Hear This From SXSW: Community Rules!
The Forrest Four-Cast: March 27, 2018
Humans crave community. That sounds obvious, but in today frenetically-paced, always plugged-in world, there are new challenges to finding the meaningful person-to-person support that drives personal and professional growth and satisfaction. In March 2018, SXSW content approached this issue from multiple angles, including taking a look at the lessons from a female-driven community, the importance of building team spirit and the impact of a very, very early online community. If you missed any of these SXSW sessions, take a listen to the full-length audio replays by clicking on the title below.
Women + the Power of Community with Audrey Gelman. Pictured above, Gelman is the CEO and co-founder of The Wing, a NYC-based co-working and community space for women dedicated to providing members with a place to advance their pursuits and build community. At SXSW, she sat with interviewer Alyssa Mastromonaco, former Deputy Chief of Staff of Operations under President Obama and NYT bestselling author of “Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?” to speak about the importance of women building community in a time of political struggle. Gelman highlighted the role that community spaces play in personal and professional growth, and in upending larger societal trends of alienation and loneliness.
Building Communities: URL and IRL. How do you build a community from scratch? What’s the value of a community? What is an effective community, anyway? This panel discussion explored the best practices and particular challenges of creating successful communities, both IRL and URL. Marianna Martinelli, Director of Community at The Wing, and Liz Milch, Genius’ Director of Content, reviewed their steps toward building two distinct communities: a women’s co-working space in New York City, and a music media company built around crowdsourced song lyrics and musical knowledge. Martinelli and Milch discussed the benefits, the pitfalls and everything in between, including what it’s like to be part of a community of your own creation. Moderated by Jazmine Hughes of the New York Times.
Collective Tech Experiences and the Future of Teams. The age of individual genius is being overtaken by teamwork. Success requires multiple experts at the table, but now more than ever that table is virtual. As companies face irrelevance in today’s disruptive market, the tools to simplify and accelerate team productivity have largely been unavailable. Learn how teams can better accomplish complex projects in a rapidly changing environment. Torkel Mellingen shared a vision for a new way of working that inspires teams to brilliance.
The Story of an Impossibly Early Online Community. It’s 1974. In front of you is a PLATO terminal, with 512x512 graphics, a touch-sensitive screen, and multimedia support. You sign on into an online world of chat rooms, instant messaging, multiplayer games, online forums, email, screen sharing, a crowdsourced online newspaper, and more apps appearing daily. A thriving online community, that in 2018 is almost entirely unknown. Until now.
Longtime tech startup entrepreneur Brian Dear and author of “The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture,” revealed the incredible story of this early cyber-community.
Find more podcast content by exploring the SXSW online schedule. When you click on a session and see an audio bar, then you’ve got your listening assignment for the day! We’ve made it easier for you by recapping some of the SXSW highlights. Check out previous roundups of audio content related to Senator Bernie Sanders, The Future of Work, Benefit Boosters, Fake News, Culture Changers and Building Inclusion.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
