Brooklyn Beta

Brooklyn Beta began as a conference, but it’s becoming more of a community, a place for the “work hard and be nice to people” crowd.

This group of experienced web designers, developers, and assorted practitioners have a great deal in common but no shared home. No village green. They’re currently scattered around the globe in various outposts and see each other only on rare occasions.

We want to unite these talented sweethearts into a proper community. Taken together, they represent a massive ball of potential energy and a force for purposeful good in this world. We think it’s only a matter of time before this potential energy becomes kinetic, but we want to help hurry things along.

These are the ways we think we can help:

  1. Unite the community by creating gathering spaces — both online and offline — and by highlighting common threads. As often as possible, we want to bring the community together and remind everyone just how friendly and thoughtful their peers are.
  2. Inspire the community and instill the kind of relentless optimism needed to confront hard problems, big and small.
  3. Direct the community by shining a spotlight on problems that matter and by surfacing issues that reach beyond the boundaries of our own community and help other people, too.
  4. Support the community in as many ways as we can think of. This also means helping community members support each other.

In our bag of tricks is an annual event, a summer camp, and something new we’ve been working on for a while.

Because the thing we care about most is community happiness, measuring success is tough, but there are some questions we can try to answer. Does the conference stay relevant every year? Do people make a point to be there every year, even when traveling from afar? Do more and more people feel like they belong to this community? Are people meeting through Brooklyn Beta and then working together? Are there ongoing stories of people being inspired to make something they love?

We’ll get better at measuring these things over time, and we’ll share the results with you as we learn. For now, we’re happy with what we’ve accomplished and can proudly say that Brooklyn Beta is something all of us at Fictive Kin love a great deal.

We would love it if you joined us.