I’ll be frank; this $10 fee that TTT is charging will ensure that unless the speaker is someone absolutely spectacular, I likely will not attend any future TTT events. This isn’t a bad thing; I’m not the direct target market for these events, so maybe by not attending I’ll help them get who they’d like.

However, if the purpose of your events are to bring a community together while helping to promote the individuals involved in it, I’m not sure that the nominal fee is the way to go. One of the commentors on Joe’s post said that the industry standard is to open it up to 2.5 times your capacity to account for no-shows. That seems pretty smart by me; opening up for just your level of capacity will never allow you to have a full venue, as something always comes up.

If you’re implementing a fee just to reduce no-shows, I’m not sure that fits with the community building aspect. There’s enough going on in town right now that I don’t need to pay to network with the current Refresh Events crowd, for example. (I still will, but that’s beside the point) Adding a fee to recurring events will certainly help distinguish you from the other events going on, but perhaps not in a good way. If you are planning on adding a fee, at the very least you need to do it at an event that can be perceived as having a higher value of the events in the past. That way, you reduce the shell-shock from having to pay for events which you previously attended for free, and can help ease your crowd into the new system. If you’re still developing your events, your target audience, or the logistics surrounding them, it may not be the best idea to charge a fee. (If, like Third Tuesday, you can’t get your event on the date it’s supposed to be on because that’s what you’re named after, you also might want to think about that – but that’s a personal quibble I have with the Third Tuesday events.)

Just my two cents. What do you think?

I enjoy participating in events like this, where my time can be used to help not-for-profits or charities grow and become more successful. As my generation moves from schooling to starting out careers, it’s important to remember to still take time to give back in whatever ways your skill-sets enable you to. Yes, we have the highest personal debt load of any demographic, and it’s important to work to pay that off as quickly as possible, but many of us have been able to build our successes based off of our involvement outside of the classroom. It’s important for social movements, and for our own karmic growth that we stay involved in projects like this. Often, our time and skills are worth more to these people and groups than writing a cheque – although I’m sure there exists a point where the money does become more important.

So, I ask you, what are you doing to give back outside of your work and your donations? Are you satisfied with what you’re involved in? Are you looking to get involved in other places?

To me, the interesting part was watching our community react to it. For once, possibly for the first time since I started using Twitter heavily, I finally saw real interactions taking place. People who usually spend a lot of time supporting each others ideas were suddenly placed at odds – and what’s more, they interacted and argued with each others’ viewpoints in a rational manner. Yes, there were a few ad hominem attacks, but by and large, these were well thought out, well-structured debates. I’m so used to the Toronto Twitter community being a bastion of support that I was initially shocked – but as the conversations continued, not only did I find that I joined in, but that I suddenly felt that I knew more about those that were participating. People’s public personas were dropped in favour of real personal opinions – and it was a great thing. If we had more interactions like this, not only would we help educate others and ourselves on issues which we may not understand, but we would also advance ideas and theories to levels where they could be successful. As I’ve said previously, not every idea is a good one (duh), and most can benefit from feedback and reshaping. Why do we seem afraid to do that?

Last night was a polarizing issue that demonstrated the power that we have to do this; let’s not wait for the next polarizing issue to come our way to have these real interactions again. Nobody benefits from a lovefest.

Last week, we had some great thoughts and conversations through Twitter, within the blogosphere, and face to face on communities and how they are built. For me, this spurred out of two separate “events” – research for the Ignite presentation I did last week (and a desire to expand on the ideas), and a personal examining of the role that I play in my communities, and where my time is best spent. (There’s an awkwardly worded sentence.) More on what I see my role later this week; for now, let’s continue to discuss some of the issues facing communities.

One of the common threads in any community (or crowd) that I’ve been a part of has been this phenomena of “us versus them” – either to those outside of the community, or within factions of the community itself. Be it when I was growing up, during my time in school, or in various communities that I’ve found myself is as an adult, this conflicts pervades, almost ahead of everything else. The context seems to be irrelevant as well – the conflicts have been as present at my private golf course as they were between different parts of the student union volunteer base.

This means that there has to be some other deeper cause that exists here. I think there are a few factors come into play:

1. Too many leaders – or “leaders” – with differing visions
   As the old, offensive analogy goes, the “too many chiefs, not enough indians” situation is a pretty obvious factor in the creation of conflict within communities. If you get leaders stepping up to contribute and their ideas aren’t on the same page, pretty soon, if these are charasmatic people, you end up with factions forming, each working towards their own goals. These people most often are working towards what it is they think is best for the community, and are able to mobilize others – but there’s an inherent conflict in what those visions may be. Of course, this also comes from…




2. A community actually formed of smaller communities
   Sometimes, what we perceive to be a community – or one big happy family – is actually a group of a few differing communities looped together under a “common goal.” This was certainly the case during my student union days at Laurier – each department of volunteers had different goals and different presences, yet because they were all under the WLUSU banner, the tendency was to always try and make everyone this big community working towards “providing for the needs of students.” Problem was, the personality types and jobs completed within the 1300 volunteers were all varied, and should’ve never meshed together in the first place. This created factioning, as well as resentment towards the most publicly present department – resentment which still exists to this day. That’s the danger we face in trying to create communities, or to help others do so – we may end up creating this “common goal” that doesn’t actually exist.




3. Human nature – specifically, the basic principle of natural selection
   I know, I know; we’ve gotten to where we are in this world because we’ve worked together, right? You’re right, by and large. However, we still have this inherent survival of the fittest mentality that exists, and because of that, we have to prove our constant fitness. This breeds competition, which is by definition contrary to the stated purpose of a community working together for a common goal.

As you can see, many of the previous factors are personality-based, and centre on competition. In some ways, this is a problem that should be a given when dealing with a community, and tactics need to be developed – consciously or not – in order to ensure that these aspects don’t lead to the detriment of the community.

In fact, competition can be a useful tool for community success, when it is inter-community rather than intra-community. Many major innovations have become because of races between communities – take a look around you; the odds are that you’ll see something that was invented due to one of these races. I’m not saying that competition is inherently bad; just that it does lead to community problems.

What’s important here, though, is what you think. Have you experienced the us versus them situation in a community before? How did you, or the community, deal with it? Do you agree/disagree with some of the factors I’ve identified? Am I off my rocker? Please, respond in the comments below.

What if instead of perpetrating attitudes of hopelessness, disdain for government and dire opportunity we could facilitate development of communities that encourage commerce, entrepreneurship, education, civic duty, personal branding and innovation?

Daniel also discusses what differentiates crowds from communities, but his value differs from mine. Daniel considers that communities have to be both brought together by common cause, value and goal, and ownership from leaders within that community to create a channel for communication and action. He discusses communities on the global scale, mentioning how oppressive nations such as Cuba, Zimbabwe and China prevent communities from being formed.

My thoughts on the piece? I think Daniel and I differ in two key areas:

1. Firstly, I think that leaders in the community aren’t necessarily the ones they appear to be. I’m a heavy believer in the concept of the unconscious leader – one who doesn’t necessarily seek the role, but whose actions and mannerisms cause them to be placed in that leadership position. One of the issues faced with trying to assist those who self-identify as leaders within communities is that they sometimes get caught up in the self-interest game, competing with each other. While this can lead to benefits for the community, it can also create factions or camps that end up driving a community apart.
2. Daniel’s country mentions are interesting. While I certainly can’t defend the community building efforts in a country like Zimbabwe (or, to a lesser extent, China), I think Cuba gets a bit of a bad rap here in North America. The primary voices we hear are dissent from the displaced Cubans in the US, but quietly, Cuba is a country with an excellent health care system, and full of communities that are vibrant. Yes, it may not be as developed as other countries, but that’s a testament to a lack of resources than many other things.

The really interesting point that Daniel brings up is the comparison between those of lower socioeconomic status here versus less developed countries and how similar the two may be. This is a point that I don’t really have a cogent answer to – what about you, any thoughts? Leave them in the comments below.

Great stuff. I have a few more thoughts left on the community realm, so expect those soon.

I thought this was worthy enough to have a discussion over, and so I posed a question out to my Twitter community, which read:

Interesting thought out of last night’s #refreshevents: what do we really lose by the death of the library?

As Twitter is a largely digital society of people, I expected answers leaning towards very little, or nothing. What I got was actually pretty surprising. Out of the 41 replies that I received on the topic, more than half of them defended the experience that a library offers, or the benefits that come from having a shared space like that. They included:

First thing that comes to mind is access to books for kids. I remember signing out 10-12 books at a time in my younger years.
Jon Lim

The best smell in the world, and a kick-ass numeric cataloging system. Otherwise? Not much. Digital persists more tenaciously through replication and indexing.
Noah Zerkin

if you get rid of libraries, then how do people who can’t afford the internet learn?
Share Sigma Chi

nothing compares to sitting down with a good book. Libraries let us have access to free literature. Digital versions are not free.
Clarisse Mussi

Certain content is much better in book format as it needs to be read curled up in a big comfy chair.
Adam Thody

Interesting stuff for sure. Of course, then there was the other side, or people who may have not have taken things quite as seriously. Excerpts include (left anonymous; if you want credit, just ask):

…You don’t need to keep a shrine to dead trees to offer services to a community.

…What was the library’s URL again?

…We also lose the notion of ‘Naughty Librarians’ Dear God No!

…Books are overrated. I can learn everything I need from the back of a cereal box. For example, did you know Trix are for kids?

Again, interesting stuff, but perhaps not as… academically appealing as some of the previous reasons.

Paige Dzenis brought up a great point I thought on the difference between print and digital:

There’s studies about how we interact with paper and digital differently; paper invites you in, digital becomes an extension of self, so the relationship (interactivity and engagement-wise) we enjoy when reading books etc on paper is hard to replicate on a screen

I think that’s incredibly valid, and one of the hardest things left for digital to tackle. The Kindle is a step in the direction of having a tactile reading device, but doesn’t quite tackle that gap. If we completely remove the paper experience, maybe people would learn how to adapt digital to fit their needs, but that’s an uncertainty that we can’t answer.

So what do I think? The library is a location that isn’t going to disappear. Between the fact that for many it’s the first contact in a community for many newcomers, a host of resources directly available for free, and helpful staffers who can point you in the right direction, the library serves a useful role for our society. It will certainly have to adapt to meet some changes – more eBook access, smart recommendations on site, an updating of content, access to different types of media – but I think the space is too valuable for us to lose.

What do you think? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Twitter as a platform, for any of you who haven’t used it, carries many different possibilities for usage. When it was first introduced, it was pitched as a micro-blogging platform, and as a way for you to let your friends and colleagues know what you were doing. (In fact, that’s still what Twitter promotes as their model; witness their catchphrase still being “What are you doing?”) However, in certain geographic areas, Twitter is becoming more of a tool for conversations, and from these conversations become action. Mark talks about a few Toronto-centric examples, and I’ve had discussions with a few people on the difference between using it to update versus to converse. I think that both the ability to reach a large network instantaneously but be forced to be clear and eloquent as you are confined to 140 characters has contributed greatly to the sense that anyone can collaborate without it seeming like too much of a timesink. In essence, because it doesn’t seem like you’re spending time doing work, and because you’re working together to co-create things, you’re able to be far more efficient and get far more done.

Mark raises a few different questions that the advent of this going forward would raise, mainly in the split between the connected and the non-connected:

To realize the potential of this collective intelligence, we have problems to solve:

1. How do we involve, include and reflect the values of the non-connected periphery in our hyper-connected core?
2. How do the myriad fleeting ideas that emerge find stable structures to see them through to execution?
3. How will existing structures have to adapt in order to allow this new potential to be realized and harnessed?
4. Whose interests are served by the new emergent order and whose interests are harmed? How will those conflicting interests be negotiated?

Out of these four questions, I find the fourth the most interesting, and tied in directly with the previous three. When looking at the conversational elements of these networks, tied in with the ability to move things forward through virtual communication, you do end up leaving a lot of people by the wayside. At present moment, who you end up serving are those in the tech community, and whatever interests they may have and share. There is some pushback on whether you will need to adapt these methods to ensure inclusion.

However, I’m going to take the approach maybe expected of a tech-savvy 20-something, and say that those of us currently using this tool to accomplish these goals shouldn’t have to change anything. Should we continue to prove its effectiveness in getting things done and providing meaningful change, the world will learn to adapt to us. Twitter is not a difficult tool to use by any means; if it continues to be successful, people will educate themselves on how to use it. In the meantime, in order to get some of those voices we may desire on certain projects, it falls upon the community to reach out to convince these voices of the necessity of their inclusion, and of the benefits that being included may provide to them. That’s not an unrealistic proposition. Shall they not want to be included, both we and they will have to find alternate means to accomplish the goals we all set forward. I’m not approaching this with a “my-way-or-the-highway” mindset; merely demonstrating that outreach can occur in both ways, but if swarm intelligence proves to be the way to go and you aren’t responding to it, there shouldn’t be an expectation of the community to have to bring you into the fold.

In case it isn’t obvious, both Kuznicki’s post and my commentary should be propelling you towards using Twitter; if you currently aren’t using it, and have no desire to do so, I’d be curious to hear your reasoning behind it.

In fact, it’s really, really easy to get caught up in the passion and the buzz that is currently surrounding the Toronto start-up and creative community. After a successful launch of HoHoTO in 2 weeks, you could really see the interest from the local community, and there are a few other movements afoot involving some of the key people from HoHoTO, as well as other important voices. Someone today expressed their concerns with timelines that were approaching for a few projects because of things like holiday distractions; to be honest, I don’t really see it. I think we’re seeing the sort of movement in Toronto that Silicon Valley and the like are famous for, and if we don’t capture it, we may miss out on the change that it brings.

In fact, for me, this was a great time to get myself involved in the community – by being able to be involved in things from the ground level, I can help influence change. By seeing people that are so motivated, and so able to get things done, it’s really motivating. In fact, maybe that’s all that the movement takes – just a few key influencers who are able to get things done.

Regardless, Toronto, we need to seize upon this opportunity. Let’s launch those projects; make the changes that we want to see; and let our generation influence where the city and the world is going. We’ve got the motivation; now let’s act on it!