Community

We’ve been talking about “Community” in the offices of Time Compression lately. No, not the clever and remarkably amusing TV show on NBC, but about the creation of a group of like-minded people. (Actually, the TV show does do a good job of reflecting this, in that it provides a combination of young-old, black-white, male-female, footloose-anal retentive. . . .)

Certainly you work in a place were there are like-minded people. But this doesn’t mean that there is community, for the simple reason that the only thing that many of the people there may have in common is a desire to get a paycheck and some benefits. This, of course, is not ideal. Still, it may be reality. Of course, there could be some subgroupings within the larger organization, like, say, those who get together after work to play bocce ball or some other recreational endeavor. Certainly this creates bonds, but still not necessarily a community of interest that goes beyond discussions of the pallino.

You may participate in some outside activities in support of your kids’ school—sports or fundraisers or whatever—but is this truly a community?

What we were talking about was creating a sense of community around product development. To be sure, that is a vast arena, with a multitude of halls and rooms and nooks and crannies. There are those who are stylists and those who are engineers. There are those who are focused on additive manufacturing and those who are all about ideation. There are those who focus on materials and those who focus on methods.

Still, there is the potential for the creation of a PD community, one that is fast and loose, one that doesn’t involve paying dues or pledging allegiance. One that is simply an ad hoc organization of like-minded individuals.

In some ways, we are late to this party. There are outfits and organizations that have tenure far more historic than ours. But we’d like to think that we are fashionably late.

To be sure, one of the things that we have that a community can form around is the magazine Time Compression, as well as the associated website. And we’d like to certainly encourage those of you who get the magazine to make sure that those who you know who could benefit from it get their own subscriptions to the publication, which can be readily accomplished by going online to timecompression.com and clicking on the “Subscribe” tab.

And while we’re on the subject of the website, please check out the Accele(Rant) portion, a.k.a., the TC blog. There you have the opportunity to chime in on what we’ve discovered in various aspects of the PD space.

Last, but certainly not least, we’re trying to create community through the PDx/amerimold event that we’re holding May 11-13 at the Duke Energy Center in Cincinnati. While you can find out all of the ins-and-outs of the event at pdx-amerimold.com, please know that while there are conference and trade-show aspects to it, what we really want to do is to use it as an annual place where like-minded people can get together. . . and form a PD community.

Please be a part of it.