A Revolution for Dinner

“Any big idea starts in the kitchen,” Tonya Surman once told me.

The line resonated with me because I shared Tonya’s value of food with conversation and because I simply thought it was a snappy saying.  Nearly a year later, however, and I found myself circling back to this quote when pondering offline and online communities.

Talking about the value of communities is fairly played out – and for good reason – a good community is your most valuable asset. The discussion today, however, is consistently regarding online and in particular how modern media represents the new era for community building.  It’s not a hard bandwagon to buy into but I agree with Malcom Gladwell when he recently said that we celebrate the benefits of social media but in doing so we overlook the cost.

What I think Gladwell meant was that more is not necessarily better, especially if we forget to still do the valuable things we were doing before.  His simple analogy to elucidate this was citing the creation of the elevator, which got us places faster but contributed to us getting fatter. With modern media, we are in more communities but as a consequence, less committed.  Moreover and more importantly, we are devaluing the need to meet in person.

This in part explains Obama’s popularity problems right now, according to Gladwell.  Critical to Obama’s rise was modern media and grassroots organizing but since the election, Obama has relied heavily on modern media and his opponents have at least garnered more attention by focusing on the later (e.g. tea parties).

Bringing it back to My City Lives

This video was created by Bill and Emily who are two of the nine incredible individuals who joined our team in January to help us with the first phase of content and testing.  The video is a great overview of our once-a-month team meeting, StoryTime, where we create an offline opportunity for our team to meet each other and the different special guests we invite.

We’ve put a significant amount of effort and resources into our offline events, which may have initially seemed paradoxical given that we are an online platform, but now hopefully our logic is a bit more clear for thinking otherwise.  You sink or swim depending on the vibrancy of your community and despite the rise of modern media, nothing will replace the value of people getting together in person, whether it’s at an office, in a park or, of course, in the kitchen.

What’s Next?

StoryTime has worked out so well, in fact, that we’ll soon be writing about PlantJam (goodness knows who comes up with these names), which is our attempt to inviting more people to join our community through a social experiment in social happenings that we’ve dreamed up.