Erik: Why are scenes important to cities and what makes them work?
Bijoy: This is work that I’ve been doing with Heather McKissick from Austin Equation,
ATX Equation, and we’ve been sort of understanding Austin, but I think we’re starting to understand
maybe some general patterns that are applicable to other cities, but a scene, the way we define
it, is something where you have enough density and activity in the communities, and the organizations,
and people that it becomes a scene.
You know, it starts to make a scene.
It’s something that you can identify even intuitively as something that’s happening.
You know, so in Austin, of course, our music scene was really our first scene that came
online.
And then maybe we got a little ahead of ourselves and named ourselves the live music capital
of the world when, in fact, you know, we are really good at generating scenes.
So it’s like the live-music-and-other-scenes capital of the world, you know, but maybe
that’s how we modify it.
A scene is a weird thing.
You know, think about the kinds of structures that we have, organizational structures.
And actually, this is actually another – back to Jane, her lesser known book is called ‘Systems
of Survival’ in which she talks about two systems of organization and human activity,
and she talks about the commercial and the guardian.
So commercial, of course, is how we organize commerce and business, and so on so forth,
the guardian is how we organize our politics and our, you know, our rules, and law and
order, and things like that.
If you think about a scene, it actually doesn’t fit either of those two categories.
A scene is itself, yes, you could maybe calculate the economic value that’s being made in
the scene, but it doesn’t have a command or control structure of any kind.
It doesn’t have a – it might have a set of leaders but they are leaders only as long
as the scene wants them to be leaders.
They aren’t sort of elected into their roles.
So part of this interesting thing is that a scene has to be nurtured in a different
way.
You know, in a way if you organize a scene according to these other two structures, I
think you’ll squash it.
You know, this is kind of what we’ve been learning with the entrepreneur scene in the
work that I’ve been doing in the last year is how do you get all these independent agents
who are truly independent, who are all running their own organizations, or nonprofits, or
what not?
That are all assisting in this entrepreneurial process.
How do you get them to sort, in themselves, self organize and self identify rather than
tell them what to do?
So that has been very interesting where I think that awareness of the scene is a huge
thing.
This is part of what we’ve been learning.
For example, we’ve made a map of the scene, and be able to see a map of the scene and
goes ‘oh, and this is part of the scene, and I’m part of the scene, and here’s
how it fits.’
And if the map is done correctly or in a good way, it becomes very illustrative, it becomes
useful to people.
So, you know, in the entrepreneur scene, there’s two different maps that we’ve done.
We’ve actually done one by type of entrepreneurial venture.
The other by stage.
You know, how entrepreneurs go through different stages.
And so then now you can see ‘oh if I’m in this stage, these are the organizations
and the things I can tap into.’
It also helps to identify gaps.
So – well, all of a sudden someone goes ‘yeah, but there’s no one doing this.’
And all of a sudden, ‘yeah, great, you wanna help out with that?’
So whenever people talk to us about the entrepreneur scene in Austin, I always point them back
to the scene, you know, and I’d say this is our scene and this is how it works.
I think going back to Paul Graham and how this ties into scenes is that a city – a
city’s ambition is going to have an influence on the kinds of scenes and the way the scenes
work or don’t work.
Erik: Why is it not only important to participate in a scene but also to contribute?
Bijoy: Don’t be part of the scenery, be part of the scene.
I think that’s new since we last talked.
That’s the – well, that’s how I always end all my scene talks, is ‘don’t be part
of the scenery, be part of the scene.’
as a path of engagement, you start with just simply participating in a scene, just taking
from it as you need to, and then as you acquaint yourself with it, and as you get better with
it, you can start to contribute to it.
And so, what Austinites, I think, intuitively understand is that when they participate more
than just consuming, when they start contributing, again, that same reciprocal loop starts to
happen, so I think a scene’s, probably, health is actually – you can measure it
by the number of people that are – if you take the total scene and you say ‘how many
people are in this three concentric circles of collaboration, contribution, and participation?’
If you have very few of that in the middle and a lot as participation, it’s probably
a very weak scene.
You know, when you have a lot in that contributor pile, and maybe a good core in the collaborator
pile, that’s – that’s gonna be a really vibrant scene.