Collaboration is a "Good Thing"
It aint just for bookmarking sites! Open source hackers, entrepreneurs, tech students, business folk, and others need to share ideas and expand their minds. Meeting people, learning about what others are doing and getting feedback on what you are doing is essential.
Innovation is where it's at and Chicago has a great deal of engineering smarts and capabilities. What we lack, that the Bay Area, Boston, Boulder and most other tech centers have, is the uninhibited free-flow of ideas and communication. We lack a supportive culture that encourages ideas and failure as a part of success.
So in addition to the more abstract notion, here are a few things worth considering:
- It's good to meet people outside your comfort zone; this is essential for business and for creating things that are used by others
- It's a good way to meet high-quality developers and engineers that you won't find on Monster or Dice
- It's a good way to get help on a project you're working on, and sometimes the help may just be the encouragement that other people need to see it as a great idea
- It's a good place to vet ideas or refine fuzzy concepts
- Most important, there will be free beer