Let's Have A Conversation
With NXNEI upon us, I’ve been doing some thinking about our community and our industry. We’re a very socially minded culture; we LOVE to gather, to converse and share ideas. Toronto has been a veritable hotbed of informal gatherings and formal conferences, as well as structured community groups and associations. I suspect that many other Canadian cities share those same qualities.
I’ve always been a big fan of gathering like-minded industry professionals to share thoughts and strategies and learn from one another. I believe in the value of industry-focused communities, because it gives those who are new to this industry a voice and provides a venue for seasoned professionals to meet others, learn and build real relationships. Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook have revolutionized the way we share and consume media; devices like the iPhone and the iPad are revolutionary vehicles that serve to further our ability to share and consume this information. We’re generating and sharing more real-time content than could have ever been predicted. To quote Clay Shirky, we’re having more conversations with more people than at any point in history.
With this in mind, I thought about some ways we could continue this trend and how real-time dialogue fits in with our innate desire to share and learn from one another.
I’ve always been a big fan of 37Signals, and throughout my days as an interactive developer, I often found myself working with a number of their products. About a year and a half ago, I had the opportunity to work with the people at Virgin Charter on redeveloping their site. As I was in Toronto at the time, and the client was in Santa Monica, sometimes using phone and email didn’t quite cut it. Instead, we began to rely on Campfire. I quickly fell in love with the application, how easy it was to use and how well it was integrated into Basecamp, as well as the rest of the 37Signals family of products.
With that in mind, I’d like to share with you something I’m really excited about: Open office hours, but with a twist. Since we’re so well connected already, it became clear that Campfire was the simplest way to gather people and facilitate an open conversation. There is no set topic, no rules of engagement and no censorship. This is an open (but moderated) forum to converse, share and learn with fellow industry types.
How can you join the conversation? That’s the easiest part.
- Visit https://49pixels.campfirenow.com/26a64.
- Enter your name and click on the “Sign In” button.
- And you’re done! No email address or confirmation is required.
I’ll be running a 4 week pilot program to get a sense for. Open office hours will take place on Friday afternoons from 4:00-5:00pm EST; please note that there is a limit of 25 simultaneous “chatters”. Depending on the popularity of the pilot, we may increase that number to 60 in the future.
The first open conversation will be held at 4pm on Friday June 18th, and I hope that you’ll be able to join us!
