The Unofficial Rules for Creating a Kick-Ass Network

DSC01875.JPG, originally uploaded by lizkdc.

National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian (The Old Patent Office)

My friend Beth has one of the best natural networks I have ever encountered.  Within the corner of the field given over to the study of web users, she connects with some really impressive names in the digerati culture, gurus, book authors, bloggers, heads of associations, professors.

But she doesn't use the most popular professional networking site--and according to the comments on my earlier post, apparently just ignores the invites.

Moreover, she doesn't fit the popular mental model of someone who's *trying* hard to broker connections in order to get ahead.  She's always a direct speaker, rather dangerously frank.   The opposite of every baby web consultant who's ever gelled up his hair, stuck on a pair of chic geek eyeglass frames, and spun together buzzwords about distributing crowd-sourced mashups to integrate impactful deliverables.

But she has done the following powerful things.

• founded a professional working group in her field.
• assembled panels and seminars both in her day job and spare time.
• championed technical trends early on, uphill, when others were saying "that's great, that's the future, but we have so much to do in the present, later, later." 
• set up stealth or pilot versions of features that hadn't caught on yet and didn't feature in the official, leadership-approved plans, thus seeding her colleagues with better comprehension and preparing us for the day when clients came back and started asking for the latest thing.
• did the unfun budget work to get the $ for new projects (a big dark secret of web teams is that 99% of people on them don't like to struggle with the money).

So, musing on all this today, with appropriate apologies for stealing from Beth's life, I forthwith made up

The Unofficial Rules for Creating a Kick-Ass Network of Technology Professionals:

• If you want a great network, then help others grow theirs, not by "networking" as such, but by doing something to help other people share their ideas and passions.
• Provide the coffee.
• Ideas are seeds, not poker chips; scatter, don't hoard.  Don't view other's knowledge and skills as a threat: instead, think how much better things could be if people around you better were better informed.
• Be curious.
• Adopt from the pound: take on some worthy but unpopular tasks. It will improve your skills, give you leverage, and (some) people will be grateful.
• BUT not TOO much scutwork.  Find fun, smart people invent ways to get to work with them.
• Don't wait for the leaders to get out front.  Go there yourself, report back, and bring others up to take a peek over the hill.
• If "they" don't get your big idea, don't spend forever trying to get it pre-approved.  DIY.  Then show it around.
• Don't agonize too much over today's org chart, or today's organization for that matter. See the web itself as a medium, and its participants, creators, users, customers, experts, nerds and cool kids, teams and tribes, as your playground.  Go up to the other kids and get a game started.

Comments

[Beth]

Wow...I'm at a loss for words! But you have me pegged. I particularly like the "dangerously frank" characterization ... much better than what I often use: "bull-in-china-shop blunt" :).