Looking back over the early Tuttle blogging last week, I remembered something that's slipped out of mind in the years since.
We were on a mission!
it wasn't always completely clear where we were going, but it had something of the quest for the Grail about it, or the trek to the "promised land", a quest for what? For a place, a place to belong and the freedom to be yourself in your work.
So we got together each week, partly to check in on how this was going. And in those early, hurly, burly days of Social Media, it felt like we were going a long way, quite fast. Every week there was some new service (we weren't quite talking about 'apps' yet) that could do something we might not even have thought of but which took us in the right direction. Towards work that mattered and was easy to carry out, or rather did things that were a bit tricky to do otherwise. They helped us connect or to create more complex social objects that would help us connect. And some of the people who came were the sort of hackers who'd look at a new tool and say "well you could use it for that, or you could do this other amazing thing".
But also, we were all making media about all our experiences and so the whole thing was self-documenting to an extent. That is certainly what got people along in the first place. Yes there were tweets that said "Just been to #tuttle and had seven flavours of awesome conversation" but equally there were tweets that said "I made this after #tuttle" with a link to a blogpost or a video.
If there was a place near you and someone was making something like this about it wouldn't you want to come?
Well some people did!
So what?
So the big questions for me right now are:
- What the heck was that mission then, really?
- Did we achieve it?
- If not what of it is still left undone?
- Is that worth putting time and energy into?
And if it is, how do we do that?, focus on that for the next ten years?