A weekly pulse 

When I arrived at Berkman in 2003, my goal was to start a blogging community in Cambridge. This was the second time for me, the first blogging community I started, around Scripting News, was entirely virtual. I never really got to know the people in the community personally, and they never really got to know me. The community bootstrapped around my personality though, which was a little uncomfortable because there was so little personal communication.

This time I wanted to do it with personal interaction. I was lucky to be at a place that had the facilities to draw people together. We started with weekly Thursday night meetings that were open to anyone in the community. And we interpreted that loosely. If you were part of Harvard, or part of another academic community, or part of an industry that was related to what we were doing, or if you were interesting. I don't think we ever turned anyone away, nor asked people not to come back. The room was often packed, but there was always room for more people.

It worked. We got the blogging community -- and more -- we had two blogging conferences, took regular trips to New Hampshire to be part of the political process around the Presidential election of 2004, and we helped get the political blogosphere going. Many of the members of our group were invited to cover the Democratic Convention which took place in Boston.

Now, in 2010, there's a different problem to solve, to help bootstrap the news system of the future, and I think a weekly pulse like the one we had in 2003 and 2004 in Cambridge will help get that going. Pretty sure NYC is the place to do it. I describe what I have in mind in the rest of this document.

The weekly meetups 

1. An open meeting every Thursday night at 7PM. 90 minutes. After we go, as a group, to dinner. It's all optional, and by open -- I mean in the same sense that the Berkman meetings were open. We have to reserve the right to ask people not to participate, but we expect to never exercise that. The only reason is to ensure a level of respect for other people and to the mission of the group.

2. When I'm in town, I will chair the meeting. The chair opens with a few thoughts, maybe five minutes worth of review of past meetings, brief intros of people who are present. At the Berkman meetups, esp at the beginning, I would go a little longer, to teach people how to blog. Not sure if there will be any of that this time around. When I'm not in town someone else will chair the meeting. Once we get going there will be people who can do this. I haven't been to a Berkman Thursday meeting in years, but they still have them.

3. People with new products and services will demo and/or explain them, briefly and highly interactively. Anyone can ask questions, at any time. No droning. The goal is to have a two-way discussion.

4. The main purpose of the weekly meetup is to provide an open regular opportunity to discuss issues and share your point of view and get feedback. Everyone is expected to participate.

Goals 

1. Among the people I care about, the NYC tech/media meetups have evolved into something that's not too useful. At the weekly meetups there will be a focused, single discussion that everyone participates in. No elevator pitches, no uninvited commercialism (i.e. we will ask people to present their products, but they can't start pitching them without being invited to). So the goal is to provide a place for intelligent discourse, as opposed to promotion.

2. A chance to form new ventures. By introducing people to each others' friends, we accelerate the opportunities for new projects, both commercial and non-commercial, to start up.

3. I want to bootstrap a facility I call "Hypercamp." I've written about it several times on Scripting News, and described it in some detail on the Feb podcast. The weekly meetups will function much as a Hypercamp would, but for 90 minutes once a week. The real Hypercamp, if the idea works, likely will be 24-by-7.