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.