Saturday was the Independents’ Day Festival in downtown Columbus. I hosted a discussion at the Ideas space about building community using online tools. There were about 10 of us engaged in the round table and I felt like several interesting points came to light.

• Location isn’t automatically removed from social media; in fact it is often a core component. In this way we can effectively engage our social media tools in local outreach.
• There is a real need for more community interaction on a face to face level. Using tools the way that the organizers of Independents’ Day can create opportunities for these face to face meetings to occur. Maximize tools such as Google Apps and interfacing social media so that volunteer efforts can be coordinated at a minimum expense of time and money.
• Lastly, it’s fun to predict the future; we did some of that too.

I really appreciate everyone who had a chance to come out and participate. I think this years Idea space afforded everyone involved an opportunity to get a feel for what can happen there in the future. I’ve mentioned that this event could and should be the foundation for the desires I’ve laid out in my Convergence Columbus idea. I beleive that this first event reassured me of the ability for that kind of conversion. A foundation has been laid so now we need to begin the building process.

Now if only I had had some spare duckets with me to buy art – god there was some great art going on there!

If you’ve followed my blog a bit you’ll see some strong similarities between this event that my friend Mike and his collaborative artist group Couchfire Collective helped to bring to life and my Convergence Columbus idea. In fact Mike and I had some discussions about how this event might essentially grow into my idea of Convergence Columbus albeit with a different moniker. Whatever happens I’m excited to be a part of it.

With that in mind I’d like to invite everyone out to the Independent’s Day festival this weekend at Gay St and Pearl Alley (just off High). If you’re interested I’ll be hosting a talk from 12pm-1pm at the Interactive/Idea Convention Vault about building local community through online tools. I have worked on several initiatives which have done just this and will gladly talk about some of those, but I would love for this to be an open discussion where we can all learn from each others experiences; so please come out and share.

Beyond just my discussion there will be food, drink, music, art and lots of workshops on tap – check the schedule here. The event is all volunteer driven so if you have some time please consider volunteering for an hour or so on Saturday. I really hope to see you all there!

Monday night I hosted the initial meeting for my Convergence Columbus event idea. I wasn’t certain what the meeting’s direction was going to look like as I wanted to leave it open enough for everyone to feel welcome to speak their mind. At first this really caused me a good bit of anxiety however I think the result was better than I might have hoped for.

Initial Convergence Columbus Meetup from Andrew Miller on Vimeo.
If you watch the video of the meeting it is 1 hour 20 minutes long but you’ll get to see exactly what went down. More importantly however is you’ll get to witness the development of a couple of important ideas.

The one I found most intriguing was the fact that all of these relatively powerful group organizers really want to work with each other, cross-organizationally, but somehow haven’t had a mechanism for that.

According to discussions after the meeting there are people attempting to build that sort of cross discipline sharing mechanism but, as of yet, have not made a functional model yet. I’m hoping to get in touch with some of these people. I think that is a part of, if not the bulk of convergence Columbus at this point.

There was a good deal of discussion about direction, strengths and weaknesses, and what strengths Columbus can draw from. This part of the discussion has been helpful to me in setting some level of direction. In my previous post you’ll find my WOSU Commentary about how Startup Weekend changed my perspective on things. Between that and this meeting’s discussions I believe I’m starting to find my way to where I want to go with Convergence Columbus.

To try and share a touch of that [I have much more work to do before a full thesis] I’ll give you a glimpse of what I’m thinking. The Convergence Columbus organization would host the interconnection of all of the various event hosting organizations in Central Ohio. This will be a massive undertaking to create and maintain such a thing. The event itself will be to harness these groups into a single week of providing some sort of community building activity, per my Startup Weekend to Startup Community commentary.

If you’d like to be a part of this conversation and want to help shape the future of this project please request membership to the Convergence Columbus Google Group at this link:

http://groups.google.com/group/convergence-columbus

I may ask you to identify what group you are with or how you are connected to Columbus when you request membership. Please don’t be offended, I just want to make sure that I respect members time and maintain a spam free list. Also, if you join the Google group you can choose to receive no email from the group and you’ll still have access to everything on demand, whatever suites your needs.

At the Google group you’ll gain access to information pages, files, and discussion boards. Please consider joining me and the large group of organizations already involved in developing this idea into a mature organization and event.

For another take on the meeting check out this post at Tangled Up In Blue by JC.