Reviving likemind

When Piers Fawkes and I started likemind a few years ago it was on a bit of a whim, but it came to represent something we both really believed in: Starting to take online relationships offline. likemind was a place where people from the internet could meet and share ideas over a cup of coffee. As crazy as it is, that was five years ago and obviously quite a bit has happened in the meantime. Over the last year or so likemind has lapsed a bit. Like any community it requires tending and life got in the way. But looking back, there was something bigger: There was just less need for a shared space for meeting internet people. Not that it isn’t important, but rather that it feels like everywhere is now that place. So Piers and I sat down and talked about what happens next. What does the next five years of likemind look like? Is there even a next five years of likemind? To answer the second question first: Yes, we both believe in the power of likemind. While there are many places to meet folks, we need more that aren’t explicitly about networking and instead are just about the sharing of ideas between interesting people. The thing that’s amazing about likemind is its self-selection. While we never defined what it meant, we always got the right people, all around the world. So with that decided we talked about what we felt was missing and the answer we landed on was intersections. While there are countless meetups and conferences around the world, there are two few that do everything they can to bring people from different places together for conversations. Specifically, the the industries that we focus on - technology, creativity, media - seem to have diffused at exactly the time they should be coming together. We’re spending more and more time talking to the people who work on the things we work on at exactly the time we should talking to everyone else. So that’s what we want to make likemind about. Call it likemind: The sequel. The mission is to give people from these different places a space to share ideas. Let’s make it happen.