Yesterday the Community Pros of LA hosted their first Unconference in Little Tokyo. For me the day started with walking my twins to school, driving to Burbank Downtown station, taking Metrolink to Union Station and the A line to the Little Tokyo/Arts District station. From there it was a two minute walk to the CENTRL Office coworking space. Took me about the same time as it would have to drive and I avoided paying for parking.
An unconference, from what I gather, puts the agenda in the hands of participants. We write questions on sticky notes, group them by theme and vote on them. It’s similar to how some product teams kick off sprint planning or decide on which customer pain points to address next. Then we broke up into groups assigned to discuss the top-voted themes.
Theoretically the overarching theme of the unconference was “Roadmaps”. We didn’t end up discussing that at all because we talked about a few more pressing topics:
- Community goals.
- How the community manager career path might be mapped.
- Communicating the value of community.
- How to talk about community without saying the word “community”.[1]
- What sort of questions to ask to vet a company’s commitment to community if you land an interview.
These weren’t even the official topics we were tasked to discuss, but my takeaway from the discussions. Just before lunch I was distracted by a job description which got me thinking about how short sighted most companies are.[2] Last night I ended up applying to the PostHog job because they seem to be a place where my skills would be valued.
We ended the day at a little bar across the street and talked about how there’s so much more to Los Angeles than the Chinese Mann theater and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The city changes people who move here and changes as the people who come bring bits of their culture with them. People can be disconnected by our car-centric environment, but that doesn’t mean LA doesn’t have community. It’s just takes a little longer to get to your community than other cities.
Bonus: Movies to introduce people to LA
We talked about movies that show what LA is all about and here’s my personal list:
- LA Story is a film only Steve Martin could have written. Lovingly satirical from the point of view of a native.
- Chinatown digs into the origin of Los Angeles and the critical importance of water here.
- Collateral features Jamie Foxx as a cab driver who gets roped into Tom Cruise’s assassination spree around the city. It’s directed by Michael Mann who also directed Heat, another crime movie set in LA. What puts Collateral ahead is the start of the film that sets up Foxx’s character and place in the city.
- Falling Down literally walks through a city designed for cars. It’s less of a story about a crime spree and more a story about how people (and cities) adjust to change. It’s a sorta bookend to Chinatown.
- The Big Lebowski is best known for it’s memorable quotes and like The Long Goodbye, it’s an absurdist tour of the LA metropolis.
It was a great day all around and I’m looking forward to meeting again in October.
This is a little hard to explain, but it’s really easy for leaders to ignore “community” because it means different things to different people. When “community” gets associated with negative or uncomfortable connotations, people would rather avoid even thinking about it. If you want your kids to eat fish, but they don’t like fish, call it "sea chicken. ↩︎
We considered compiling a list of best and worst companies for community managers. ↩︎
