What is this community about?

Hi, I’m Edward McEnrue, one of the leaders in this community! In this post, I’m going to try to quickly explain what our community is about:

The web and mobile development club leads an open source community here at Virginia Tech. You may ask, “what is an open source community?” Great question! It’s a two part definition. The one you are probably familiar with is that we use open source tools to get the job done. However, it also means that our community is highly distributed. We open source the leadership of the community. We encourage people to become a leader in their own right by stepping up to give workshops or to help build community apps, games, or websites (EG this website).

We teach each other how to do cool stuff, and encourage each other to pass it forward to the next class of noobs! In this way, we are open source, because everyone is encouraged to share their knowledge rather than hoard it. It’s a healthier way of doing things, because members make friendships & partnerships through a collaborative goal rather than a competitive one. It’s more successful, because everyone can become a ‘president’ or ‘vice president’ by just stepping up when they want to. In summary, autonomy & generosity are paramount principles to our community.

Hopefully, I explained this community well enough to encourage you to come to a workshop and experience stuff first hand.

Even better if you come to give a tech talk on your favorite technology. Just ask someone to edit the spreadsheet on the meetups page, and you’ll be able to. We really don’t expect you to prepare a whole lot for a tech talk, just to explain the problems you ran into so that other people don’t run into those themselves. Or, if you don’t like public speaking, you can still become a community leader by making a tech post to this blog!

PS Any question is a good one, don’t feel uncomfortable asking!