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My personal acceptance test for a community development effort

November 22, 2008 at 9:55 am · Filed under Project, local

There’s a lot of local chatter lately (local in my social network, here and afar) about community development as opposed to tribal consolidation. That is, developing meetings and infrastructure that bridge between disparate groups who otherwise never meet and interact, vs. team-building and strengthening the internal cohesion of well-formed groups themselves.

Here’s an acceptance test I’m thinking of using for a long-term project of the bridge-building type (the one I call “real” community development). It’s hard to know whether your notion of how to run things actually fosters and enhances diversity rather than just consolidating pre-existing barriers, so I’m musing about a general-purpose challenge that discriminates them. Maybe:

  1. Pick up a local Yellow Pages.
  2. Open to a random page. You may want to slice the book up into chunks to ensure uniform sampling.
  3. Randomly select an entry on the page, maybe with a blind stab, and note the category it’s in. Plumbers? Lawyers? Dentists? Libraries? Landscaping? Escort Services? Restaurants? Used and Rare Books? Knitting? Jewelry? Wedding Planning? Septic Services?
  4. Repeat the previous two steps to select a second category at random.
  5. If you can create, announce, and populate an open-format unconference-style meeting that will attract at least five people who actually work in each of those two categories professionally, your community-building effort may have a chance.

You don’t need to ever repeat with the same two categories. But it might be interesting to walk ahead by adding a new category and dropping the oldest category in each successive meeting.

This may be a bit of a stretch. Wedding Planners plus Shoes I can see a path to; House Painting and Office Supplies, less so.

But what’s a test without a challenge?

Edward Vielmetti said,

November 24, 2008 @ 12:38 am

House painting actually gets you quite a bit of variety in this town, because a lot of the house painters are musicians.

I would question whether the yellow pages is the right random sort; that skews towards categories where that flavor of advertising either works, or it has worked in the past and the proprietor is on auto-pilot renewing it.

You describe an organizational effort that looks like a chamber of commerce, or a Rotary, or some similar kind of structure. what you miss in a college town are the hidden pockets of work-at-home telecommute trailing spouses, who will never show up in your yellow pages yet do world-class work in some field not advertised in the yellow pages.

–

You describe the essential tension between the get-things-done closure version of network building, where you all meet and greet and get to know each other and hunker down and build something; vs. the find-things-out brokerage version of network building, where everyone knows someone else but not everyone else and there’s always someone new at the table and nothing obvious ever gets accomplished.

Tozier said,

November 24, 2008 @ 8:25 am

I agree: Yellow Pages are probably only fractionally appropriate.

I wonder if you could just invite people according to a similar approach, though. Maybe start by inviting the friends and colleagues of one person who are least likely to know each other, then trying to identify the least-likely among their friends, and so on.

And you’ve put your finger on a real long-term tension in a lot of the engineering I do: “Learning” is never done; “design” is never done; “search” is never done; “optimization” is never done; ‘programming” is never done; “writing” is never done; “publishing” is never done; “marketing” is never done.

Community building, too. Getting something obvious done is too often used as an excuse.

Better to create a self-maintaining process that persists and adapts, than to try to provide a “solution”. At least that’s my general tendency.

Tozier said,

November 24, 2008 @ 8:51 am

I should maybe clarify that:

Learning by almost any technical method can result in extensive and suddenly improved models, and the new best can be used productively, but in a real-world setting where data are still being collected one should never assume the current “best” is a universal best.

Design by almost any method can result in innovative and creative solutions, and the best choice of the moment can be used productively, but in a real-world setting where customers and applications are diverse, one should never assume the current “best” is a universal best.

Software development methodologies, old- or new-fashioned, can produce useful and “complete” applications that provide business and personal value in a given context, but in a real-world setting where customer needs are subject to externalities and innovations percolate through the supply chain, one should never assume a particular program is a universal solution.

Publishing (driving printing or some other production method) is necessary for the dissemination of new results and creative efforts, but in a real-world setting where history is unfolding and science, literature and the arts are ramifying all over, one should never assume that a particular draft, version, edition or volume is a universal success or failure.

And so on.

Maybe what I mean is: Expand, Reuse, Recycle… and Keep Moving.

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