I recently finished my presentation at the Utah Open Source Conference. I think it went pretty well. I had a good turnout, and people were contributing to the conversation.
My main presentation was on the topic and fact that community does not mean “some big group of people”. Community means you and me. It is individuals. It is the geek coding in his basement. It is the guy submitting bugs. It is the people interesting in running a good piece of software.
You can get my slides, if you want, here. They aren’t much to look at without the presentation end of things. I tried to make the slides really simple so attendees would listen to me instead of read my slides (interesting thought ehh?)
I did credit sabdfl, Jono, Daniel and Malcom. I hope ya’ll don’t mind. You’re representing parts of our community and the contrast (particularly between Jono and Daniel) show the diversity quite well!
I’ll see you next year at the Utah Open Source Conference 2008. I’m sure it’ll be twice as big and we want to see more of you from outside the state!
Interesting to read what you said about community being individuals instead of a group.
This presentation http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html came up in my reading last night. It talks about creating social software, but some of it’s supporting “evidence” is from a book by W.R. Bion called “Experiences in Groups,” written in the middle of the last century. The question of whether
groups of people are aggregations of individuals or actually a cohesive group was explored.
He didn’t discuss at the difference between a “group” and a “community.”
-james.