The Community

People talk quite a bit about "the community" when discussing the IT/software development world. It's a quite nebulous concept. For me, recently, the term has taken on quite specific meaning in the context of our Software Engineering Radio podcast.

The community of listeners has given us tremendously encouraging feedback. Our listener numbers are rising continuously and the feedback (till now, anyway) has been overwhelmingly positive.

But the podcast itself is an effort of (a small part of) the community. The team that I had invited to help doing the show is eagerly producing stuff. It's great to work in a good team whose members share the vision (thanks :-)).

But there's more. Other podcasts (such as JavaPosse) have helped us publicize our show by plugging us on their (very popular) podcast. Henning Pauly, the creative mind of Chain has given us permission to use his music as the intro and outro to our podcast! We also have the permission from marillion to use their music for the same purpose. There is Libsyn who provide hosting and bandwidth specifically to podcasters for a very very reasonable monthly charge. Finally, there are the folks from Creative Commons who provide bullet proof licenses for endeavors like our podcast.

All of those people are part of a community that is (as can be seen from the music and Creative Commons folks) not necessarily IT specific. But that community is very collaborative, helpful, uncomplicated and generally really nice to work with. I don't know whether such communities have been around forever and I just didn't notice? I think this phenomenon is somewhat specific to the Web and how it enables collaboration in ways that have not been imaginable before.

We all know this talk about community, tagging, web 2.0, user involvement, free content and open source, etc. etc. In the context of building this podcast, some of these intangible and nebulous concepts have become quite concrete for me.

It's nice that all of this exists and I am happy to be a part of that.  permalink