Nashville's Tech Mushroom...

Nice article here from VentureNashville.com (mushroom? really? does that evoke the right image?) about the various tech-oriented groups around town that have been meeting. And another post here at the VentureNashville blog that re-emphasizes the point of the article.. that these informal and institutional groups (i.e. Nashville Geeks vs. the Nashville Tech Council) don't seem to naturally co-mingle.

As someone who's attended events hosted across the spectrum, and also as a technology manager from the institution to beat all institutions, the great State of Tennessee, I have a few thoughts about this:

1) nothing against the NTC, but the few of their events I've attended have largely been about Tradeshow floors. Vendors trying to sell me something. Sponsors trying to get their 'impressions' quota. And lots of business card trading.

2) NTC events seem to largely center on DATABASE SECURITY. Just my impression. Nothing empirical to back it up. Not a lot about application development, user experience, UI design, or new technologies. Again, just an impression. I could very well be wrong.

3) like most professional associations, the conversations at NTC events are mostly alot of "this is what I do; now what do you do..." it's like a series of mini-interviews. Not very comfortable. Not very natural.

4) The Nashville Geeks events are largely about socializing. Informal, yes. Not a lot of collared shirts-- mine is sometimes the only one. And not exclusively a technology audience. There are artists and musicians and writers in the group. And lots of marketing folks. Tech-oriented, certainly. Folks who like to get their geek on with the latest WordPress release or tinkering with the latest social-networking-fad-tool of the day. And lots and lots of digital photography. And cutesy business.. er, calling cards. Lots of those as well.

To be honest, in some ways, I've felt a little out of place at the Geeks events only because I'm the only person (or one of the few) there who works for a large technology shop in a fairly formalized, not-too-cool, not-yet-too-open-source environment. My group's not blazing any trails with PHP or Rails. We're building enterprise software for a large, highly proceduralized government agency. Not a lot of the other folks at the table at Noshville are in that game. And yet, all that being the case, I feel very at home there.

What's ironic is that the social/digital media crowd at the Nashville Geeks events-- the breakfasts, the Barcamp Crew meetups, the bourbon nights-- the talk at those events is a lot about products and marketing and getting messages out to consumers-- this is what social media's largely about after all, isn't it-- but the atmosphere is more collegial than commercial. I'm not being sold something at Barcamp. I'm part of something.

Interesting that Digital Nashville's first mixer the other night appears to have been the first event that crossed this apparent boundary in any kind of significant way.. and everyone, even Dave Delaney, was wearing collared shirts!... and I missed the dang thing. Ah well, I'll be sure to catch the next one.

Exciting times to be in this industry in Nashville.. Looking forward to what's to come.
God, I love this town.