Geek As Citizen

Activities For The Civic Geek: Help Out A Group

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Maybe you’re not up for founding your own group or club.  Fine.  Take your specialized skillset, go find an existing club or convention or event that needs your help, and volunteer.

Geek clubs and groups and events are usually made up of volunteers – and frankly, not enough volunteers in most people’s experiences. Your average convention needs a lot of good will, a lot of warm bodies, and a lot of volunteer brains to run. These clubs and organizations need people that can help out.

That’s where you come in as a Civic Geek.

Ask yourself what skills you have, what skills you can provide, and go volunteering. If you’re willing people will respond – and if you’ve got a specific skill set you mind find yourself deeply involved right away. Good skills and good volunteering are important combinations.

Don’t know what you’re good at?  Doesn’t matter.  Gophers, people setting up the snacks, whatever.  Start somewhere.  You’ll find your niche.

Most conventions, clubs, or events have some kind of contact web page or volunteer form, so it shouldn’t be hard to get access. Some good networking will help as well.

On top of all of this, you might improve your existing skills or develop new ones. Maybe you’re an accountant and you help with a conventions finances. Maybe you want to develop public speaking so you run public auctions for a comics club. Helping out can help you out.

It’s my firm believe that every geek should be involved in some geek group, preferably local.  Being involved face-to-face is good for civic geekery.

 

Resources:

 

(This ongoing series is an attempt to write a free guide to Civic Geekery – one idea at a time)

 

Activities For The Civic Geek: Start A Group

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Want to do something for your community? Found a group, club, or organization for people like you and bring folks together.

Communities are made up of smaller communities, or make up larger communities. If you want to do something to be a civic geek, then go and found your own community. Find something that should exist and found a group, club, or organization.

Try “scratching your own itch” and ask yourself what should exist. Does your area need a writer’s group? Does your area need a gathering for cosplayers? Are you looking for a good group to play video games with? Find something you want then go found it.

It’s not particularly hard – I recommend meetup.com as a great starting point, but you can do it through many forms of social media. Go on, find what’s needed, gather your friends, and make something.

Will it work? Maybe, maybe not. But as is often noted you don’t know until you try – and you can always see what it’ll evolve into.

Resources:

Activities For The Civic Geek: Adopt A Charity

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Pick a charity and have you and your group/convention do events to support it.

This is probably the simplest thing you can do, but it’s also effective. Almost any major geeky con has an associated charity or two, raising money for them with sales, donations, auctions, and so forth. It’s almost an afterthought.

Of course it shouldn’t be an afterthought – clubs and cons and the like can do a lot of good. It doesn’t even have to be raising money – maybe you rally your group to work phones, or gather books or school supplies, or whatever you want to do or try. Find the right cause and get imaginative.

You could even get creative with all sorts of theming and synergies:

  • Do a blood drive at your vampire event.
  • If you’re a fanfic group, donate time to maintaining the website for a good cause.
  • Your literature-oriented convention could promote literacy (and maybe give people a chance to join a literacy organization)

There’s too many suggestions to even try at this point – but remember it can’t hurt to pick something relevant and give it a try. Your only risk is doing less good than you intended . . . but always do more than doing nothing.

Oh and if you don’t have a group or organization that’s charity inclined?  Do it yourself. Better a $10-a-month donation off your credit card than nothing.  Besides that monthly deduction can keep reminding you there’s always more to do . . .