I spent last week decompressing from organising Papercamp 4, my hobby/mission to revive an event started by Russell and Matt in 2009. I’ll talk here about what motivates me to run small, niche (some might even say discreet) events.
On the nature of community
I’ve organised very big events but I prefer smaller ones. This has something to do with community building. The history of the word community is linked to place and religious rituals before it became about hobbies. But even hobbies need a place and a ritual to thrive. Which means that using the word community to describe ephemeral activities people don’t attend regularly is a little silly. After a pandemic break I returned to yoga and practice it weekly but only three of us show up consistently. We smile and nod at each other in recognition but we don’t speak. That’s not a community, that’s a service.
I think you know that people feel like they are part of a community when they up their engagement. Nothing really happened last year. This year, both the speakers and attendees wrote about it and people reached out to thank me and offer to help next year. Someone even reached out to ask if I wanted to organise it in Portland (!). That’s a good sign. That means people are starting to feel psychologically invested. Repetition helps and so does returning to St Bride Foundation. I’m building the ritual, one event at a time. Papercamp isn’t a community, it’s an event that aspires to welcoming and developing a community.
Making with
I’m trying to get into Donna Harroway through her lectures and I like her concept of sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. In the UK, meeting strangers is uncomfortable, and it’s even harder to make things with them. So the job I give myself is to help attendees get over their initial reticence of talking to strangers. I give people name badges they can write themselves and ask people to talk to someone on their table they don’t know before we start the talks. It’s small but it’s also big. You could say that helping strangers work together is the driver to my event/community work and my general compulsion to introduce others. If ‘annoyance is the price of community‘ I lean into the fact that annoyance is just an emotion, not a set state. And if I can create the conditions for comfort to replace it because someone knows a little bit about the person they’re sitting next to at the start of the day, that sets things up nicely for making things together.
Make the work visible
I did most of the production myself, not because it’s hard, but because after 20 years of event production, it’s easy. I have been running the London internet of things meetup on and off since 2011 which never got bigger than 75 people. So a room the size of Bridewell Hall is perfectly manageable. It also means people can see the mechanics of the event clearly. The theatre of it is kept to a minimum. No big signup table, no large banners, very little swag, maybe some pens and beautiful paper to take home. It’s not about the fanfare but about the content. Attendees should be travelling through the talks, not the set design.
Also I hope some red threads emerge throughout the day. That’s the work that really matters but it’s a bit of a gamble. I don’t ask speakers for slides, I just make sure they see what others will be speaking about as early as possible. And the rest is up to chance but sometimes it works really well. As an example, Asia came up a lot so I was delighted to have asked Marcus Ho to close the day with a marvellous exploration of Origami and Orientalism. That was the red thread for me. But I know it will be different for others with different interests.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying I enjoy doing it, it’s a massive work in progress and of course, I’ll do it again on September 19th 2026. I already have most of my lineup sorted so I think tickets will go on sale in March. See you there?