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Key Takeaways The best platforms are built with input from many different team members with unique skills and experiences. The same applies to building a community.
When you’re bringing a group of people together, the environment you provide for them shapes their creative potential.
Whether you’re building technical systems or human networks, you need an incremental process of introducing new ideas and carefully testing them until they function effectively within the whole.
I’m well-known as a tinkerer who loves building apps and tools. But I also love building communities.
Bringing the right people together for a team or conference requires the same core skills as determining the right features for a platform: You need an ability to appreciate the value of each individual component and the vision to see how they come together to serve a higher purpose.
I discovered precisely how true this was when I created the DRIVE (Data Reporting Information and Visualization Exchange) Conference at the University of Washington in 2011. Its goal was to help people turn technical data into actionable strategic insights.
I’ve always believed in the power of finding new ways to present information clearly. It’s a thread that has carried into my role as the CEO of PhoneBurner — a power dialing platform that includes advanced call analytics to improve outreach for phone sales teams.
But breakthroughs in fields like this don’t only result from individual achievements. The real value of DRIVE was that it let me take some of the most brilliant people in my field out of the silos and echo chambers they were stuck in and put them in a place where they could build on each other’s knowledge.
In just a few short years, the conference grew from 80 attendees to over 800. Here’s what I learned in the process, and why you should be putting the same energy into organizing people that you put into optimizing features.
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