dangerouslyawesome

I write a lot about IndyHall on this blog, but I don’t think I’ve spoken at any great length about another local organization, Philly Startup Leaders. I’ve recently joined the organization as part of a newly formed advisory board, along with a number of other people from various local organizations that support and contribute to the local scene, as well as others who have been long-time fixtures and observe Philadelphias growth from another vantage point.

Philly Startup Leaders, like IndyHall, has modest beginnings: started by a couple of people who had or were involved with startups to discuss the challenges of being a startup in Philadelphia. Those early meetings, all held over beers as far as I’m aware, have transformed into a strong mission for the Philadelphia startup community:

“…above all else, startup entrepreneurs need each other.”

So what’s been fascinating to me has been watching IndyHall and PSL, two different communities grow alongside each other with similar purpose and vision. Lots of crossover has taken place. We share a number of members. Some of us have worked together. All good, healthy things for the ecosystem.

The PSL board has done a great job of growing membership, creating and evolving new events for the membership to participate in, crafting a manifesto, and providing the primary venue for community: the PSL-Talk e-mail list.

That e-mail list, a phenomenal resource for the community, seems to also be one of it’s greatest weaknesses.

There’s currently a flare-up (well, it’s currently as public as the e-mail list is…another issue…and it’s persistent in back-channels) about “self promotion and sales” in the list. When a new thread author, or an existing thread responder, posts something that is less about contributing information to the community and instead, advertises themselves as the solution to a specific problem, they receive a slap on the wrist (public or private, at the board’s discretion). The response is usually something like this one, from PSL co-founder and president Blake Jennelle:

Steve, you could have sent this solicitation to Yasmine directly. Promoting your consulting services is not appropriate over PSL talk. This is your public warning as per the policy you see in the footer. If this happens again you will be removed from the list.

The policy in the footer that Blake refers to reads:

The PSL Talk List is /not a sales channel/.  If you use the PSL Talk List to make a sales pitch to the community, you will be warned, publicly. If you do it again, you will be removed from the list.

I want to be clear and say that I understand why this rule is in place. Lists that are primarily solicitation, job postings, and the like do a lot of harm to the balance of “has” and “needs” of a community.

I liken it to the situation that IndyHall has with recruiters and job-postings. We wanted to make IndyHall a place and a community where people can be more effective at getting their work done. If the ecosystem becomes a place where people can come to get work, vs a place where people come to do work, the has/needs balance gets out of whack.

This is a tricky situation to deal with, for a couple of reasons. First and formost, the LAST thing I want is to be the person, or organization, that gets between a person and the opportunity of their lifetime.

When there’s contact from recruiters, startups, companies, etc about the talent at IndyHall and their availability, we explain that we’re an organization that provides physical space and community resources to our membership, as well as a highly collaborative environment that they can use to get their work done. Work exchanges hands all the time, but we don’t get in the middle of it. If you [recruiter/startup/company/etc] is interested in coming to IndyHall as a member, to use the space and community resources in the same way as anyone else who walks in our door, we welcome you!

So rather than police their intentions, which are to find a candidate for the job they have open, we frame it appropriately. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from walking in the door and joining IndyHall. So long as you can work from anywhere, pay your membership, come on by.

What’s nice is…because the culture is established by the existing membership, most anti-culture behavior sorts itself out. Rather than police culture, which is a very top-down way of looking at things, we carefully frame the situation.

If that person, whoever they are, feels they aren’t getting what they came there for, odds are, they came for the wrong thing. And most importantly, they won’t come back.

So, I came down on Blake’s response in the e-mail list where he slapped the so-called service provider on the wrist for an infraction that I’ll keep referring to as “anti-culture behavior”.

Someone who specializes in the topic of a question responds, and it’s sales. Someone who’s novice (or less experienced) responds, and it’s a-OK. Does anybody else see the problem here? I think there’s a difference between letting the group know what you do (within the list, which is the only unified point of membership of PSL) and overtly selling it to the group. What happens when someone asks about office space, and someone other than me recommends IndyHall? What if that person is a member of IndyHall? Is it better if they aren’t a member of IndyHall? It’s not me selling, but they’re selling for us (without my direct influence). What happens when somebody asks for help, like in this case? Experts aren’t allowed to be responded to in public discourse? What does that accomplish? I know that a LOT of energy goes into keeping this list anti-sales, and don’t think that I don’t understand why. Maybe if that energy went into focusing on what this list is, instead of what it’s not, the message would be clearer to people joining PSL. I don’t think the barrier to entry is to high or too low, I just think that you’ve put up the wrong barrier.

I admittedly painted some broad strokes, for the sake of illustration. But I made my point, and framed in the context of this post, I think it makes even more sense.

So Blake responds:

All Steve had to do was answer Yasmine’s question over the list and let his expertise speak for itself. This would have been a much more effective sales pitch. Alex, when you share your expertise on workspaces, when Wil shares his expertise on SEO, when Aaron shares his expertise on marketing, that unquestionable adds value to the list. It’s when you send a solicitation, beyond giving freely of your expertise, that people get annoyed. PSL talk is about helping each other for the sake of helping each other. That’s the culture that draws so many people to this community, as to Indy Hall. That’s the culture that we care so much about protecting and nurturing. That’s what PSL IS about.

Which, again, I completely agree with. Except this part:

That’s the culture that we care so much about protecting and nurturing.

I think it jumped out at me because I said something very similar in an unrelated conversation with Sean Blanda, co-founder of TechnicallyPhilly just yesterday.

Blake and the PSL board have always taken the approach of policing, posting signage (the footer warning), and warning/banning offenders.

What concerns me about this approach is that I don’t know if you can protect and nurture culture at the same time. By protecting it, you’re not letting it build up its own cultural defenses, which would truly be nurturing it into maturity.

My most recent post to the list encouraged Blake in two directions: first, to take some of the board-only-back-channel-discussion into a public forum, and make the most of the smart problem solvers he has as peers in his community. Second, to focus on what PSL is and stands for, instead of trying to keep out everything that it isn’t. Since, Blake has started a new thread doing just that, in which I’ll be sharing this post, as well as participating in the group discussion as much as is appropriate.

I don’t have the exact solution for PSL. I’m not a genie. And believe me, I’m far from perfect.

But I do know that policing culture is historically ineffective (culture’s going to go where it wants) and if the PSL board and the community it represents put more energy into nurturing than protecting, the solution would likely begin to materialize as a much clearer, and more sustainable approach to the problem.

This afternoon I attended my first City Council hearing. Frankly, it was my first time inside City Hall. Today’s hearing was related to a topic that is known to be near and dear to my heart: the city support of the so-called “creative economy”.

I found out about this event, as most people did, last minute. And my desire to attend was minimal, chiefly because I have a strong distaste for the types of meetings that end up being mostly masturbatory: if I don’t leave a meeting with some sort of actionable item besides having another meeting, I’m usually pretty unhappy with the use of my time.

However, I was drawn to this event because a number of my peers, notably some that I have a pretty large amount of respect for, had been invited to present on panels to the hearing board. That group included Blake Jennelle, Philly Startup Leaders founder, and Matt Fisher, President of Night Kitchen Interactive and long time member of PANMA. I knew that these particular leaders shared my views of the local scene, shared opinions about the strengths and needs of our community, and were extremely capable of vocalizing these messages succinctly and effectively. If nothing else, I would have an educational experience in how a city council hearing is conducted, and support my friends. The only guaranteed loss was being indoors on such a beautiful spring afternoon.

As I was walking into City Hall, I decided that it would be interesting to live-twitter my experience. Not only for record keeping purposes…but sort of an experiment to share my at-the-moment opinions (as heat-of-the-moment as they were) with my followers.

So it began. I quickly learned that there was a video feed (which I’m working on finding an archive of), and others were watching from afar. And before I knew it…my twittering turned my timeline into a back channel for the Philadelphia City Council Public Hearing on the Creative Economy.

I’d be very surprised if this was actually the first time a government event had a backchannel…but what was interesting to me was that it ended up proving incredibly valuable. For a number of reasons.

First, as my original thought was, for record keeping. If you look over my tweets in chronological order, the hot-topics were tracked in twitter forever. Sweet.

Second, was me opening my brain. Not that I wouldn’t have done that anyway, but instead of passing notes or whispering in my neighbor’s ear, and being disruptive…I got to put my disruptive behavior to good use.

Third, and most interestingly, it engaged a number of people who could not be in the room do to prior commitments, or lack of notice. I’m lucky that I don’t have a boss I have to ask if I can take the afternoon off to go do something. Most people aren’t. Did all 1500+ people that follow me care about the contents of the hearing? Of course not. But a number of them certainly did. And some of them cared enough to chime in on the conversation. And thus, the backchannel was born.

Whats most interesting about the people who cared, is that not all of them were even in, or from, Philadelphia. One of the really important parts to remember about all of the creative economy and city branding initiatives that we’re involved in is that they are, at the very least, two-fold. There’s the need for better awareness inside our city limits, but just as valuable, are the external perceptions of our city, its economy, its workforce, and it’s general contributions to the rest of the world. So when people started listening, and better yet, chiming in from places like New York City, Kansas, Austin, and LA…the message was being spread MUCH further than the city council ever could have anticipated. And the best part about this message? It’s showing the rest of the world, not only that we’re doing something…but we’re looking to them to reciprocate in many of the potential relationships we’re creating.

Its worth noting that I only have a limited scope to this online backchannel…my own tweets and the tweets of the people I follow. If someone said something and I wasn’t following them, I missed it. If someone responded to one of the people I was following, I likely missed that as well. So the message may very well have gotten even further than I’m aware. And that’s freaking rad.

There are a lot more thoughts I have about the contents of the event. Some of it was intensely, intensely positive. Some of it was intensely, intensely frustrating. I’ll save those thoughts for another post as my mind starts weaving things together. Most notably, though was some really really glowing support for the things I care the most about: Indyhall, of course, but also P’unk Ave and their Junto, Geoff DiMasi in general, and iSepta (a new app thats sprung up out of some really awesome organic collaboration between some IndyHall members). IndyHall, P’unk Ave, Geoff, and I were mentioned by no less 3 separate panelists. If the city didn’t know about us yet…they sure do now.

In the mean time, today was the day I realized the value of live, citizen journalism.

Today was a pretty important day.