Congrats to the new Organizer

Nate Westheimer came by the 10gen offices this morning and met with Jim Hirshfield, Dwight Merriman, and me.

Nate was recently elected to lead the NY Tech Meetup. With over 7500 members, this is one of the largest tech meetups in the world. Nate is promoting organization as his central theme. He recognizes that NY has a lot to offer, but the part that's lacking is the organization and connections between and within the different communities. He's assembling a league of ambassadors who will serve as communication conduits, making connections between people and groups.

This fits right in line with my philosophy and some of the community type organizing I've done in the past - establishing High Performance Computing user groups within academia and big pharma. What I've seen is that it's not the solution that's lacking, but awareness of the options out there and their applicability to people. Once you get people to realize that "hey, this is relevant to me," and get them listening to each other so they realize, "that sounds like my problem, how'd you solve that?" a dialog is opened. Then the community member begin to support one another. They begin to collaborate. They become more than the sum of their parts.

Having a cohesive (or at least communicating) community is great, but even more can be achieved when it looks out side of itself. Rare is the group that is completely self sufficient. Being able to have a focal point / distribution point for inquiries and information exchange into and out of the group and amongst its members improves that critical signal:noise ratio so that people actually pay attention & hear what those things that can add value to them. Building relationship between organizations and groups compounds the value and opens up new and innovating solutions more easily.

Looking forward to the structure Nate is proposing, it's exciting. It's simple, and it can work.