There’s always room
There’s always room for Jell-O…
Innovation Night, DemoCamp, Startup Weekend, AppsForHealth, McMaster Computer Science Club, Mohawk College AI Club, Open Hamilton, Startup Drinks, HackIt Mac, McMaster Game Development Club, Hammertown GDD, Ladies Learning Code, Hammertown CoderDojo, Coderetreat… and the list keeps going. And the amount of activity seems to grow a little more every month.
Can having ‘too much stuff going on’ be a bad thing for a community? Somebody asked me once “why can’t it all just be one group?”. Some people and communities try to attempt that. There’s a view that different groups and events compete with one another, and of course at the level of each individual sometimes people have to make decisions with their limited time. But if you look at a community as a whole, one of the most important goals has to be engaging the highest number of people possible.
If you have a “purely social tech pub night”, how many people is that going to engage? Maybe 20-40 in a city like Hamilton? Maybe 100+ in a larger city? So let’s say you’ve got 30 people engaged. If somebody spins off a web development group out of that, a web development group can focus in on things that are specifically interesting to web developers. The tech pub night might lose a few regulars, but the new web developers group will appeal to new people who were never previously engaged. And if that web development group spins off a PHP group? The same logic applies, and on and on. As the ‘original events’ become free to specialize on more specific topics themselves, they are able to engage new people too.
It’s not about putting more wood behind fewer arrows, it’s about putting more wood on the fire to make it bigger!
I know this is a point that a lot of people get intuitively, but because the comparison between tech and startup community building and more formal professional organizations with chairs and subcommittees is often made, it’s a point that’s lost sometimes too. Don’t worry about ‘too much stuff going on’. Right now a very small percentage of the total 500,000+ community in Hamilton is engaged in the tech and startup community, and the important thing to measure is how many of these 500,000+ total people in Hamilton (and beyond) become engaged in the years ahead.
A few years ago I published a list of events Hamilton didn’t have yet. Since that time we’ve added many more, and other types of events have become popular in communities all over. I’ll publish a new list soon in case anyone out there is interested in stepping up to continue to build the community but isn’t sure where to start.
