I’ve been in a weird mood lately. This past weekend I attended the local Linux Users group and chatted about free software. Yesterday I heard about Aaron Swartz commiting suicide and have mixed, albeit, sad feelings about that. And this morning, following a recent conference announcement from the Charleston Digital Corridor’s (CDC) Code Show, I saw a few comments that had me thinking about the state of our tech community and what it means to me.
Chalk it up to being sentimental and super invested in the local tech community I’ve grown with here in Charleston for the past 5 years, but I got a little defensive about one of the announcement tweets,
{% blockquote @chscodes https://twitter.com/chscodes/status/290818518084108289] %} Introducing #Chs’ 1st #Software #TechConference: CODEshow 3/14 with @MongoDB, @AngularJS, @Nodejs. http://www.chscodeshow.com #chstech #SETech #SC {% endblockquote %}
My gut dissapointment was later validated from 2 people I really respect and are super involved in the local tech community:
{% blockquote @amblin https://twitter.com/amblin %} @CHSdigital 1st techconference, really? {% endblockquote %}
and then
{% blockquote @russellbryant https://twitter.com/russellbryant %} @amblin @CHSdigital and I’m a bit disappointed that I never saw any kind of call for talk submissions. {% endblockquote %}
Being really involved with Barcamp and being part of building it up as a mostly tech focused conference is what dissapointed me in that the CDC didn’t really acknowledge that.
This ‘gut’ dissapointment started to evolve to more of an understanding of 2 distinct camps and the motivations behind this conference and one like Barcamp Charleston, which is a pure community event.
I see two very distinct roles of the Charleston ‘Tech’ Community:
One role is very distinctly what you would consider ‘grassroots’, meaning individuals, people wanting to connect and share and learn from one another. Of course they want to raise the bar of our local #chs, but moreso want to identify, socialize, learn, and share the wonderful things that we bring to enrich this community.
A different role, in my mind anyway, is really and primarily about driving economic growth in our knowledge economy…aka economic development. They want to realize our ‘Silicon Harbor’ by supporting the growth of companies and supporting the ones here…as well as raising the profile of Charleston so as to attract more companies to call here HOME. Having a conference with nationally known speakers can only help the profile of our city and get a conversation going to a broader stage, especially knowing the ‘sell’ of #chs is an easy one.
Understanding these two ‘roles’ helps me put things in perspective, but still doesn’t completely iron out why the announcement tweet turned me the wrong way…
which turned a little more with 2 more responses from @chscodes
In reponse to @amblin asking if it really was the first software tech conference:
{% blockquote @chsdigital https://twitter.com/chsdigital %} @amblin This is the first conference in #CHS focused exclusively on software. {% endblockquote %}
And in response to @russellbryant about open calls to speak:
{% blockquote @chscodes https://twitter.com/chscodes %} @russellbryant @amblin We’ll be doing a local-focused event again later in the year. This is designed 2 bring national speakers to #Chs. {% endblockquote %}
To me, @chscodes missed the point of their questions and responded more in a tone of a parent telling their children to calm down, we’re giving something to the community soon, but this is bringing more knowledgeable/known people to charleston.
The thing is, Russell Bryant is a rockstar amongst geeks…he currently is a Principle software engineer at Red Hat and plays a very invluential role in Red Hat’s Open Stack project…and before that, he helped lead core development of Asterisk - ‘The world’s most widely adopted open source communications platform’. If that’s not national, not sure what is.
And I’m not trying to take away anything from the Codeshow…I really want to go and am excited they are showcasing some technologies that I really care about and use all the time. In fact, I’m really happy with the state of Charleston’s tech community; I really feel like there is such diversity of not only opportunities to learn, but a whole lot of talented and nice people to learn from as well as companies to work for.
I feel very strongly about the mission of the Charleston Digital Corridor (CDC) in that they help nurture and grow smaller companies and help broadcast and find talent via the networking and being a hub. They work hard, very hard. Codecamp and tech talks…they do a lot, but there’s always room to improve.
Through many community tech events and local user groups, we’ve embraced celebrating the talents and local capital we have in Charleston and we’ve demonstrated that there’s Power in that. Power to come together and strengthen our tech community. Power to connect and power to learn from one another.
It’s just that my drive to learn and connect with more cool geeks doesn’t bring jobs to the community.
I’m also not naieve enough to ignore the importance of building up the companies we have here in Charleston and attracting new ones. I’m certain there’s a lot of factors that go into making a decsion to locate your company to a specific area…and I feel like a very important one, at least for attracting talent, is having a solid tech community outside of just the local companies in the area.
I’m not anyone special or have any super talent that would be considered ‘national’, and I realize I may be speaking from a narrow perspective since I don’t regularly keep pace with all the CDC and the local ‘grassroots tech community’ happenings, like Code Retreat which sounds like an awesome ‘grassroots tech community’ event that was put on by the CDC.
My main reason for rambling tonight is to get my thoughts out there (I start a lot of posts that never get finished)…and also just to provide some feedback to the CDC to maybe start a dialog with the larger ‘grassroots tech community’ to get a better understanding of each other…because I believe there is POWER in that and think that each party can enrich the other’s ‘primary goals’