Changing the Culture of Community and Business

Fascinating weekend at Podcamp DC this past Saturday. Geoff and I hosted episode 16 of District of Corruption as a session. We had some technical difficulties that prevented us from broadcasting live very effectively (it was really garbled and hard to hear).

Fortunately, Geoff recorded the thing on video and we’ll be posting that soon.

A few things I wanted to talk about that came out of that session. First, we’ve opted to move on from BlogTalkRadio where we have hosted the show since day 1.

Photo Credit: Jesse Thomas

We have not been happy. I posted my feelings about BTR back in February and the feedback was not all well received at the BTR World Headquarters. Putting aside the need for openness to even critical feedback from the community, the point remains that we have a show to run. Though I have personal friends at BTR, the situation continues to deteriorate.

Week after week, we run our show and week after week we hear from you, our listeners that you can’t login to BTR, you can’t use chat, you can hear the live stream on your Mac or Linux computer.

In an age of ubiquitous flash video, it’s amazing to me that these basic problems cannot be solved via flash. Why can’t you stream through a flash player instead of a windows media format that causes problems for so many listeners.

If the number one selling point for District of Corruption is the ability for us to host a live audience, why does that one feature stink so badly?

It’s a blocker.

Geoff and I have decided to move our show to TalkShoe, which admittedly has its own challenges. I’m told that listeners need to have a thin client downloaded and installed in order to interact with us over the web, though listening and call-ins remain unaffected.

So if you’re a regular listener - or you want to be and you simply haven’t been able to - go grab a talkshoe account and prepare for our first show on the new platform slated for Tuesday, April 29 at 4pm ET

The show itself was fun though. It was classic PodCamp. The attendees set the scope of the discussion. While Geoff and I began the show by discussing some of the flaws in the current system we have in DC and the matter of events being scheduled often without consideration of what might be happening at the same time, the conversation quickly took a turn toward how community and business could, in general, improve in the District.

Jesse Thomas and Nick O’Neill suggested that we should have fewer events where business is talked about and more of actually doing business.

While I tend to agree, my feeling was that the community is in a place that is young and undisciplined. My feeling is that there are successful entrepreneurs in the area who could lend some coaching and mentorship to help bring other younger entrepreneurs success. That the events we do are an early stage of understanding each other.

Others felt the community aspect of what we have is very important to developing relationships and business. Some see it as business development.

Here’s my suggestion that may seem somewhat disjunctured - if everyone, regardless of business maturity, attended just one event every month that was outside of their normal circle of people, the individual would benefit and the community would benefit.

This past month, I attended Capital Cabal which is attended by a wide variety of business professionals mostly outside of my typical circle. In May, I’m thinking of attending a political meetup. Let’s do more of this stuff.

In fact, here’s an Upcoming list of everything in the next 30 days. Pick something and go.