On Community Involvement

Guy Kawasaki writes about community building in The Art of Creating a Community. It's interesting because I've had a 'user group' experience with his old company, 4D.

Several years ago, in December 2000, my brother and I were in Cupertino taking a week-long class given by 4D, a pre-cursor to re-writing the application that his business runs on.

While we were there, we noticed that the 4D User Group meeting was being held that week at Apple's campus.

This gave us a chance to do two interesting things while out there — visit Apple and learn more about 4D. We went to the UG meeting and found that the president of 4D, Brendan Coveney was there to provide a briefing of future developments. It was a lot fun. As an added bonus, numerous people went out for dinner afterward at a nice mandarin restaurant and Brendan picked up the tab.

Everybody was very gracious and we had a good time.