Community

Civic Diary 4/9/2016 – Community

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr)

So my latest Civic Diary is on community.

As I document my experiments in being a better citizen (which I haven’t exactly defined, but we’ll learn along), I wanted to share my latest finding on community.

My local writer’s group needed me to take over a writing event as the person running it at the time had a change of schedule and wouldn’t be doing so for quite some time.  I took over out of a desire to help out – it’s a good group that focuses on getting together and writing.

At that point I suddenly thought about my other activities in communities.  Helping at a museum.  My video gaming group.  Movie nights for another club.  All those little things (remember when I mentioned the power of weak links?) that create alliances and bonds.  I saw how important they were.

All these little bits of community involvement are important as community is important.  Community ties us together, community helps us connect, community builds something bigger than us.  If you want to be civicly engaged, building some community, virtually any kind, is important – and lets you use other interests to do good.

Some community seem trivial?  That Steven Universe fan group could also let people network to find jobs.  Your anime club can do charities.  Your doll collector group might be a place where you can offer your skills in accounting to someone with tax questions.  Multiply those opportunities over a lifetime and you can see how important community -any community – is to being a citizen.

Obviously, I think we need to consciously think what kind of community we should build. I will doubtlessly go on about that more in the future.

A few more thoughts on community building:

  • * Real community is built by real people – be it face to face or with your real name, yu need to connect as human beings.
  • * Functional community is integrative, not divisive.  A community ma address a problem, but it does so with a larger purpose of bringing people together.
  • * Community should be connected to the “big picture” even if the big picture is “man we all have hard days, let’s have a movie club every Friday night.”  Insular communities have a way of being very non-civil.
  • * Community has some kind of identity. It needs to know what it is.

So there’s my thoughts.  What’s your community?

– Steve

Activities For The Civic Geek: Teaching And Workshops

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Chances are any geek has a pretty valuable skillset others would like to learn from or use – so why not get educational and teach people.

If you’re a geek you’re enthused about something, and quite likely you do something with it.  From fanfic to coding games, from cosplaying to running cons, from historical enthusiasms to your extensive film library you have developed quite a set of skills.

Of course you may also be good at stuff that may not seem particularly geeky that’s still valuable.  Your writing skills that forge both fanfic and video game reviews may also be useful for your technical writing career.  You might be well organized which is why you run your club and game clan.  Maybe you just have skills you share in a geeky setting (such as the way I talk job skills in geekdom).

You and your crew are smart and skilled in things both geeky and not. Start sharing it.

  • Teach geeky skills to people who don’t have them – how many folks would like to be a bit better at computers, use your cosplay knowledge to sew better, or enjoy learning about Japanese cooking (that you learned due to your love of anime).
  • Teach geeky skills to your fellow geeks.  I mean, we all have to start somewhere.
  • Teach skills that your fellow geeks need.  Sure there’s many budding authors and artists, but your work in PR could be what they need to know how to sell themselves.

You also have plenty of venues to do this in:

  • You could take your skills to any community center, school, or what have you.  This is great for all those geek skills others may need.
  • You can hold events at conventions or other geek events.  They’re always looking for panels and features.
  • You can do workshops and get people hands-on.  After all hands-on is one of the best ways to learn.

Best of all when you do these things, alone or as part of a team, you learn how to teach and instruct.  As you do more of it, you get better at it.  This can open up new options in lives and careers, just be useful overall – or be something you eventually do panels and training on for others . . .

  • Steve

 

 

 

Activities For The Civic Geek: Be A Green Geek

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We’ve got to live on this planet (even if some of us want to explore beyond it), and that means a keeping a healthy environment.  Geeks can do their part to make sure we keep Earth livable.

If you’re at all informed about environment science, you’re probably a bit concerned about the environment.  From global warning to the effects on fracking, it’s a bit hard not to come to the conclusion we could manage our use of the planet much better.  As we geeks are usually quite enthused about science, we’re also painfully aware of the problems we face.

Fortunately there’s no small amount of people out there you can help, get involved with, or donate too.  Everyone’s got the same idea as you, and there have been organizations dedicated to helping us preserve the environment around for a long time.

It’s also hard to know where to start.  Here’s a few suggestions to get you going:

  • Donate or get your geeky club/group/convention to donate to appropriate causes.
  • Donate time.  This is great if you’re particuarly oriented towards either STEM (and the hard science of the environment), have the skills needed by the various groups (such as web work or speaking), or both.  Time is often more valuable than money
  • Spekaers.  Run a convention?  Get speakers from appropriate organizations to discuss the science and issues of the environment.  If you’re part of a fiction-writing geekdom, you can combine good world building with good awareness of how our world has structural problems.
  • Do citizen science – From dedicating time to local citizen science groups, you can often find people focused on daily, hands-on scientific activities from recording to explaining issues.

There’s problems.  Maybe we geeks can do what we can to help out.

Resources

  • Engineering for Change – A community to connect engineers, governments, social scientists, and more to share knowledge and solve problems in a sustainable way.
  • Engineers Without Borders Canada – A nonprofit Canadian organization that supports sustainable community engineering projects around the world.
  • Engineers Without Borders USA – A nonprofit US organization that supports sustainable community engineering projects around the world.
  • Marine Conservation Institute – An organized, sustainability-oriented institute focused on protecting marine ecosystems. Heavily driven by partnerships, alliance, and outreach.
  • Nerds For Nature – And all-volunteer organization that brings together communities, scientists, and technologists to understand and preserve nature, including hands-on projects. Located in California.
  • Oceana – An international organization focused on sealife preservation and marine issues
  • Project Noah – A software platform that brings citizen scientist together in various projects to record and preserve biodiversity and understand nature.
  • Skeptical Science – A site dedicated to explaining the science of global warning. Always looking for help in donations or paper review.
  • World Wildlife Fund – Focuses on preserving and protecting wildlife and related environmental and pollution issues.