Institute For The Future

Communities of purpose, USA, Atlanta, Thomas 12/13/08

Family context: Thomas is a 53 year old technology analysist living in a small town outside of Atlanta with his wife; 3 grown step-daugters live in the area. Brother and 90 year old mother live in Pennsylvania, where he grew up. They talk primarily by phone, and write letters (yep, by hand, on paper) to each other once a week. Moved to this small town for college, and only left for 4 years of the last 24 to live in the SF Bay Area for work. High-tech company day job, works with a team dispersed accross the US and three other continents, wrote a book in the late 1990s about telepresence and working with virtually mediated teams. Last three years worked from home halftime, commutes to another suburb to a corportate office the other half, to his great annoyance. He largely avoids traveling for work, and rarely goes into the city of Atlanta proper.

Domain context: Two major ventures of local community participation; started engagement in both after returning to the small Georgia town from SF in 1993.The common technologies between both of these include: E-mail distribution lists, desktop-publishing of educational materials, home high-definition video and DVD production, and just-in-time manufacturing

-Local historical society, joined in 1993, became president a year later, and is still president. Motivated by a conviction of the importance of history and local pride, and the necessity of spreading these convictions through education. When he joined there was no regular educational endeavors of the historical society, no electronic communication, and a strong focus on oral history with very little catologueing and no interpretation. Instituted a newsletter (in color!) that later became electronic/paper, then in 2002 wholly electronic. Organized a lecture series and joined the board of the sister organization, the local museum, to encourage it's expansion and rennovation. Authored several historical desktop-printed booklets and a book, published content in full on the internet (he notes that contrary to publisher's conventional wisdom, publishing full content online actually increased his physical booklet orders dramatically). Primary source research from CD-roms and later the net made historical research possible for him, never travels to archives. Participation in the historical society has grown several fold, and shifted to include more young people, young professionals with kids, and middle-aged folks, while retaining elderly membership. Content publication on the net has made him an "expert" approached regularly by national and international media. Whereas previously reporters occasionally interviewed the mayor for

information about the town, now with publied works he has become an

entrypoint for outside interest in the town's history. The attention he's brought to the town, and the photos and quotations of townspeople included in his publications, has earned him enough social standing to not be included in disparaging comments about "Yankee invasions."

-Adult sunday school classes: As an elder in his church, Thomas has taught sunday school decades, and adult sunday school is a common institution in his denomination. Circa 1994, he started his own class for adults and started writing and researching his own curriculum. His class grew quickly to be the largest in his church (about 60 people attending every sunday), and he occasionally teaches stints at other churches of his own and other denominations in the area. He chose a teaching space shunned by other teachers for it's technology setup second, and first for the coffee hour that preceeds it, allowing participants to be drawn in by colorful Powerpoints without having to go through a closed door into an uncertain social situation.

Similar to the historical society, he started publishing the curriculum as desktop-printed booklets and online in html. (Only in the last year or two has he made any of his content available in PDF form, feeling that broadband is now widespread enough for the churches and non-profits that he sees as his audience, behind the technical curve, to download files.) His sunday school curriculum has garnered over 1.5 million unique visitors, and he is regularly contacted by theologens, ministers, missionaries, and laypeople of numerous denominations for arguments, elaboration, and thanks. To cover the overhead of booklet and CD printing, he started putting his teaching Powerpoints online for a fee, generating USD$1-2K a year. He also films many of his classes with a high definition camera for pupils who are absent in a given week, burns DVD's for them for a material cost. He has gained several students from neighboring towns as these DVDs are circulated. He also organized a signing group of some of his students, and films their performances and produces DVDs, as a community building exercise. He has not put any of his video content online, but sees that as a possible future direction. He values quality: he bought a high definition video camera, so that when Blue-ray becomes more widespread he will already have quality content. A large part of his avoidance of experimenting with video-sharing is the low quality of online video; he doesn't even like MP3's as a sound format because of the compression.

The lone elder expert: One thing that fascinated me, and astonished him, is that no one in the communities that he has built and nurtured has any interest in the process of what he is doing: no one even asks how he does the desktop publishing, or creates the web-pages, or burns DVD's and labels them with LightScribe. Although his content travels far and wide and has created significant impacts on the community and on other communities, he has no protoges of technique, and unlike nearly all of the other people I've met and interviewed who engage in projects on this scale, does not delegate tasks to community members. He interpreted this as a lack of curiosity, a deep conservatism that he encounters here often. His high tech background also mark him off as the "town geek," with just purview over such matters. There also might be an element of his own desire to control the processes and the status that results from them. His mode of participation fits a very established, (and apparently especially Southern) cultural model: the gentleman expert, town elder and historian, with the priviledge of autonomy.

More disjuntures: While Tomas' content and historical writing is a window for the world into his community and a source of community pride, cohesion, and cultural activity, again, there is not lateral movement of his methods to other historical societies. He chalks this up to jealousy over heritage and narrow local interests that form part of the culture of historical societies in his region (and that I have also encountered in California). Alternately, while his courses and his methnod of licensing have caught on and even been endorsed by churches and other denominations, Thomas's work has not been recognized by his own denomination.

He also mentioned a fear that his success has come primarily from being an early adopter in each of these areas, identifying an education content need and filling it with the most compelling current technologies for his (local) audiences, accidentally spilling over into global impacts. With more and more people coming onto the web, the democratizing force that allowed him to snub his nose at the publishing industry (which he despises) will render his own contributions less unique, and less compelling.

General insights:

- Definitely a segment trend focused on quality rather than distributive capacity

- Some forms of expertise may build community, but not through the actual activity of media production... a sort of semi-professionalization of DIY production

- Some content areas make vertical leaps in impact (local-national-global) easier than lateral leaps between local contexts.

- nothing new, but: people take what they do at work and port it into their communities, hobbies, and ancillary businesses.

Trends:

-Home fabrication and just-in-time inventory

-"Pro-Am" Internet-made experts, see The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society (2004), by Charles Leadbetter and Paul Miller; available in Alex Pang's review and thoughts of that idea here: www.iftf.org/node/509

- leap-frogging technological modes and trends by quality rather than edginess