Citizen Agency

This might seem a tad peculiar, but while getting the Hot Stones treatment on our recent trip to Tucson (”The Capital of Desert Style” apparently) to attend a conference by NASCIO, a consortium of state-level CIOs, I was forced to work on my elevator pitch, or, in this case, my Hot Stones Massage Pitch for Citizen Agency.

Basically, the masseuse wanted to know what I did, and I had to figure out how to explain what it is we do, exactly, in layman’s terms.

I mean, you know the drill: “So, what do you do?” the stranger with no background in your field (and even less technical experience) inevitably asks. And so instantly you’re forced to reduce what you do, day and day out, online and off, into a few human-comprehensible sentences which relate, with little subtlety, to how you make a living doing whatever it is that you do.

“Well,” my common refrain usually begins, “we help startups and tech companies learn how to build healthy communities.”

But no, that’s not quite right, since building communities is often what we advise against, suggesting instead to become part of existing communities and to learn to serve those collectives that already have already formed around areas of interest and passion.

“We’re kind of like personal trainers for companies that want to get better at social media,” I follow. “If we do the hard work for our clients, then we build the muscles, and when our contract is up, the company is no better off, and we leave with a bunch of social capital that our client should have been earning.”

“I mean, simply, we sell our advice and our experience being in the trenches, building grassroots communities, working on open source projects, being transparent, giving away our work and our knowledge as much as we can towards building healthy, global, sustainable movements like Coworking and BarCamp.”

Sure, that’s correct, and that’s transactionally what we do and what people pay for, but it still kind of misses the point of our approach and the way we think about working in social media and online communities.

Ultimately, I didn’t have an answer. Not one that really sufficiently could capture what we do in a way that he could viscerally “get” it. I mean, it wasn’t like I was trying to sell him or anything so it’s not like I was trying to convince him of our merits. But coming up with that short description that captures over six years of cumulative wisdom between Tara and myself working on real-world projects and nurturing but also watching communities grow, stutter, fail, resurge and then transcend is something that probably isn’t possible… and might not actually serve the point of connecting with someone over the work that we do.

“So it keeps you busy then?” the masseuse finally concluded.

“Yeah, I’d say that,” I responded. “And through this work, I’ve had the privilege to know and to meet people who are really pursuing their passions, or just beginning to learn that that’s an okay thing to do. And I think if anything, a good measure of how successful we are with our work is the degree to which, through our advocacy and our own actions, we are able to convince other people to give themselves the permission to pursue their own passions and the things that make them most happy. It’s a hard thing to quantify, but at the end of the day, I can say that it’s a rather satisfying way to make a living.”