I’m looking forward to the meeting dubbed “Group of Groups” happening later tonight. A large number of high-profile tech community members have been gathered to sit down and decide how to improve our community and its cohesiveness. It’s enthusiastic to see these individuals taking the time to get involved, but I’m concerned about the lasting impact that this meeting will produce. Primarily because of each person’s interpretation of “improving our community”. It has been suggested that meeting once per quarter will be enough to keep our channels of communication open, but I don’t believe that it will be enough.

Part of our community’s problem is how far everyone is stretched apart from each other. I’ve written before about how valuable serendipity can be to success and it applies similarly with community. As an attempt toward improving this, I propose creating more opportunities to have one-on-one interactions. If you’re having trouble thinking of reasons to get together, lunches are a perfect excuse. I think if each person can commit to having lunch once per month with someone else in the community, two things will happen: (1) we will generate more serendipity and (2) more starkly expose our “disconnected-ness” as a community. Both of these are hugely beneficial in our communities growth, but only if we’re truly all-in on building this community.

I’ve started an open thread on the South Florida Tech Leaders Google Group for lunch invitations. I hope you’ll consider my offer.

South Florida Tech Leaders open lunch invitation