Patio Friday Round Up: Thoughts on Community

We landed at the Adelaide St. Pub rooftop patio along with the sunshine last week, this time with an added twist as we celebrated Darcy and Kevin’s birthdays.

As the conversation ebbed and flowed with the arrival and departure of various new and familiar faces throughout the afternoon it became more evident to me that the Toronto Twitter community is strong and bright. We have, as a group, leveraged the online communication utility for many great things, not the least of which is simply to form new and formidable relationships with people we wouldn’t meet otherwise. This, naturally, also leads to learning things and finding opportunities we wouldn’t otherwise.

Reflecting on the past few weeks of our new Patio Friday tradition I’m compelled to share some thoughts on what “community” means. I don’t think any of it is rocket science, but reaffirms what a lot of us may believe to be true.

In 2000 Robert D. Putnam noted in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community that “in the US over the past 25 years, attendance at club meetings has fallen 58 percent, family dinners are down 33 percent, and having friends visit has fallen 45 percent.” (Source: Wikipedia/ Community)

I wonder if this divide coincides all too conveniently with the advent of personal entertainment devices such as the Walkman, hand-held electronic games, and the home computer. Along with this, the workplace became computerized and demands placed on the career-minded grew driving us out of the home, into the office and eventually into the home office. Interestingly enough the very technology that may have helped to pull our communities apart is now bringing us together in ways never thought possible.

I can’t help but believe that in the past three years alone, the Internet and specifically the proliferation of social networks has given us all an avenue to return to a sense of community that was all but lost in the 80s and 90s. We now have a way to connect with people near and far from us on a common platform with common interests that was never available to us before. We can find, connect and engage with people who think, believe and act like we do. Further, being the social animals we are, we are driven to take these new connections to higher levels and meet in person to form stronger, more meaningful bonds. This isn’t an entirely new concept, if you think about dating sites and chat rooms that have been around since the 90s, but the technology has become friendlier, personal computers are in most homes and people in general are becoming more technologically savvy. I wonder also, if we’re all feeling the unnatural disorder of not belonging to a community disrupting a very primal need, thereby driving us all to find a means to create communities that have been sorely missed for years.

There’s no shortage of books and blog posts on the topic and I’m not planning to jump on the bandwagon, but I’ve started a list of the things that make a community a community. It’s by no means complete and I look to you to add your thoughts on what I hope to be a growing definition of community as it pertains to what we are building here and now. This is an exciting time in our lives and I’m personally thrilled to be part of it, learning every step of the way with all of you. I look forward to your comments and additions to the list. Let’s see where this goes, shall we?

1. Regardless of professional or personal standing, the community accepts, supports, and encourages its members.
2. The reciprocal energy found in a healthy community is irreplaceable. It carries its members through the tough times and celebrates with them in good times.
3. Community is a natural phenomenon. It can’t be forced, bought or fooled.
4. A community grows because it is not just built, but nurtured.
5. Communities are flexible. They expand and contract as necessary to allow for change.
6. Communities listen, observe and challenge those within it with the common goal being success and achievement.
7. Communities are people who choose to belong to a common purpose, belief or goal.

Patio Friday Round Up

@rochlatinsky
Idea girl, perpetual volunteer,people wrangler, geek| Available for hire

@AlexaClark
serial entrepreneur, chief cheapeater, photographer & social media addict
Alexa's Blog

@AprilDunford
Product Marketing / Product Management consultant, formerly of Nortel, IBM, Siebel and others.
April's Blog

@Erin_Bury
Community Manager @RedWire, online network for entrepreneurs. Journalism grad w/ tech PR background. TwestivalTO co-organizer. Self-professed nerd. Shopaholic.
Red Wire's Site

@Smack416
UX practitioner and lover of design, typography, photography, music and life.
I Need Sugar Blog
Say Yeah's Site

@Matt416
UX design/developer @ Say Yeah! I'm also an HCI and psychology hobbyist.
Say Yeah's Site

@Xclarke78x
# Bio I am a web devloper + designer based out of Toronto. Currently working at http://www.yousayyeah.com Loving work and life!
Darcy's Blog

@KevRichard
Recent Marketing Grad. Writer and analytical thinker.Interested in tech, social media and digital strategy.
Kevin's Blog

@philmoreira
Web Developer for TD Bank. I like tech/web stuff, WoW, hockey and back and forth banter with my TO peeps. Official Ambassador of #HOVA.
Phil's Blog

@RJToronto
Displaced West Coast Buddhist hippie, advocating for refugees and human rights!

@Hyfen
The guy behind @torontoist, CUSEC co-Chair (student software conf), Varsity online editor, UofT computer science student, Ruby developer, cyclist, photographer
Andrew's Blog

@RohanSJ
I help innovators create online products and services.
Rohan's Site

@flashlight
Husband. Dad. Designer. Reluctant entrepreneur. In that order.
Peter's Site

As for the Adelaide St. Pub? Awesome patio with great food, service, drink selection and WiFi. It isn’t a cheap lunch spot but well worth it if you’re in the Spadina & Adelaide neighbourhood looking for sunshine and a place to call home for a couple of hours.

Photo Courtesy of Lee Dale (@smack416)

Comments

[Kevin Richard]

I like how you connected technology with society's progression regarding interaction and community. A major thing that these technologies have done is they allow us to better control the time and space around us. When we want to be alone we can plug in/tune out with portable games and mp3 players. When we want connect we take out our cellphone. And when we want to unwind we either hit the net or the television.

Going back to the topic of community as the internet has improved its allowed people who hold the same ideas/beliefs to interact and speak with each other and now with social media we are able to get to know each other on a more local level where we end up having IRL meetings and not the kind that your parents warned you about!

Its been awesome to see how this technology brings people together, from making a random post saying "hey who wants to see a movie/grab dinner etc" to doing more formal events like #patiofridays etc. And basically summed up in your definition of a community, its an organic body its not something that ever stays the same or has rigid rules.

I agree with you Paige, I'm excited to see where things will go with the formation of these communities as I've already seen great things happen. People have gotten together to talk about business ( and form businesses) and people have come together to create change and do good doing things such as netchange week and recently with @ryantaylor's warchild initiative. For me its been a crazy 6 months seeing everything happening and getting to know a lot of great people. I'm looking forward to seeing even more happen ifor the rest of the year!

[Amrita]

Hi Paige, I love what you are doing with your round-ups, especially for those who can't attend Patio Fridays. I do think that new technologies have made it easier for people to form and maintain connections with people. I have been able to network with people in Toronto in the last year much faster and easier than in the 3 prior years when I first moved here. (Even though I must add, often people are much more social online than they are in real life!)

I also wonder though how much this new technology is also disrupting these connections - i.e. I feel like my attention span is getting worse since using social media, and when I am socializing with people who use smartphones, they often get distracted by their online conversations, preferring them over the "real life" ones. This is most apparent when you bring smartphone-carrying and non-smartphone carrying folks together - totally etiquette clashes!

Wondering if communities will soon be formed around our access to said technologies and not just our interests/values?

[Paige]

Thanks Amrita! I'm a bit behind on sharing the past two round ups, but plan to do that this week.

The point about disrupting connections is an interesting one. At social events our attention span is shortened because we're competing with so much: not just the smartphones, but also the number of people in the room with whom we feel we must connect in some way. What becomes increasingly important at these large meetings like Patio Friday, Wired Wednesday, Refresh, DemoCamp, etc., is to establish a connection and then followup outside the meeting one-on-one or in a smaller group to engage in a more focused fashion. These events should act as catalysts to richer conversations with a purpose.

There's a definite shift in behaviour that has occurred in that past few years that is rooted in etiquette and our ability to manage multi-sensory inputs and tasks. The human brain wasn't designed for this type of activity so we're all struggling with it. We all have to try harder to stay focused don't we? Perhaps learn to be where we ARE and not where we AREN'T. Be IN the moment instead of SHARING the moment with those who are not present (twitpicing, tweeting, etc.).

We're programmed to somehow share our experience with others as soon as we can, which means we're viewing the experience through a lens with one eye closed instead of watching with both eyes open, or listening with one ear cocked as we text or tweet part of the conversation instead of having our minds fully engaged. We're really missing a lot this way aren't we?