So let’s do a thought experiment.

Let’s imagine there’s a mill town. A place where there’s a big factory, and there’s always been a factory as long as anybody can remember. It doesn’t matter what they make; maybe they make cars, and maybe they make university alumni, but either way it’s a factory atmosphere.

Safe, fundamentally conservative, basically bad for innovation and secure in its traditions.

Now suppose there is a subculture of people in the area who have, through the years, invented something new. People who, oh, I don’t know founded weird-ass things that local people don’t pay attention to: slashdot, Extreme Programming, wikis, social network modeling, stuff like that. Stuff everybody else in the world considers “theirs” now, but which in fact originated geographically near this sleepy little mill town.

I know it’s a stretch, but consider it’s an imaginary thought experiment. Noplace like that could exist, surely.

Now suppose the mill was shutting down. Hell, the whole damned state was shutting down too.

But you live there, and you would like to save it from becoming a completely boarded-up crack house kindof neighborhood.

How would you take the people who live there, who until recently have been protected, safe mill workers and wingtip-wearing marketers used to selling metal or MBAs, and bring them up to speed? People who have never understood Open Source, or agility, or any of the things you imagine are absolutely crucial to life &c?

How would you take the under-represented technically creative minority and get them to understand they don’t have to move to Portland or Cambridge or Sussex or Shanghai to get a leg up? People who have never realized you can’t just write a better git or a Ruby gem for WoW character naming and make a living?

In other words, how would you build a new community? With these people who never actually talk to each other?

But who are about to be out of a job. It being the worst economy in the damned country at the moment.

If you wanted to run a meeting, would you come right out and cater to the assumptions aand prejudices of the geeks right away, and spout MARKETERS NEED NOT APPLY U OLD MORONS? For example? Or would you come right out and say NO BLACK T-SHIRTS ALLOWED YOU MUST BE ABLE TO USE A PUTTER AND MS EXCEL TO ATTEND?

I think both those groups, and a lot of others, are easily scared. They can all stand on their hind legs and generally make themselves understood amongst themselves, and so they think they’re what you’d call Civilized and Sophisticated. And Correct. And when they get their version of sophisticated correct civilization stepped on by Outlanders, they’ve trained themselves to rebel.

So maybe what you might do, in this thought experiment, is (1) weed out the most egregious, bigoted and self-righteous control-freaks among each group right up front, and then (2) gradually morph the meeting event into something that attracts the open-minded and sane population.

You might, say, let the people who imagine BarCamp is Way Better than actual Open Space wander off and fly away far, and in the end keep the people who are willing to come see what they can do with each other.

Now of course this is a thought experiment. It’s a Central Control Model, and the cabal who planned such a thing in real life would be Illuminati-grade politicians who should be working at the Trilateral Commission, not some little mill town.

But say it plays out that way in the end, not because there’s a cunning mastermind behind it all, but because it’s the way how group decision-making and community formation happens in real life… well, that would be indistinguishable, wouldn’t it? And even useful. Because as it happens that the groups of people we like to refer to as “communities” benefit from driving off the most bigoted obstinate individuals among them.

And even though individuals in those communities may not get or plan it that way, it’s a natural emergent property they have. It just works, and often as not nobody actively decides to do it.

More generally: sometimes it’s better to just try something, and adapt as you go. Every time you take a little iterative step, you prune the set of possible worse alternatives, and you also make some progress towards a goal. And discover the goal as you go.

So, in this thought experiment, starting from BarCamp as an example of what people have done, and then testing and fixing it… that would be a productive way to try to save said mill town.

Thus: Sorry we’re not doing it right. Have fun wherever it is you decide to hide instead. I hope you find what you’re looking for there.