Today somebody called me a community leader. I felt I had to correct them:

[…] please readjust your sensibilities: I’m nothing of the kind. I just do stuff sometimes. I have never sought nor been appointed a leader of anything beyond my business interests and in part Fly The Coop.

I’m wary of being seen as leading something so ill-defined and as self-forming as a “community”.

I remember once being asked why I did the things I did: BarCamp Manchester (the first one), BSDUG, mucking in with Fly The Coop, general championing of the local tech sector and so on. The questioner even asked whether I was hoping for financial reward. My answer now is as it was then: this region needs people to do those things. I never did them because I thought I would be better at doing them than others (in the case of FTC, Ben Gibbs deserves pretty much all the credit for it ever even happening, never mind keeping it running), or because I wanted the attention or the kudos, but because I thought if those things were done by somebody then the local tech sector would be improved for everybody who followed.

I actually think all of us should be doing those things. We should all be “community leaders”, in one sense. The fact that so few people do dawned on me around the same time I had to suddenly stop a huge amount of community engagement for personal reasons. As a result it feels to me like things have slowed down a little, but I suspect that’s mere perception: if anything the rate of things happening has increased. It normally does.

I then spent some time thinking about what mattered, and what to do about this. Around that time I read an editorial by Alan Sugar in the Telegraph which he posted to Facebook:

I am sick and tired of hearing people asking what to do, going to networking meetings and seminars expecting to glean some gems of wisdom. These events are money-making exercises and benefit one party and one party only: the organiser.

They have become an escape for people to justify sitting around wasting a day bullshitting with each other while they should be working. You will learn nothing other than that there are another load of people in the same boat as you.

This is now the second thing he’s said/written I agree with[1].

Of course he’s talking about something very different to the community groups I’ve been involved in or attended, but something struck a chord: if you want something to happen, shouldn’t you just go out and do it instead of discussing it?

As a result, I have a few irons in the fire - I ran a survey about doing a Lean Startup weekend that should be happening in the autumn, amongst other things.

However I think everybody should get involved in being part of the change they want to see locally. No matter what your skill set, you can contribute. You don’t need to run an event, you can just start on that side project bothering you, or you can do as I have and get involved in STEMnet and go and talk to kids about what you do. Or just go and write an article about how to do something interesting and post it on a blog somewhere.

Do anything, just don’t expect to be immediately rewarded. You’re making the World a tiny, tiny, tiny bit better for yourself and others by doing any of this, and that’s why you got into tech in the first place, right?

[1] If you’re interested, the first thing he said I agreed with was something along the lines of “Once you work for your self, you never go back to working for somebody else. Even if you’re taking a salary off them, your mindset has changed”. Running my own business changed how I think about myself, my skillset, my future and my potential permanently. If my current employer told me I was going to be redundant in a month, I would worry for about 5 minutes until I realised I can always make money. That’s what it does for you: I would recommend it to most people, it frees you, permanently. Just make sure whatever you do, you know full well there is a lucrative market for it and you can personally deliver enough value to make a living quite quickly.