The Glass - Perspectives on creating community

I’ve been asked to share with my colleagues some ways my efforts over the past couple of years have created or affected a technical community amongst disparate enterprise companies.

One view is that you can count attendance and determine if it was worthwhile. What I learned quickly was it had to be relevant to the community and it had to be consistent and up to date.

What I enjoyed most was the community. The people who used the time to meet others in the group and also to catch-up with me and my colleagues. So I guess I am the glass is half full kind of guy. After reading one of my old IEEE spectrum magazines I figured there were other ways of looking the this effort:

• Optimist: The glass is half full.
• Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
• Engineer: The glass is twice as big as it needs to be.
• Solution Architect: The glass needs to be redesigned.
• Project manager: The glass is performing at half the capacity it was designed for
• Tester: The glass has a safety factor of two
• Developer: The glass is is in beta.
• Infrastructure Architect: This is one of two glasses
• Sales: It’s not only half full, but half priced as well
• Financial Services: The glass has just under 50% of its net worth in liquid assets.

Philosophically speaking, you could take one of the following:

• The glass is always full, it just depends if you want the glass to be full of air or water
• The glass is neither half-full nor half-empty — it's just half-a-glass!
• A glass can't be half empty because half of nothing is still nothing
• what matters is whether you are thirsty, not whether the glass is half full or half empty
• If you just look at the glass and don’t do anything, it doesn’t really matter

So, I probably subscribe to last one as a process guy . Plan-it, do-it, review-it.