Yesterday, Siddharta came over to our GE office. A few of us huddled in a small quiet conf. room and Siddharta gave a splendid demo of the software he is working on. And we had some great discussion on agile, agile in restrained environments, such as those controlled by regulatory agencies like FDA. Post session, Lavanya, Siddharta and I finished off at the cafeteria jostling details and efficacy of stand-ups.
I met Siddharta at Barcamp Bangalore 3, a few months back. A guy with incisive views, he is one of the more-meat-less-talk tech-entrepreneurs I have come across. It is good to see fruitful social and commercial relationships spring up from Barcamp -- he has some good leads now.
I struggle to make some people understand that one aspect of the Barcamp community is to build and support business relationships and networks. Some people get mad at even one single job-post. "Don't spam me", the vociferous will cry, giving little or no thought to somebody who might actually be looking for a change. "I do not want you to use my email bandwidth to make money for yourself/company".
These same people will beeline for the startup talks at Barcamp.
As long as we do not shed our hypocritical attitude towards making money, a vibrant entrepreneur community will remain a distant dream.
Thanks for inviting me over to give the talk. I had a great time there.
ReplyDeleteInteresting thoughts about building a community.
I think the community within itself should be allowed to send job posts. Like you said, such interactions are important for building the community.
The thing that scares many people is when people outside the community start thinking that this is a fertile group for sending such mails. They join the group, send a mail and are never seen again. These people are not part of the community, and not interested in building it up, they are just spamming.
Perhaps we should have a system where you have to be a member of the group for X amount of time before sending out a job mail.