How Social Media is Building Community

It’s Wednesday morning and I’ve already attended a Tweetup with about 20 people, the first Boulder Beer and Blog (both of which I learned about on Monday on Twitter) and the biweekly Boulder Open Coffee Club .

I’ve also missed the first Boulder Denver New Tech meetup held in Denver and the latest iVolunteer meetup. Tonight I’ll attend IgniteBoulder .  On Friday morning I’ll be at the Boulder New Media Breakfast. Friday night I’m stopping by the iPhone Dev Camp for iPhone application developers.

Who says technology is alienating people?  It must be people not using technology or people who don’t like connecting with people.

The mission of Meetup.com is “to revitalize local community and help people around the world self-organize. Meetup believes that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference.”

In these meetups you’ll find yourself meeting interesting people and having conversations that you’d otherwise never have.  They give you a pulse on your community and professional industry that you can’t get anywhere else because it’s much bigger than meeting up with a few friends or colleagues.  This is the case whether the focus is wine tasting, hiking or technology.

While Meetup.com is an amazing social networking tool that helps to facilitate over 2,000 groups in  local communities, what’s even cooler is that local groups and individuals are going beyond Meetup.com’s model.

With Twitter people are spontaneously saying “I’ll be at this place at this time if anyone wants to meet up” to set up a meetup with anyone on Twitter in the area.

There’s also the power of Facebook to reconnect us with old friends which isn’t any less valuable than the face to face meetings created through Twitter, Meetup and grass roots meetings organized by just throwing up a wiki or a website and emailing friends about the event.

Podcamps, barcamps and unconferences are even better than Meetups.  You get together on a Friday night and figure out the groups interests for topics to cover on Saturday and anyone in the group may end up being a presenter.  Many versions of podcamps are popping up because you just pick a topic and invite people to tell their friends and show up.

I’m very inspired by how people are coming together to create community, to do charity work and to support each other.  It can’t just be my community that’s doing this.  Maybe this was happening five years ago and I just didn’t know about it, but today there’s an amazing fire spreading that’s bringing people together in great ways.

Check out Meetup.com today to see what’s going on in your neck of the woods and if there isn’t a group already started to cater to your interests then start one and get in on the fun.