groups - coding sprints, code reviews, lightning talks, tutorials, and more. This blog is devoted to information and ideas covering these issues, as well my experiences putting those thoughts to work.

Thanks for checking in, and I hope you find my blog useful, and please join in! I'm looking forward to talking with you.