Community-Building? Do it and they will come

Jonathan Kressaty attended last week's Phoenix Design Week (which I wrote about last week) and was thrilled to find the Phoenix design community one that was willing to do a lot to help to build a 'community'.

He wrote that he found "...an amazing group of people who are so passionate about their community that they're willing to go all out in order to further that community." And for those who couldn't make it in person...."Many people who were unable to attend PHXDW still participated and benefited from the panels, discussion, and interaction that was happening miles away from their location."

And he found correlation between the amount of social FACE time folk spend together with the amount of 'community building' that's happening. To wit: "The quantity and quality of our interactions online as a community is directly related to the time since our last large-scale social gathering. In fact, the size and scope of the gathering could even dictate the scale of this correlation."

And he provided a graph to make that point.


It's always a great time when online folks can meet together at a certain event (say, like last night's Gary Vaynerchuck book signing in Tempe or the Phoenix Design Week show), and it helps to further a community when everyone is aligned behind cetain goals and objectives for that community. But that's another topic for another day.

For now, get involved. Go to community building activities. I'll be at Gangplank on Wednesday night for the Crowdpitch event - should be awesome. You can get involved - check out Chuck Reynolds' great lineup of upcoming tech-related PHX happenings. Get involved. Don't just be a online observer.