Building a community
What I love about Silicon Valley is that you can ask anyone for a coffee chat and get it. Even if you are new in town, people who build multiple successful businesses or are deep experts in their field will find an hour to sit down and talk to you.
This is the secret behind Silicon Valley’s success: it is a high-trust and very supporting community.
But I’m based in Hong Kong. And I adore it. And I’m convinced it is poised to become the hub for innovation… just not there yet. We have money flows, infrastructure, an incredible location. What we are missing is a culture of a universal community support. Investing back into the community of practice.
There is no other reason why we are not as innovative as Silicon Valley.
So I decided to play my small role in changing that. At first, we would meet at a co-working space meeting room and just talk for a couple of hours in a small group.
I joined User Experience Design group on Slack created by Nic Tinworth and decided to be active there. Soon we had a meetup and it quickly grew to be the biggest design event in Hong Kong.
I develop a format when I invite 2-3 speakers to give short, 12-15 minutes talks on something they currently care about the most. I was after raw, immediate, work-in-progress.
It is event for busy people for busy people… no self-promotion or other nonsense.
Nic was surprisingly absent from the gatherings and I was a bit puzzled why original organizers are not there. Soon I learned: Dwayne reached out to tell me that Nic is very sick and in a hospital. The first time we met he was in a bed. Brain cancer.
After chemo he got on his feet again and we finally had them over for amazing conversation on value of Design. Nic died a few months after. Rest in peace.
To this day it is one of my favorite events I ever hosted. Three cool speakers, engaging conversation, good audience, important topic: The Value of Design.
Soon I started to make a circle and engage people in fast-pace conversations. While it was still possible…
Here you see us already in masks. Soon COVID will shut down everything and we will move online with Design x Tech events.
To my surprise during COVID audience shifted completely. I got a lot more people not form Hong Kong dialing in and sharing. We had truly international community. At the time I decided to call it Posit Network and we started to grow beyond initial UXDHK group to incorporate entrepreneurs, service designers, product managers and more.
I really enjoyed hosting events, but I feel like we could do more, so FromAFuture festival was born. We gathered together for 2 full days, had 10 talks, and 2 big workshops. And then we did it again. And again.
The festival format allowed for much more hands-on approach:
Today I have two active groups: UXDHK and EdTechHK both on WhatsApp and a handful of smaller groups. If you are interested: join in.
So much more work to do to build our community. Now I’m doing this with People App at scale.
