Friday, April 17, 2009

Connecting People and Ideas



I like to connect people. As friends pointed out to me a few nights ago, the importance of connecting to other humans is one of the things I'm always talking about. Well, hey, science has now proven that it's really important if you want to be happy, live longer, etc. etc. etc., so I'm not just running off at the mouth anymore. Well, maybe I am, but not necessarily without merit - at least on this one topic.

When you get people together who have interests that complement each other, the conversation is always worth eavesdropping on, and that's just what I was doing this morning. The sum of the parts becomes greater than the whole.



The last day and a half, bloggers from Oklahoma, Iowa, Texas and Kansas have been in Hutchinson, touring the town and seeing the sites, so hopefully they will have cool things to say about our town. One of the folks who came from Oklahoma was Becky McCray. (on the left in the photos)

I've been following Becky in Twitter for awhile and just KNEW that she and Marci Penner, (on the right) who is the head of the Kansas Sampler Foundation, needed to meet. I've forwarded some of Becky's blog posts to Marci and WenDee (the assistant director at the Sampler Foundation - in the black in this photo) a few times.



Well, the other night when our blogger group was at dinner I mentioned this and Becky said, "See if we can go see them Friday morning." So, I tried to call Marci but didn't get her. A few minutes later Cody tried and got us set up for early this morning.

While we were talking, Todd, (see him working hard in the photo below) who is the editor at The Ledger, a print and online paper that covers the area, said he'd like to cover the meeting for the paper. So, this morning I picked up Becky and Jeanne at the hotel and we headed out to the barn in Inman where we were greeted with homemade cinnamon rolls, courtesy of Marci's mom. I've had her cinnamon rolls before and let me tell you, they never disappoint. That, alone, was worth getting up extra early for!



Like Todd, Jeanne was taking notes like a fiend. She writes on the Small Business Survival blog, along with Becky and some other folks.

It was really cool to see people who are interested in some of the same things meet for the first time and connect. There's an energy that's generated that can't be duplicated by anything else. Marci is devoted to preserving rural culture. Becky is interested in small business. There is some common ground there, for sure.

Becky did a few video bites with Marci and I'm sure will be posting them at some point. I don't know about Becky, but I'm sort of buried under really great potential blog posts right now, after our intense days of touring.



Marci and WenDee are preparing for the Kansas Sampler Festival, May 2 and 3 in Concordia, so they're busy bees, but I'm so glad they took time out to visit with us for a bit this morning. It was cool, at least for me. I hope it was for them, too.


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