Cam Findlay

Posts Tagged ‘community’

Last Thursday and Friday (8-9 Oct) I was lucky enough to be part of the very first national New Zealand Iaido Seminar held at the Auckland Kendo Club in of course…. Auckland.
It was a 2 day intensive training, grading and a good opportunity to network and meet the others throughout New Zealand swinging a sword in this age old martial art.

The plans moving forward are to start building numbers and really promoting Iaido in NZ and I am hoping that I can add my knowledge of social networking and online communities to work towards this.

Thursday saw a full day of training and learning some new kata in the Kendo Federation Seitei Iaido which consists of 12 kata (I know up to number 11 at the moment!)
It is interesting learning from others as each teacher does seem to put their own knowledge and spin on each kata.  At the end of it all I think gathering as much knowledge as you can from as many teachers as you can and then combining that with what feels natural with your own movement and focus is the way to go.

Thursday evening I dug deep despite extreme tiredness and a rather painful toe injury I performed the best I could at the grading and came away with a 2nd Kyu (ni-kyu) grading! A jump of 8 grades as I had been previously ungraded.

Friday saw more training and a Shiai (competition) and something even more fun… getting to invent our own kata!

The “build your own” kata concoctions were all very interesting with one of our (chch) dojos students ideas using an umbrella as a sword took it top marks.

The 2 days were a great challenge that everyone who attended met and got something out of…

Before I left for Auckland I flicked to a random page in my copy of Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure” (a classic Japanese warrior code text) and thinking back on it now it shared some insight into the days ahead, it read:

The talented rise to the challenge-
There is a saying, “As the water rises the boat rises”. When a person of talent … encounters a difficulty, his [or her] heart rises to meet the challenge, and the greater the challenge the more he [or she] is spurred to take it on. – Hagakure, Book 2, Line 42

Rather fitting I think! A big thanks to all those at Auckland Kendo as to all those who attended the Seminar. Look forward to next year!

We had (at work) a great core values session with Kendall Langston from the Results Group yesterday to really nail down just what it is that we believe in and want to ingrain in everything we do at RockStar Recipes.

This is what we came up with…

• Curiosity – To learn new things, in the future, in our history, in people and relationship building, teaching methods.
• Embracing technology - Adapting and utilising new tech as it rolls out, being tech savvy and aware of what is new and finding best places to use it (or not use it) to augment our teaching, our delivery, our work flow and our lives.
• The experience to teach – building mentor relationships, being skilled in what we teach, having great communication, producing great content and resources, inspiring students – this is internal as well as external… that is we at RockStar Recipes learn as much as our students.
• Being a musician – Being active in your music community, being creative, expression through music, seeing music as a universal language.
• Being a “tight band” (or band member) - Being a “good dude”, team player, serving the band not just the self, having a friendly vibe, laid back & focused, supportive of the other band members!

Companies don’t have core values… people within them DO and I think we have really nailed what makes us at Rock Star Recipes tick, no marketing or PR bullshit… bottom up not top down,  just real honest values that we live and bring to our work.  It’s just like being part of a band and we all bring our unique style and character.
We hope that our customers, fans and friends can also relate to them and join us in our movement to shape the next generation of musicians!

Below shows some activities in my life where I experience “Flow” that being a place where my skills and challenges meet to allow me to perform at my very best. It also shows some of my core values and sense of purpose around these activities.
(Click the diagram to enlarge)

These are just 3 of many areas in which I find a sense of flow there are many more but focusing on these ones for now they have helped (and continue to help) me become more integrated and differentiated in my life by:

Participating in communities are various types gives me both a place to learn from others and a place to share my skills to help advance the goals of that community. I find that there is a sense of community in just about everything I do. Being part of the “Dance Music Community” and helping run events and share my music with others as a DJ and music producer. On the web development and coding side of things I am part of the “Open Source Community” where ideas around building great websites, producing reusable code that anyone can use, modify and make better drive this movement and foster a place where I can again learn from other open source participants and at times contribute back so that others may learn and make use of what I have learnt.  I am also part of a community with my Iaido training which is a subset of the greater community of people doing martial arts (Budo) in a quest to build character, mind, body and spirit in their lives.
I find that for all of my broad range of skills, talents and hobbies there is a community of people (either online or offline) that can benefit from my participation and contribution into that community.

Purpose I something that I have been thinking about a lot lately and it is still something I am not crystal clear on just yet.  I do or have done a lot of hobbies, jobs and I always put as much as I can into everything I do.

Lately however I am finding that I am spending more time in and around social networking and online communities both as something I naturally do when I am online (I participate and contribute to several forums, blogs and networking sites) and also something that I have consulted and helped others on getting their head around it.  A couple of examples being:

1) Meeting Fraser Hurrell from BrightMind Labs at X:Media:Lab, helping  and consulting him on how to align his online business model for his learning game and online community through Facebook Pages.

2) A student who had been in my summer paper earlier this year after yesterdays lecture sort me out to talk about online business and his ideas.  I had a good discussion with him about online community, different business model for existing as a business online.  Hopefully I can help him out with his ideas and how to grow his tribe around his ideas.

There have been countless other times where I have helped or given away advice to friends and people I have met around the topics of computing, communication, social networking, communities, online business the list goes on…

So something is making me seriously look at possibley having a purpose based around offering advice in helping businesses exist online within the new ideas around online community and how people can take advantage of all the great tools out there to communicate more openly, and honestly -  up, down and across their social graph.