Why reading about community isn't the same as building one
Why you can't teach a kid to ride a bike at a seminar.
One of my favourite book titles ever is a book called 'You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar' it's by a legendary sales trainer called David Sandler. He was active in the 70's and 80's his hilarious workshop delivery sounds like the New York comedian Lenny Bruce.
I find a lot of people talking about community have read a couple of books and now they're a community expert. And if you are running a community, if you have the ability to get a group of people together on a regular basis to talk to each other, you are a practitioner. There is a huge difference between being a practitioner and being a theorist.
I could have read fifty books on community and I could tell you what to do, but there is something very different about having skin in the game, boots on the ground, the skill to have the relationships and pull people together to connect, find meaning, find change with each other, break bread as we like to say.
Like riding a bike or learning to swim, you actually have to do it, to experience the awkwardness, the joy, the terror, the euphoria, the feeling of a packed room where everyone loved it, and the feeling of an event where no one showed up.
from the point I joined Twitter and Meetup in August 2008, I ran a Meetup every week, sometimes three a week.
Most of those were in coworking spaces in London:
- Bloggers meetups
- Freelancer meetups
- Tech meetups
- Writer meetups
- Artist meetups
- Podcast meetups
At one point, around 2015, when Phil and I ran @Work Hubs in Euston we had a group of 30 people who were connected to the different meet-ups and events we did.
They did not have a formal membership, these folks were community, fans or advocates, whatever way you want to look at it, these days, I might even call them citizens.
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