Make up your mind

If, as G.I. Joe once told us, “knowing is half the battle,” then what is the other half? Charlottesville is one of the brainiest cities in the country—which means, presumably, that we know a lot. The irony? We don’t know how our collective brainpower works.

In August, The Atlantic published an article called “Where the Super-Brains Are.” The article by Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, cited a few statistics to explain why Charlottesville landed among the 20 brainiest cities in the country. The Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) evaluated cities according to the percentage of the population age 25 and over with a graduate degrees; the percentage of computer scientists and mathematicians among the workforce; and the percentage of scientists among total metropolitan employees.

Fact is, it’s easy to quantify Charlottesville’s aggregate braininess. In May, MPI also named Charlottesville one of the best destinations for college graduates. One of five residents has a graduate degree. More than 15,000 UVA alumni currently live in the area. Over the last five years, the UVA Patent Foundation averaged 168 inventions disclosed by UVA inventors. Those inventors disclosed fewer inventions in 2010 than in 2009, but filed more provisional patent applications and had far more U.S. patent applications pending—262, up from 203.

How Charlottesville uses its aggregate intelligence is harder to quantify. Except that, during recent years, our city has seen a surge in the number of clubs and groups that assemble on a regular basis to talk, create, and think. The people behind these groups are changing the way our city’s brain works—how we share our thoughts, where we brainstorm and, increasingly, why our brightest ideas are the ones we create together.

Who do you think you are?

Charlottesville, says Marie Schacht, is a curious city. People like Schacht treat that curiosity like clay: They shape and reshape it to attain a collection of goals that is perpetually in flux.

As co-founder of the Charlottesville Trade School (CTS), Schacht and her partner, Michelle Rehme, coordinate 15-person classes for a varying group of students. CTS subjects have ranged from sewing and paper-making to coffee brewing. Schacht, a 2008 UVA Architecture School graduate, is willing to host any trade, so long as it has a teacher and students attached. “We have someone willing to teach plumbing,” she says.

CTS, which posts a schedule at cvilletradeschool.com and hosts classes at a variety of spaces, doesn’t charge admission. Instead, says Schacht, participants offer their skills and expertise as commodities: “What do I have that’s teachable?” Students barter with teachers to attend classes, and offer things like mix CDs or a home-cooked meal as payment. Classes are held wherever space is offered.

Locally, groups like CTS have exploded during the last few years. Members of the Performers Exchange Project hosted Assembly, a monthly workshop and informal critique session for artists of all stripes. When Assembly concluded in November after two years, co-hosts Sian Richards and Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell referred artists to other upstart forums in town. “Heard of Secretly, Y’all?” wrote Tidwell and Richards on the Assembly blog. “Or Filmmakers Republik? Or Songwriters Showcase? These are all supercool forums for artists to try out material, share their process and get feedback.”

The dynamic is particularly strong in the local technology and business worlds, where group membership frequently overlaps. There’s First Wednesdays, a bar-centric meeting held to “promote [local] Internet, technology and startup businesses.” There’s also the annual beCamp, a local “unconference.” At beCamp, attendees plan their schedule and events based on the skills of the people who show up. Computer programmer Ron DuPlain and software engineer John Chapin liked beCamp so much that they helped found beSwarm, which aims to host unconferences more than once a year. Where did DuPlain and Chapin first discuss the idea? A First Wednesdays event.

One of Charlottesville’s best examples is also one of its oldest. Jack Smith founded the Neon Guild in 1996 as an informal technology meet-up and a subcontracting pool for his interactive entertainment company, Arrow NewMedia. Formerly called PeopleSpace, Inc., Smith’s company develops online entertainment for a variety of clients—“from Playboy to ‘Sesame Street,’” he says.

The guild’s membership is similarly diverse. A January 4 meeting attracted roughly 40 regulars, along with six or seven newcomers. Those on-hand included UVA and Martha Jefferson Hospital employees, freelance software developers and graphic designers, and at least one plumber, who writes computer programs in his spare time.

Each meeting features a guest speaker, and offers two hours of highly engaging, highly informal shop talk over pizza and beer. However, attendance is voluntary. In fact, the bulk of the guild’s activities—technology troubleshooting, job inquiries and rumors—happen via a members-only mailing list. But while guild members don’t pay dues or fees, each must accomplish a simple mission to join the gang: Attend a single meeting and introduce yourself.

“We’ve been meeting all these years, and every single time new people come,” says Debra Weiss, founder of DRW Design and, for several years, the bubbly Guild Master. Without dues or fees, Weiss says, “people give what they give way more, because nothing is asked of them.”

With the Neon Guild, members have nothing to lose; consequently, they have everything to gain. The guild preceded Charlottesville’s dot-com boom, and membership continued to grow long after the bust—around the turn of the century, when companies like locally based “e-tailer” Value America filed for bankruptcy and laid off 200 people.

Much like the Charlottesville Trade School, the Neon Guild meets wherever space is consistently available. While the guild currently convenes at Inova Solutions on Avon Street, it has bounced from the Pink Warehouse on South Street to the King Building on Water, and between the homes and offices of its members.
In 2003, a bespectacled self-starter from Northern Virginia decided to move his entrepreneurial ambitions and growing family to Charlottesville. When Jeff Gunther arrived, he found groups like the Neon Guild, composed of members who developed interesting ideas whenever they could find the room to collaborate. He decided to give them a permanent space.

Where does your mind go?

OpenSpace occupies more than 3,000 square feet on the corner of Second Street SE and Monticello Avenue. The “space” actually comprises two sweeping workrooms and three studios, each designed to encourage collaboration. A massive “random” light—a transparent bulb surrounded by a porous sphere—casts a perfect Venn diagram of shadow atop each table. While you can’t draw on the tables, you can doodle on the walls of the Workbench and Conference studios with the markers stocked in each room.

“See?” asks Gunther, OpenSpace’s founder and CEO. He swirls a red marker across the white wall, then wipes the surface clean with his hand. “Everything in OpenSpace—from the expansive work tables to the technology rich meeting studios—was designed to help people collaborate.”

Gunther calls OpenSpace a “place for social serendipity.” Launched in November 2009, the space functions like a mental gymnasium. Members pay for an unlimited plan, starting at $250 per month, or a pay-as-you-go account, to the tune of $9 per person per hour. People arrive on their own, or with colleagues. They keep to themselves, or interrupt each other with problems or solutions.

OpenSpace is the incarnation of Gunther’s entrepreneurial philosophy: Assemble a group of bright people around an idea and see what happens. The quality of the outcome matters more than the time spent to reach it. In other words, the brainstorm should be measured according to its strength, not its duration. “If the billable hour has an antithesis,” writes Daniel Pink in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, “it’s the results-only work environment of the kind that Jeff Gunther has introduced at his companies.”

Gunther was an early advocate of the results-only work environment—called “ROWE,” a 21st century update to Glengarry Glen Ross’ “ABC: Always Be Closing” acronym. He uses ROWE at OpenSpace as well as Intalgent, his custom software development company, and Meddius, his healthcare systems integration business. While the rest of the working world punches in, Gunther’s employees may punch the snooze button a few extra times, if it helps them perform better.

“People are free to work when they want, where they want,” says Gunther, who tells his employees they were hired to produce results, not time cards. “As long as the work gets done.”

What ROWE does for time, OpenSpace does for, well, space. The business does not make collaboration its explicit aim. Rather, it offers the potential for collaboration by preserving rooms where it may occur. When Ron DuPlain and John Chapin needed a home for beSwarm events, they used OpenSpace. In December, Gunther began hosting a monthly event called Charlottesville Night Owls—an occasional chance for locals to gather and work in a shared space from 9pm until 2am.

“People come for the space, but stay for the community and the people who are here,” says Gunther. And while data like graduate degrees and science jobs quantify Charlottesville’s braininess, data from OpenSpace may help quantify how we use that brainpower as a city.

An example: During its first day of business, OpenSpace welcomed five members, who spent a combined total of 12.4 hours in the building. One year later, 64 people spent a combined 230 hours in OpenSpace. Total membership currently numbers around 200. Gunther says that OpenSpace may launch a second location this year.

OpenSpace members include freelancers who can’t work at home for one reason or another—barking dog, bad Internet connection, etc. They also include members of start-up businesses that don’t have a building of their own, and prefer to go month-to-month rather than sign a multi-year lease. One such business is Relay Foods (formerly Retail Relay), a locally owned online grocery service that temporarily made its home amidst the OpenSpace crowd.

Another such business is WillowTree Applications, a local phone apps developer. Founded in 2007, WillowTree was based in founder and Chief Technical Officer Michael Prichard’s home until business grew.

“I joined briefly in 2009 to have access to a meeting space, since I ran the company out of my home,” says Prichard. “Now, we have grown to the point where we have our own offices in the King Building.” Prichard calls OpenSpace “the perfect place as we transitioned.”

In fact, both Prichard and Gunther see Charlottesville as an increasingly collaborative place to live, work and think.

“Charlottesville has a number of highly talented people, and there are opportunities to collaborate with them,” says Prichard. “In the past, finding a venue for these individuals to meet and lay the seed of collaboration was hard to find. I feel OpenSpace helped open that up.”

But while OpenSpace holds collaborative potential within its walls, businesses like WillowTree take it to interactions with clients. And, in the case of WillowTree, that potential can lead to new, groundbreaking collaborations.

What are you thinking about?

UVA, according to Zachary Wheat, is “famously decentralized.” For Wheat, the Director of Web Communications and Interactive Media, that decentralization posed a particular challenge when the UVA Office of Public Affairs decided to launch an iPhone application to distribute UVA news.

A number of departments had suggested similar ambitions and, according to Wheat, public affairs was “concerned that 25 UVA applications would launch.” Rather than work in isolation, Wheat and the public affairs office gathered representatives from a number of UVA offices interested in launching a more comprehensive iPhone application.

The meeting, says Wheat, was unprecedented in its breadth. Those in attendance included Public Affairs Vice President Carol Wood and Chief Student Affairs Officer Patricia Lampkin, University Librarian Karin Wittenborg, Alumni Association President Tom Faulders and representatives from the Athletics Department and Information Technology & Communication (ITC) office.

“It’s kind of uncommon around here to operate with that level of interaction,” says Wheat.

Ultimately, attendees merged their iPhone ambitions, and four departments—public affairs, athletics, the alumni association and ITC—agreed on a $50,000 threshold for a development contract, to be split four ways. On June 4, UVA awarded the $50,000 contract to WillowTree Applications, one of six companies to bid.

When WillowTree entered the picture, both Wheat and Prichard say that work remained collaborative—something that shows in the finished product. Informally dubbed the “Good Ol’ App,” the application lets users check bus schedules and sports scores, but also comes couched in the particular language of the UVA community—“first year” instead of “freshman,” “grounds” instead of “campus.” Rather than launch 25 separate applications, UVA launched a single app with 25 different functions. In August, the app debuted atop Apple’s “New & Noteworthy” applications list; by September, nearly 7,000 iPhone users had downloaded it.

Wheat calls the application a victory for collaboration within and without the UVA community. “It was parties that typically don’t work together on something that brought us into a new area,” he says. “So, that’s fun.” Prichard concurs.

“The fact that we could meet together in a room with a projector and whiteboard is what makes the UVA app so successful,” says Prichard. “I don’t think we could have done it without constant feedback and collaboration.”

And the collaboration may beget another. WillowTree, which is currently developing a “pregnancy tracker” application with a Johnson & Johnson company, has also received multiple requests for a UVA application for the Android phone. Wheat says that an Android application is one of the next steps on UVA’s interactive media checklist; Prichard hopes WillowTree can develop that application, as well.

Ultimately, both UVA and WillowTree shared resources to attain a mutually held goal. They also share gratitude for the outcome—a $50,000 contract for one, thousands of downloads for the other. According to one UVA researcher, that feeling of gratitude may explain why we collaborate in the first place.

Thankfulness and thoughtfulness

Benjamin Converse teaches “Psychology for Leadership” at the UVA Batten School of Leadership & Public Policy. He also studies the social components of motivation. “How people use other people to help them accomplish their goals,” he puts it, “as well as how the goals that they have affect their views of other people.” Much of his recent work focuses on gratitude—a feeling that increases when people help each other reach goals, and may be instrumental in binding brainstorming groups together.

When a person is motivated to attain a goal, says Converse, his attention is drawn to those tools that can help him succeed. Converse decided to see if people were drawn to other people for the same reason.

For his doctoral dissertation, Converse conducted a series of tests in which subjects worked on a variety of tasks, received assistance and reported their perceptions of gratitude. For one test, he created a game show similar to “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?.” Subjects were asked questions, and offered the opportunity to phone a friend for assistance. Converse asked each subject, “How grateful do you feel toward your partner?” However, he asked one group of subjects while their partners sought the answers, and a second group immediately after they got the answer they were looking for.

“There was no difference,” says Converse, “other than, ‘Right now, I know this person is working for me,’ versus, ‘Right now I know this person has finished working for me.’” However, Converse noticed a difference in his subjects’ perception of gratitude. Subjects felt more grateful while they were being helped; once they received the help they requested, feelings of gratitude diminished.

In a follow-up test, Converse’s subjects either received a little bit of help and were asked about their gratitude while they were being assisted, or received a lot of help and were asked about their gratitude after the task was completed. In those studies, Converse says, he found the same dynamic—“even when people had received objectively more assistance from the helper in the ‘after’ condition.”

“Once that goal is completed, it’s not that gratitude goes away completely,” says Converse. “It just drops off a little bit.” According to Converse, this means that people experience a surge in gratitude—“a boost,” he calls it, “while they’re actually getting help toward the goal they’re pursuing.”

In other studies, says Converse, gratitude is shown to motivate individuals to help others. “It can create these kinds of pay-it-forward kinds of chains,” says Converse. “If I’m feeling grateful towards a person, and I have a chance to open the door for that person, I’m more likely to do that.” In some cases, says Converse, that gratitude might lead a person to open a door for “a complete stranger—someone who had nothing to do with the initial gratitude.”

Perhaps groups like the Neon Guild, rooms like OpenSpace and projects like the UVA application function as gratitude generators. In each, motivated people work in a shared space. If those people collaborate, then they might end the collaboration feeling grateful. And if those people remain in the same space, they sustain the potential for more collaboration. They renew and reinvigorate the group. They help brainstorms thrive and merge into perfect storms.

John Feminella is a principal consultant at a local software developer called BitsBuilder. He’s also a Charlottesville Night Owl, a founder of beSwarm, a Neon Guild member, and an OpenSpace member—meaning, at any given time, his brain can access the combined intelligence of more than 600 locals. Much like Gunther and Prichard, Feminella says each group is “less about being intrinsically collaborative and more about providing a great environment for collaboration to happen.”

“By analogy, providing a great kitchen and tools won’t turn people into great chefs,” says Feminella. “But it will certainly provide a place where they can be a better chef, or work with other chefs to produce something too complicated for even a very good chef.”

Our brain is mighty. But do we thank it enough? Converse says that his gratitude study can be read in a very cynical way: “You only care about people when they’re helping you out.”

But cynicism isn’t the only interpretation.

“The more charitable alternative, and the one I see, is that there’s this extra booster shot of gratitude while you’re actually receiving help,” says Converse. And that gratitude could, hypothetically, help us open new doors for friends and strangers alike.
Feminella, Gunther and Prichard all agree that Charlottesville seems to be an increasingly collaborative city. Maybe, like OpenSpace’s “social serendipity,” Charlottesville’s quantifiable brain power makes our city a prime place for mental serendipity. Maybe two heads are better than one, and 100 heads beats a pair. And maybe braininess and gratitude go hand-in-hand. Keep it in mind.