Saturday, I bumped into Amanda at Seattle Tilth‘s Harvest Fair, a tiny slice of Vermont set in Seattle, a rolicking sea of organic veggie booths, chickens, goats, beekeepers, bluegrass and flood-water deep children. She said it was her first time at the fair, and her blissful contentedness said she liked what she found.

I met Amanda two weeks ago at Gnomedex, where she spoke about SalaamGarage, an organization she founded that encourages travelers to create and share socially and politically meaningful media. In chatting, she said she found a great contrast between the Harvest Fair and Gnomedex, which she also loved. I pressed her why, and she talked about how Gnomedex was about building from the electronic, the digital, whereas Tilth was about building from the organic, the material.

That surprised me a bit, because to me, the two are ideological twins, the connecting lines as clear as dew-heavy webs.

Historically, of course, the hippie culture is the progenitor of today’s open source, DIY hacker community. Steve Job’s description of his acid use as “one of the two or three most important things [he had] done in [his] life”* may be one of the more famous indicators, but that example does the full extent of ideological confluence injustice: Mitch Kapor’s fascination with Transcendental Meditation, the influence of Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow on intellectual property law through his co-founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and his writing, that Adam Osborne was raised in the hermitage of Sri Ramana Maharishi, these are but a few of the threads that bind the movements.

An obvious manifestation of the relationship is their twin pursuit of democratization and “people’s power”. For members of the Homebrew Computer club (where the Apple I was first introduced), the goal of the personal computer was to take the power from the corporations and put them into the people’s hands, or, as Wozniak put it, “the big wealthy power structure should be undone, we want to turn the balance over, we want to make the small individuals more important.”* And that goal continues today in the open source movement, in microformats, in mash-ups, in the Linux community, and in a myriad other forms.

More important for me, though, is the fact that the Apple I was introduced not at CES 1977 (as if there were such a thing), but at a meeting of that Homebrew Computer Club. It wasn’t a corporate stage show, it was a bunch of guys getting together with people they liked and sharing what they were doing. This underlines what I see as the most powerful value shared between these two movements: the desire for community.

The reason people love Gnomedex and Foo Camp and all the many Barcamps isn’t the talks (or at least it isn’t just the talks) any more than the great food and music is the primary draw for Tilth. It’s the community.

What evidence is there? Well, for one, Gnomedex was livecast, so anyone who only wanted to see the talks could have saved themselves $600 and a plane ticket and watched from home. But they didn’t. Why? Because that’s not why people come to conferences. They come to conferences to meet other people, to socialize, to feel the warmth of affirmation one gets from having a great, in person conversation, in forming a relationship that will grow over the weeks and years that follow. You don’t have to be a psychologist to understand where belongingness fits into the hierarchy of needs.

And that’s why it’s so important to me that I’m working on Pathable, the on-line community tool used at Gnomedex, O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, New Media Expo, Crave, Greendrinks and a dozen other events. Because the goal of the tool is to build community.

People sometimes ask me “how is what you’re doing different than LinkedIn or Facebook?” I want to make an important distinction between a social networking tool and a community tool. LinkedIn and Facebook are social networks: each participant has a list of people that they communicate with, one to many and many to one. But in both cases, groups, or collections of people that act as a completely connected whole, are afterthoughts, adjunct features grafted.

Pathable, on the other hand, was built as a community tool from the ground up. The core organizing construct is the event and the people attending it. Conversations happen n-way between all the members of the community. The goal isn’t just to build a list of contacts to follow up with after the event, but to build a community around the event. One of our core design philosophies was to draw people into relationships by engaging members of the conference community with one another in unexpected but compelling ways. Pathable doesn’t just introduce and match-make, it provides the scaffolding, the substrate of the community.

And that’s what makes my job so personally rewarding. I admit it, I was (am?) a hippie! I went to Brown, lived in a vegetarian co-op, saw the Grateful Dead 78 times, and, in fact, the entire Pathable office took off the last week for our annual trip to Burning Man, the famous bacchanal and “temporary community of radical self-expression” in the Nevada desert. It may sound corny, but if I can make the world a better place by giving people a sense of belongingness and togetherness, my life has been well spent.

And so it warmed my heart to meet Amanda at Gnomedex, then at Artwalk and then again at the Seattle Tilth festival, and to see her reaction to the communities she saw binding themselves at each. The start-up life can be hard, each success and set-back monstrously large in their looming perspective, but seeing a community at work, and seeing someone’s delight at becoming a part of it, reminds me that the fight is a good one.

See you out there.