Membership is up, the coffee is flowing, the television and paper covers the press releases, but something is missing. There has been a lot of spin, a lot of hope, a lot of dreaming, but the delivery has been less than stellar. Before we had coworking in the form of MatchBox here in town, we heard a lot of words like “tech, art, innovation, collaboration, entrepreneurialism, revitalization, vision.” Before there was a building, we were buying into an idea, a bit of vision, and what we hoped to be fun. We knew there would be two things being built, one was a building, the second and the much more important part was the community. Over a year later, I get the feeling I am still waiting for the community. I will be the first to admit I am a delusional maniac, so maybe I was hoping for things that were just not going to happen.
We knew there was a lot of community building to do. There also was a lot of ambiguity about what this community would be. Everyone thought and hoped it would be something cool. I feel like we are still waiting on the cool. Yes there are some cool things happening around here. We are having Verge events, Startup Weekends, tech meetups, writer’s nights, and there are some really cool people coming through this place. There still feels like there needs to be more. The conversations, the energy, the ambition in this community are just mediocre. In fact at this point coworking is a failure.
I see very little happening in this place that was not happening before. My approach and viewpoint is definitely from the tech side of things. From that perspective there is nothing happening here in this building that we were not making happen elsewhere. In fact our attendance was similar if not more for events we were holding elsewhere. We have a multi-million dollar facility and have turned it into zero momentum. In fact the spark in these circles is fading fast, and the community weakening. This is a failure on my part, and a failure on the part of Lafayettech leadership, we should have done better. The opportunity really exists for a great tech community, a great coworking community, but someone has to do the work, someone has to create the community we wanted.
I hear there is a vision, I hear things are moving forward, I don’t really know. Hell if it is in a coherent format, I don’t know what it is, send me a paper copy if there is one. I don’t know that I much care at this point. This community is not visionary stuff, anyone that says it is, is probably a charlatan or a dumbass. We really need to stop waiting for something to happen and create the community we want. I have been apathetic, so I am to blame as much as anyone. We really just have a great opportunity here to build a really cool community. I see this MatchBox and coworking thing going one of two ways, we can build something cool, or let this community be a droll amalgamation of freelancing drones, sales training, “synergy”, “teamwork”, and all those other buzzwords that don’t mean a thing and exude lameness. So I guess we all need to up our efforts a little bit, and make this place into what we want to see. So here is what Nehemiah is going to make happen in here, or he will get ran out, one or the other.
- Startup Weekends are coming back, bigger and better than ever. We are just waiting for the right time to ramp these back up.
- There will be more technology specific meetings on the way. We want to go deep into iOS, PHP, C#, more announcements are on the way.
- Reigniting the hacker culture around here. Coders are wizards, masters of the universe, and Jedi masters, it is time for us to act accordingly and build for the love of building.
- More tech talks and workshops, on everything from social media to legal issues.
Hey if you’re into tech, come hunt me down, and help out, there is tons of work to do, and it’s going to be a lot of fun. If you are not into coding, entrepreneurship, tech, or anything that I am, that’s fantastic too. To make this community really awesome, we need artists, filmmakers, singers, writers, dog enthusiasts, food truck drivers, gluten-free vegans, the NRA…. There are all sorts of nerds, not just tech nerds, and really fun things happen when you get them together. So all sorts of people need to make MatchBox their playground, because that is what this place is. Or we can all just not do anything and within a year MatchBox will be a meeting room for GLC and a cheap office for a bunch of service professionals exchanging business cards. So do whatever the fuck you want around here, that’s what I am going to do.