PodCamp Nashville

Over the past year, I’ve gone from some­one who con­sumed and dab­bled in new media after hours (okay, and some­times dur­ing work hours!) to one who helps to cre­ate it as part of my day job. It was a very excit­ing and affirm­ing part of my deci­sion to work at Bent­ley when they asked me to start help cre­at­ing screen­casts, blog posts, and online com­mu­ni­ties for the struc­tur­al engi­neer­ing com­mu­ni­ty. This past year has been a very steep — yet reward­ing — climb up the learn­ing curve.

Par­al­lel­ing that won­der­ful sense of that I’d made a good deci­sion to go to Bent­ley, I also feel that the new media and geek com­mu­ni­ty here in the Nashville area is even stronger than the one that was in Rich­mond (note: I also have more of a rea­son to be involved, now, so it’s part feed­back loop). A cou­ple of real­ly excit­ing exam­ples of this are Bar­Camp Nashville (in Octo­ber) and Pod­Camp Nashville (in March). You can read more on uncon­fer­ences else­where and I don’t mean to make these out to be some sort of pin­na­cle of geek/ new-media cul­ture (they may roy­al­ly suck here, for all I know as I haven’t been to one yet and have no com­par­i­son any­way). The point is that there is a desire to have these sorts of event and — far more impor­tant­ly — the com­mu­ni­ty that goes along with them here in Nashville. Social­iza­tion was some­thing that Rich­mond had a very strong sense of; but it seems that Nashville has more social­iza­tion with a pur­pose, not just a end in and of itself.

So, I’m going to Pod­Camp this year. I’m not going to attempt to con­tribute any ses­sions myself as I still feel I’ve got more learn­ing ahead of me that teach­ing (maybe next year?). But I’m so glad to sup­port this sort of thing here and I feel that I need to at least con­tribute my par­tic­i­pa­tion as an attendee to encour­age more of this. After all, it’s one thing to com­plain when noth­ing cool ever comes to insert your town name here but it is anoth­er to not both­er to show up when some­thing poten­tial­ly cool does happen.

So, if you’re in the area on Sat­ur­day, March 7th and have an inter­est in new-media: pod­cast­ing, screen­cast­ing, blog­ging, etc., then please come to Pod­Camp Nashville. We’ll see what it is and if we think it can be bet­ter, we’ll make it bet­ter. That’s community.