Social groups built around websites
Isn’t it funny how websites and social networks can inspire and be responsible for the creation of offline social groups and sub-communities where people who are members of such sites and networks take their online interaction into the “real world” extending the depth and scope of that interaction, taking advantage of the richness of real-world communication and moving out of the context of guided or controlled interaction.
For example I co-coordinate the local Canberra Twitter usergroup … basically a bunch of local Canberran Twitterers who get together for lunch or drinks every couple of months, and we usually have between 6 and 14 people turn up to those events. It’s a lot different from chatting via Twitter and can be occasionally awkward to meet someone you’ve been chatting to via Twitter for months and think you know them but when it comes to social small-talk you realise you know them in a different way to what’s applicable to that particular situation. You may know their day-to-day struggles they experience with their job but not even know if they’re married or have kids. But it’s nice to have a completely rounded relationship with people you consider friends … and so we have these meetings to put faces to names, real names to aliases.
Another such group is the local Canberra flickr photographers group. Just like the local Twitter group we’re not sponsored, endorsed or supported by flickr in any way. We all love flickr and it doesn’t bother us that we promote flickr and have built a massive community around flickr (over 600 members online with close to 70 people turning up for big events like the annual flickr gala) and get nothing back from them … though if anyone from flickr is listening and feels to support us it would be nice to have some financial support for events like our gala *grin*. But flickr was the hub that enabled local photographers to find each other and coordinate our regular meets – in fact our next meet is this Saturday for Floriade and the Nara Candle Festival in Canberra. Flickr has provided the platform for this interaction to a point but clearly many people want to take that further beyond the webpage and now some of us have close friendships that started offline and matured offline.
In fact I met my girlfriend through flickr as we are both members of the Canberra flickr photographers group – so for that, flickr, thank you!
Websites can only go so far and they shouldn’t try to cover off all interaction needs of their users but expect that offline communities will be spawned and attempt to facilitate and support that.
I too have met local Flickr’ites and we even had George Oates (an Adelaide girl) who now works at Flickr at one of our meets last year and I must get along to an Adelaide social media meetup one of these days. The opportunities are definitely there to make the online and offline worlds collide if you’re interested. I like it.