Waay back on Dec 14th I attended another brilliant Publishing Point Meetup, with guest speaker Scott Heiferman (@heif) who founded Meetup. Since then A LOT of AWESOME has happened in my world so this short post is long overdue.
My biggest takeaway from the talk was that when you get people together, in real life, amazing things happen. The “alchemy” of everyone’s ideas building on one another creates a bigger and better idea. We’re all so focused these days on “community building” and what the magic pill might be to pull it off that we tend to forget people have been building communities organically since people began.
Scott Heiferman founded Meetup shortly after 9/11, the idea inspired by realizing it wasn’t until the aftermath that he was getting to know his neighbors for the first time. Since it’s beginning there have been 7 million Meetups with 70 million rsvps. There are Meetups created around every conceivable idea. I love the way he defined community as “conversation” and simply as people saying “LET’s.” He talked about envisioning a future where Amazon would have MeetUp buttons for every book. Discuss!
I’ve described a lot of events this past year as cool because it was like “my twitter stream came to life.” I’ll confess at the first it felt a bit like gawking at my own personal red carpet but once you move past that there is so much to learn and be inspired by when we have face to face conversations.
