As I drove home last night from Craig Agranoff’s “Pizza Tweetup“, I took a stroll down memory lane and thought of how far we’d come along as a community in three and a half years.

When I moved back to Miami, there were no new media meetups to speak of. I missed the Stormhoek geek dinner in May 2006, which was a one-off, and judging from the pictures, it looks like more jet-setters made it to the party than geeks.

Miami’s bloggers, web developers, designers and startup community in general mostly kept to themselves. Soon after I moved back, I lamented (April 2006):

“The South Florida blogging scene seems very laid back, as you might expect with the mix of great weather, beaching and boating … and perhaps a more conservative, “Southern” lifestyle. Relative to Paris, there seem to be fewer local blogs and no events to speak of”

As I look back now, that single blog post set off a chain of events in my life which led to the creation of four main meetup groups and the development of our vibrant community of new media professionals  (see Craig’s post: “South Florida has no tech community?“). These include RefreshMiami, BarCamp Miami, Mobile Monday Miami, and Social Media Club South Florida.

An hour or so after I lamented on my blog back then, Lori Leach Forster — a web designer I have not met and who has subsequently moved to Georgia — commented on my post and introduced me online to Brian Breslin, with whom I co-organize RefreshMiami. I wanted to set up a regular event and Brian spoke of creating a local chapter of Refreshing Cities. Although I hadn’t heard of Refresh, having lived in Paris and London for the past decade, it sounded like a good fit.

After a few months and many long threads on Google Groups, five of us showed up for our first meetup at a Starbuck’s on South Beach; we should have known better than to schedule a meetup in Miami  at noon on a sunny Spring Saturday! From that inauspicious beginning, Brian and I grew the organization to its current membership of over 1,500 South Florida web professionals and startups. Our monthly events gather 130 participants, on average, and have become a hub to meet new people, create friendships, and find job opportunities. RefreshMiami is held on the last Wednesday of the month. If you’re in town, you’re welcome to attend.

Five months later, I set the wheels in motion to develop Miami’s first  BarCamp. I had met Chris Messina at the first BarCamp in Paris and loved the experience and the concept of a “user-generated conference,” where participants create their own learning experience. Professor Kim Grinfeder of the University of Miami School of Communication helped secure space and sponsorship, and we held the event in February 2007. About 60 people attended, 5 companies sponsored, 15 participants presented, and The Miami Herald wrote up a nice article about it (archived). I have since organized two more BarCamps, one in February 2008, with  300 people, 15 sponsors and 35 presentations, and this year’s event, which counted 600 participants, 38 sponsors and 70 presentations. The community has embraced the BarCampMiami concept and similar events have recently been held or are in the works, including LaidOffCamp Miami and REBarCamp Miami (Real Estate).

After last year’s BarCamp, I started up a local chapter of  Mobile Monday Miami and invited Jeff Sass and Florian Seroussi to the board. Why Mobile Monday? I had worked for a number of years in mobile content distribution and had enjoyed attending MoMo meetups in Paris. Although our first meetup in Miami was about as well attended as the first RefreshMiami meetup, we held three more club meetings that year, including an excellent evening at Nokia Latin America’s Headquarters organized by Michael Tangeman. Michael and I fired up the club again this year and legitimized it by formally signing with the international organization. We’ve had some great events this year and club membership is growing. MoMoMiami meetups attendance averages about 45 people. Starting in August, MoMo Miami will be held on the first Monday of the month, unless we schedule a meetup adjacent to a local mobile conference. We are still  discovering our mobile ecosystem and are eager to meet you at one of our events.

Over the last few years, I had been talking to and exchanging emails with Chris Heuer, Founder of  the national organization of Social Media Club, about founding a local chapter in South Florida. There had been two previous attempts to set up a Social Media Club locally, but they had not panned out. I was working at Scrapblog at the time and would run into Chris at various web conferences, including Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and BlogOrlando. We shared an obvious passion for social media technologies and implications for business.

In the Fall of 2008, I founded the local chapter of the Social Media Club of South Florida and we started holding our monthly meetups, which have grown from an average of 30 people per event in the beginning to over 100 people recently.

Nearly a year later, the Social Media Club of South Florida is a dynamic community of professionals from all types of businesses who meet monthly to learn about social media best practices and case studies. Club meetups are scheduled for the second Tuesdays of the month and we’d love to see you there.

All of my work was social media related and I could see working professionals trying to understand the subject. For example, Scrapblog shared office space with one of the top 5 global public relations firms; I could see the PR professionals’ long-term progression in understanding social media, from initial dismissal to grudging acceptance to implementing social media initiatives for clients. I saw the same thing at the university, where I taught one of the first full-semester courses on the subject in the nation, to University of Miami School of Communication students majoring in journalism and in public relations (and workshops for professors). I had also co-founded a startup with Brian Breslin, StartPR, which provides an online hosted service for social media tracking and blogger relations.

As I stroll down memory lane, my thoughts are on:

Serendipity – How a single blog post changed the course of my life and opened up a whole universe of possibility and opportunity.

Community – The unique sense of belonging that only comes from creating opportunities for others.

Transformation – Not only in terms of personal growth, but in particular I’m thinking about the transformation of the community into a more welcoming region for technologists and startups. We’re not there yet, but it’s a far cry from three years ago.

Gratitutde -For the innumerable people and resources that came into place at the right time to make these initiatives possible.

The future – We’ve only just started building a viable technology future for the region; there are many more challenges on the way as we vie for the attention of our local media, of the city, and of investors.

One step at a time.