geek tourism
Yes, I’m thinking of this article by Neal Stephenson (it’s one of my favorites - Daniel knows what I’m talking about).
I’ve been hanging out with Winnipeg geeks. It has been a really interesting experiment, and one that I definitly will include any upcoming trips.
Like I said, on thursday before I left montreal I sent an email to the local Linux User Group. I introduced myself, gave a quick description of what I’m involved in (ISF), and asked if anybody wanted to meet up for a beer. I added that i was interested in learning about the local scene - OSS and also the general geek scene. I also left a message on the local wifi forum saying the same thing.
There were a few responses, and a few people asked about the WSIS conference and if they could register and I had to tell them that it was invite-only.
The next day in passing I saw someone at the conference with the word “P.L.U.G.” on his conference name tag. When I met up with a few open-sourcers that night at the hotel bar, I found out that his name was Jason, and that he had just dressed up and presented himself at the registration desk that morning and said that he was a representative from PLUG. The woman at the desk replied, “I don’t seem to have a package for you”. An uncomfortable silence . . . and then “Let me go print one up”. (!)
So Jason social-engineered his way into a fairly exclusive conference, and then proceeded to network with all of the OSS and creative commons guys.
I ended up talking with Jason a few times. He is one of the main organizers behind OpenCity 2005 (they’re obviously updating their website) which also took place last year. He’s trying to bring together the left, the OSS movement, and the arts community. We talked a lot about the potential between these three groups. Through him I ended up hanging out with some of the organizers of the Winnipeg Social Forum.
Saturday night I met up with two people from the wifi group. It’s probably inaccurate to call them a group, since they seem to be mostly just participating on the local forum and doing seperate projects. Bart (can’t find website) is going to set up a central point on a water tower near downtown and invite other geeks to connect. The two people I met were *very* knowledgeable about wifi - esp. hardware - they could have given any one of our guys a run for his money. They were completely non-interested in wifidog, not because they were only interested in the technology, but because they weren’t interested in “mom and pop” users. They wanted to set up a social network, but only for themselves - as a way to bring together geeks in the region - so that they had their own exclusive communications infrastructure (that’s what I took away from it, although I might have misunderstood them, and they weren’t necessarily representative of the rest of the group).
In both cases, it took a bit of time before it felt comfortable talking to these strangers, but after 20-30 minutes it was really natural because of the common values and points of reference. I find it really exciting to make this assumption that these people and I are part of some larger community. I’m not sure if it’s true, but in practice it seems to work quite well. I’ve meet up with wifi people so far in BC, Seattle, and NYC, but in each of those times I had a real reason. This was the first time I was doing it just to learn about the local scene and for some company in a foreign city. I feel a bit like a mini-joi ito (each time he travels he lets people know that he’s going to be in a city, and, when time permits, he sets up a wiki page to coordinate hanging out with the local people that are interested in similar stuff).
All of this stuff fits in my head with the idea that people like us (open source people, internet people) are still very low down on a curve which will bring us up as a group over the next couple of decades. I hangout with people because I like them and because it’s really comforting to be around people you can both get energy from and give energy to. However, on a less emotional level, networking at this time is especially necessary (and potentially rewarding) because we don’t have very many resources (money, social pull, political power, etc). The people that you work together now and get to know and trust will be the people that help each other later on when we all have more access to resources (power). That’s true for networking with any young group, but I think it’s especially powerful for opensource/internet people, because we are in the process of a revolution, and we (as a group) are going to rise very high, very quickly. That’s the hypothesis. It’s part of what’s been going through my head in the last couple of months.