I’m writ­ing to ask you to con­sider attend­ing Arb­Camp, an UnCon­fer­ence to be held at Washt­e­naw Com­mu­nity Col­lege on Octo­ber 27.

We’d all like to bring together the region’s tech­ni­cal, entre­pre­neur­ial, aca­d­e­mic, artis­tic and cor­po­rate cul­tures. “We” being the orga­niz­ers of Arb­Camp, the region’s plan­ners, the region’s workers.

And I agree. I’m not an orga­nizer of the event, but I’d like to help build a future here out of some­thing besides rusty scraps.

The orga­niz­ers picked what was clearly unfor­tu­nate model—Bar­Camp—for their inspi­ra­tion for this meet­ing. It’s unfor­tu­nate because of the conflict-​​ridden his­tory of BarCamp’s ori­gin. Bar­Camp has bag­gage: the right­eous youth­ful rebel­lion it’s sup­posed to rep­re­sent, the cliquish­ness and fer­vent brand-​​defensiveness it fos­ters. Bar­Camp is a tool designed to define a com­mu­nity, and its goals, by set­ting itself up as dif­fer­ent from an estab­lish­ment, Tim O’Reilly’s FooCamp.

For the most part we’re not them, and nei­ther are we the establishment.

But a meet­ing is nec­es­sary. What the orga­niz­ers might rather have said was: We need to talk, to estab­lish and then blend and grow com­mu­ni­ties, and use those inter­con­nec­tions to sup­port our indi­vid­ual goals. We should have fun, and make things: soft­ware, busi­nesses, money, social changes, art. And at the same time, we should explore how to do it bet­ter and more often.

All the time. Over and over. Because our region can no longer sup­port the many dis­parate “com­mu­ni­ties” that don’t inter­con­nect. We have the same over­ar­ch­ing goals: we want to live here, we want to suc­ceed here, and we want a life with less pressure.

But the raw mate­ri­als we use to make that suc­cess — our skills and abil­i­ties and expe­ri­ence — they’re dis­trib­uted too dis­cretely among the artists, the film­mak­ers, the geeks, the con­sul­tants, the mar­keters, the angels, the car­mak­ers, the bankers, the aca­d­e­mics, the students.

All these lit­tle groups meet amongst them­selves to dis­cuss the museum, the the­aters, the Fund­ing Sit­u­a­tion, the pro­gram­ming lan­guage of the week, how to place ads on web pages, the elec­tion… our focused and sup­pos­edly spe­cific goals.

Now we need to stop talk­ing to the peo­ple we already know. We all live here, we all work here, and we are all under pressure.

So on 27 Octo­ber, I’m hop­ing that we can build a first draft out of some­thing besides wish­ful think­ing, junk mail and unread web con­tent. Not an online com­mu­nity, not a wiki, not a new mail­ing list, not a break­fast club, not a new busi­ness, not even a new orga­ni­za­tion.

Some­thing real: A con­ver­sa­tion, face-​​to-​​face, in one place. With mem­bers of as many of those dis­parate, local groups as we can get.

Derek Mehra­ban, Brian Kerr, Char­lie Pen­ner and Ross John­son have made the first move and started some­thing. They have a place, and the frame­work of the seeds of a vision of some­thing that could even­tu­ally be flex­i­ble, use­ful, and long-​​lived.

What I’m ask­ing you to do is try to attend that first day, and help it become what you would find useful.

Just do that, and I promise I’ll buy you a beer.

And if you can’t, and you know some­body else who can, send them. And I’ll buy them a beer.

I’m not a real orga­nizer. Derek and Brian and Char­lie and Ross aren’t the real organizers.

You are. Stop wait­ing to see what some­body else will do for you.