Last night we had nine people at the New Media Group gathering, held at the Manchester Barnes & Noble cafe. This easily blows away the record for attendance at TechSpace. We had to steal three tables and bunch them together in the cafe.

Since we had a number of new faces at this gathering, I made up a new sign for our table. I got this cool double-sided lucite stand at Staples that has a kind of green cast to it on the edges and put the sign inside. The front side had the collage image, and the back had the following copy (click on the image for a bigger pop-up):

Reaction to the sign was favorable, so I think we’ve started to nail the mission and tone of the group. In general, the energy was wonderful. It’s everything I wanted to see at a group meeting: people were open and accessible, willing to talk about themselves and what they were doing. We joked that the group was part user group, and part support group. The vibe of friendly support was there. We also spent time looking at past work (we all had laptops) and brainstorming solutions to our design projects. A lot of us are freelancers or sole designers working in a larger company, so we don’t often get the opportunity to bounce ideas off other creative-technical types.

With a larger group came a larger need for organization, but there were enough old hands there to help keep moving things along. I was worried we’d need to bust out Robert’s Rules, but it went pretty smoothly. Everyone got a chance to speak.

I am rather amazed at how far the group has come, in a relatively short amount of time, to become a cohesive-yet-open group of friendly people. It grew from absolute scratch, born from an email on a couple of mailing lists that I sent out on a whim, and now it’s this cool organic thing that energizes everyone who participates in it. I believe it worked because the email itself was written to filter-out business networking types, subconsciously emphasizing fellowship and dialog. So we ended up attracting those types of people, who are storytellers and givers. We didn’t realize it at the time, but I think that was one factor.

We’re now entering a second-stage of growth through word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth has helped maintained the tone of the group. I don’t want to grow the group for the sake of bigness. However, I do want to reach more like-minded people in the area, so I’m thinking of posting up some of our signs in places where creative types are likely to lurk to see who bites.