social signal | The Daily Gumboot

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to an ongoing segment here at The Daily Gumboot. It’s called “Get to Know Your Community” and, basically, it goes like this: each and every Sunday we will profile someone from a community somewhere. Each person is asked the same five questions (see below as well as in the “Ideas from Everywhere” page). At the end of the profile, the Gumbooteer (member of this blog’s Editorial Board) who found the person will list their three favourite things about the highlighted community member. Savvy?

Here are some ideas from everywhere. Here is one way that we try to build community. Have fun with it!

Funnily enough, Alexandra Samuel is scared of robots and four other kinds of technology, including the kind that allows cars to parallel park themselves...

1. Who are you?

I’m a social media geek, entrepreneur, and working parent. I’m the Director of the Social + Interactive Media Centre at Emily Carr University, which is a new applied research centre that helps BC businesses tap the knowledge, skills and creativity of ECUAD’s faculty and students. I’m also the founder and principal of Social Signal, one of the world’s first social media agency.

2. What do you do for fun?

I make stuff. Sometimes I make stuff online (online communities, blogs, campaigns, videos). Sometimes I use the Internet to help me make stuff offline — like looking at mermaid pictures so I can sew a mermaid swimsuit for my daughter. Sometimes I make stuff without using the Internet at all (tonight I made fresh pasta!) but to be honest, that hardly ever happens anymore.

3. What is your favourite community and why?

The nonprofit technology community — which often refers to itself as NPTech. There’s no one site, event, or center for that community, but it has on- and offline gatherings all the time. The first nptech gathering I attended was the Aspiration nonprofit developers camp, and I had this experience of feeling like, oh, HERE are my people! Since then I’ve had that same experience in working with TechSoup to build NetSquared.org, in connecting with the Web of Change community, in attending NTEN’s nonprofit tech conference, and in connecting with all sorts of social change/nonprofit technologists. What I love about these folks is that we all intersect on two planes of geekiness: tech geekiness, and save-the-world geekiness. These are people who can have a serious conversation about the relative pathologies and strengths of the social justice and environmental movements, and then two minutes later switch into a passionate argument about the relative merits of iPhones vs. Android phones. I love them.

4. What is your superpower?

I am a truly amazing parallel parker. We drive a massive boat of a minivan, but I can get it into a parking space with less than a foot of room on each end — often much less. And what is particularly amazing about this skill is that it seems to be completely disconnected from every other aspect of my brain. I’m just an averagely competent driver, and I have pretty much zero spatial perception — I can barely get through a door without bashing into the frame, and in fact I can barely park in a regular parking lot space. But somehow I’m a parallel parking savant. I’ve literally had strangers applaud my parallel parking.

5. How do you use your superpower to build community?

There’s a close relationship between my parallel parking abilities and my sense of connection to our local community. Because I can parallel park in about 10 seconds, I often pop into a store for a quick errand on my way home. So my local shopkeepers see me a lot, and because I’m a friendly person, I tend to use those micro-interactions to exchange a little bit of news along with the purchase of some flowers, or kids shoes, or whatever it is. So much of our lives are lived in interaction with people who aren’t part of our closest circles of family, friends or colleagues, so it’s easy to stay anonymous. But when you choose to abandon that anonymity in favor of a real conversation — about how your respective businesses are doing, what your family is doing for vacation, or even about the party you’re shopping for — it strengthens our community just that little bit. Whenever you have a chance to connect to another person a little more deeply, take it: they’ll feel better, and so will you.

My three favourite things about Alexandra Samuel are…

1. She actually talked to us: when it comes to blogging, creative currency and building online communities, Ms. Samuel and hubby Rob Cottingham are second to none. And don’t even get me started on how her parallel parking story reflects this woman’s true humility and amazing sense of humour/social-justice (our chat about the community-building nature of parallel parking may or may not have taken more than an hour). Needless to say, the Daily Gumboot is lucky to have been graced with her presence!

2. Alex is a bit of a history nerd, too. Sure, her PhD dissertation about “hacktivism” includes some powerfully awesome techno-geekishness, and it also addresses very important, very meaningful big picture socio-political issues and ideas that certainly set standards for internet pirates (and the people trying to stop them) everywhere. See, history does matter! And Alex will tell you that the past – from time to time – dictates our future.

3. Two words – entrepreneurial spirit: This young lady has it in spades, and, let me tell you, it’s always inspiring to meet someone who possesses this element of the human condition in a way the we know will bring innovation, inclusion and downright goodness to all that she touches. And that’s a beautiful thing!

…as told by John Horn…

Rosie knew what it took to build strong community

Sometime back in Classical Greece someone carved “know thyself” on my least favourite god, Apollo’s, temple at Delphi. No one really knows who wrote it, but a quick twitblog of the interscape will tell you that Socrates (or maybe Plato) took credit for the idea. And Alexander Pope wrote a poem about it a few years later. The point is, before you look outward and certainly before you strive out on a life path – career, family, adventures in foreign lands, kidlets, part-altering-operations – you need to look inside and, well, get a sense of yourself.

Melissa McCrae is an Associate Director at Simon Fraser University’s Career Management Centre. She is also just downright lovely as well as a bit of a genius. To say the least, Kirk Hill has good – nay, great - people on his team at the Career Management Centre. Melissa walked our team through a self-assessment tool called StrengthsQuest, which is based on and linked to StrengthsFinder. Regardless of what you think of self-assessment – one of my colleagues addressed the paradox of “self-assessment tools telling people what they value by asking them what they value” – there was something incredibly powerful that we all took away from Melissa’s presentation. In business, as in life, we constantly focus on what we’re not good at and try to improve it. So much so that some people even find themselves reflecting on how they made it so far in their career doing something they, first, were never great at and, second, don’t really like doing. And it’s because we don’t focus enough on what we’re really, really, really good at. Get this: recent findings show that in job interviews, people rarely showcase their top two strengths – that’s right, the two best things about them. Needless to say, we – individually and collectively – need to focus more on what we’re good at, because doing so is how we’ll increase things like happiness, healthiness and efficiency.

Now. Let’s do what we do and make this about community.

First, people as individuals. Find out what you’re good at. More importantly, when you’ve discovered your strengths, think about ways you can apply them that will make you really, really happy and like a contributing member to your community. Now. This doesn’t have to have anything to do with work (although combining strengths and work is a supercool idea just because we spend so much of our time/life working), it’s more about knowing where you kick butt and then focusing on continually using said skills to kick said butt. Specialize and develop where you’re awesome. And how do you find out what you’re good at? Well, here are some questions to consider:

What comes naturally to you?
What compliments do you continually receive?
Does it confuse you when people say “good job” or “wow, that was amazing” when you just do something? If so, why?
What do other people struggle with (ie. public speaking or attention to detail) that you just don’t understand or ‘get’?
What kind of person do you want to see when you look in the mirror?
"What is that guy really good at?"

Another great exercise is to find a few people (friends, family, colleagues, nemeses) who know you well and ask them to use three words to describe you. After all, to paraphrase a Kenyan proverb, “you are the way that others see you.” Cobra Commander calls me “leader” and “visionary” and “so happy and positive it’s disgusting.”

Once you have thought about what you’re good at, start thinking about how to apply it to your community. Here are some tips on how to get started:

What strength(s) are you excited to share with other people?
Tell a story about your favourite strengths.
What do you enjoy doing?
What do you get paid to do?
What do you struggle with?
Where can my strengths and skills make the best impact in my community?

If these questions are getting you excited about learning more about self-assessment, inner knowledge and personal reflection, well, from Confucius to Robin Sharma there are a lot of introspective resources out there. Twitblog on the up-and-coming search engine, Google, for things like “self-assessment” or “reflection” or “know thyself” or “strengthsfinder” for ideas more information on strength-finding of the non-performance-enhancing-drug-variety.

Second, people as community. Here is a great example. As it happens, there are a lot of crappy things about Houston, Texas. A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend Social Signal’s open house and hear from Randy Twaddle, a Principal with tTweak Renewables and one of the founders of HIWI, better known as Houston, It’s Worth It. Like I said, there are a few things – flying cockroaches, flooding, property taxes, no zoning laws, Republicans, refineries – about Houston that are certainly community-based weaknesses; however, Randy and his team at HIWI also recognized a lot of strengths in the city. So, without dwelling much on Houston’s weaknesses, HIWI focused on friendliness, arts and culture, food, and – shazaam – community as strong and defining traits of the city. You see where this is going; it is no surprise that the “Houston, It’s Worth It” campaign has garnered a heckuvalot of public interest as well as major tourist dollars for the city. But, more importantly, it’s galvanized a community and made people proud about where they live. Being proud about living in a town where a street can, theoretically, have a bar, a shopping mall, an oil refinery, a school, a hog-rendering facility, a church, and a sushi restaurant, well, that’s another discussion for another time…

So, get to know yourself. Following such introspective reflection, take what you’re good at and use said skills, values and interests to build good things. Get to know your community. And figure out where your personal strengths can play a positive role – both where you work and play. Let’s face it. Here in Vancouver we’ve got nothing like the uphill battle of our Houstonian friends (if anything, we have to fend people off). Needless to say, I hope you’re excited to see what we can do!

Thanks again, Melissa McCrae. Like I told you on the phone, you got my mind, heart and body moving after your presentation. And it’s a beautiful thing.

In strength,

John