Here’s a new CoolTown blog feature:  As CoolTown Network members were sending in questions, I thought it’d be beneficial to more people if I answered them here.  It’d be even better if others provided their own suggestions and answers at the comment link below the blog …

read more…

The benefits of building community virtually (via the internet) are often seriously limited without a physical venue by which the online participants can meet face to face.  The goal of CoolTowns is to provide both.

What would this look like?  Simply combine the virtual community elements in yesterday’s blog with the third places described on this web site.  Then you’ll come up with things like a “Friendster Bar” as a friend of mine would like to see - a physical watering hole for the popular

read more…

There’s an old argument that the internet is isolating people.  However, if you ask anyone in the net generation, they wouldn’t know how to meet and keep their friends otherwise.

Take something as simple group email programs.  About twenty of my college friends keep in touch this way, and we plan reunion trips every few years.  There’s no way we’d keep in touch like this without the internet.

Then there’s services like Friendster, myspace and Meet Up that modern presidential campaigns swear

read more…

Affinity Lab happy hour: As promised, here’s an update on my workplace’s first community building event last Tuesday, based on the aforementioned principles.  First of all, the anticipation of the happy hour created an unprecedented ‘newsroom’ buzz of activity a few hours before, and this new level of collective energy seemed to motivate productivity.  Then, with a Lab-founder sponsored display of food and mixed drinks, a rhythmic set of tunes and some interesting lighting, the conversation

read more…

For regular blog viewers, you may notice that I end the weekly theme on Fridays with a blog on how investors plan on implementing these visions in a real town, a CoolTown.  Here’s how the group plans on helping enable a sense of community:

1. Focus on a target audience - in this case it’s the cultural creatives.  Learn as much as possible about the things they like to do, experience and prioritize.  Learn about their sub-groups as well, like the free agents.  This is the

read more…

Community: A group of people living in the same locality; a group of people having common interests
Clique: A small exclusive group of friends or associates.

When we think of ‘friends’, we often think of them as cliques - people we regularly hang out with.  However, being exclusive by definition, cliques also include country clubs and gangs.  Either way, they typically aren’t very diverse.

I believe a CoolTown will be more about community than cliques.  Rather than asking the people in your

read more…

Actually, the verdict isn’t in yet, but the way I’m hoping to help catalyze a stronger sense of community at my workplace is using the same approach as where I live (see yesterday’s blog).  Just today I used the listserv to pick dates for our first happy hour, and half the entrepreneur tenants (eleven) are a go.  June 3rd’s our first happy hour, so I’ll let you know then how it went.  Update: How it went!

As far as a common place that everyone can naturally gather, that’s a strength of where

read more…

There are seventy or so people who live in my building (image below), but for the first three or four years I hardly knew a soul.  Today I know more than half of them by first name, and that all happened within a matter of months.

Here’s my recipe to get to know your neighbors:

1. As painful as it is for some of us, you’re going to have to go out of your way to get to know at least three or four of them.  This forms the ‘neighborhood core’.
2a. Plan an event like a happy hour in the most

read more…

It’s something many of us secretly ask ourselves, and there’s even a book written about it.  Is it possible to create a sense of community where none existed?  History says yes, and hopefully we can use that to build better communities in the very near future.

This week I’ll present places I’ve experienced that are known to have a strong sense of community, and how we plan to integrate that into CoolTowns.  I’ll start with Hawaii, since it’s regarded by its residents as having an incredible

read more…

At least that’s what the cultural creatives, the early adopters and today’s kids are saying.  One may need to look no futher than Jane Jacobs to find answers.

In her 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which by the way, has probably prompted the renaissance of more than several cities, she says if there’s any one word that defines success for a city, it’s diversity.  To achieve it, she says you need:
1. A concentration of people.  This explains why pedestrian malls without

read more…