Amy Lewis (@CommsNinja) said something on a recent Geek Whisperers Podcast Community Building is the New Marketing that struck home with me. She said:
These that the rare technologists that are articulate and super-engaged, and often feel like they don’t fit in any one organisation or department.
I really do think at the core is that they want to share.
This has certainly been the case for me. One of the things I’ve loved most about finding the people from all the subsets of the online social-media tech community (Speaking in Tech, Geek Whisperers, the Tech Field Day folks, the VMware VMUG community, the folk from Dell, and many others) over the past few of years, is that sense of belonging to something that transcends any one company, country, or technology.
The insular tribalism of some groups has never appealed to me. There are very few zero sum games in life. As we used to say in a.s.r back in the day: All software sucks. All hardware sucks.
Instead, I’ve found a community of people who are friends across generations and continents, and who remain friends as they transition from company to company, role to role, and who continue to share knowledge and support to those around them.
As someone who hasn’t yet found a company where they really belong (and so started their own), it’s nice to belong to a community of my people, and I’m very glad to have found them.
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