Ten years ago today, I wrote a blog post that changed the direction of my life and ended up making a few microscopic dents in the universe along the way. It was the post that first described something that led to the formation of the Tuttle Club, a weekly meetup in London for interesting people to have interesting conversations.
The post was entitled "Social Media Café" and it laid out an idea for a space that I wanted people like me (Social Media was the newly minted term for the thing we were into) to co-create in London. I say, quite clearly that it's a place, not an event. It was a mix of café with good wifi, co-working space, private members club and media-hackspace. All those kinds of things are in much more plentiful supply now than they were then - I only knew of one co-working space in London worth the name.
The social technology infrastructure we had available was: this blog post, a wiki, a FaceBook page (that people just didn't use because many people still weren't on FB), twitter and Flickr - it worked well to spread the word and get people talking online and off-
It turned out that the community that formed around this idea was much more interested in getting together for a chat every week rather than becoming deeply involved in a property project. Thank God for that, because I was supremely unqualified to run such a project and it turned out I wasn't that interested in it anyway - it was the people, the crowd and what we could do together that has sustained my interest over the years.
By the way it wasn't until November 13th that I wrote about Harry Tuttle and this thing being known as the Tuttle Club. Soon after I'd been to the Web 2.0 unconference in Berlin. In between I'd spent a lot of time talking to people about it, socialising the idea and holding the prototype plan in my head. This was also the time you may have read about in Liam's book when I thought I needed to write a business plan and raise some funding (Spoiler: I didn't!)
At the time, we knew what co-working was (in America!) but didn't have any here. The only places we had were cafés and restaurants whose wifi was usually dodgy and private members clubs that were basically just too expensive for most of us.
The key bit of learning I think was to say what I think is needed and then listen back to what everyone else says they need. I carried the shared vision for a few months, but you can also get a glimpse of it from this wiki page.
I think the real time for anniversary celebrations will be November 21st which was the first prototype meeting but looking at it has re-ignited my interest in what else was going on that year. 2007 has a lot to answer for.
