This Must Be The Place

This Must Be The Place was created by Greg Dunlap.

Throughout my life I have found myself deeply involved in niche communities. It started when I was introduced to the punk scene in Chicago, and fell immediately for the commnity's energy and passion. Hooked form the get go. As I got more into the scene, I realized I was not satisifed simply buying records or going to shows, and soon started booking bands and publishing a fanzine with my friend Dan Grzeca. Through that I met some of my dearest friends, played in bands of my own, and made some dear friends who I am still close to today. This pattern would continue again when I fell in love with pinball, becoming a competitive player traveling the country for tournaments, working on design teams in the pinball industry, and later running a non-profit arcade with my wife.

This was all fun, but it wasn't until I got involved with the open-source content management system Drupal that I really started to think about what community meant, both in concept and to me as a person. As I got into contributing to Drupal, I kept running into pain points around process, descision-making, and watched my friends continuing to throw themselves into this work and then burn themselves out. Through this, I spend a lot of time thinking about all these questions? Why is this happening? What is causing it? How can we stop it? Is that even possible? What makes our community tick? What makes it broken? This eventually culminated in a keynote I gave at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit called Stay For The Community, and since then I have been semi-obsessed with the ways in which people do and don't work together, and what we can do to change it.

This Must Be The Place is an attempt to look at these questions from a wide variety of angles and viewpoints. My hope is that by listening to the triumphs and struggles that others have had in the communities they take part in, listeners will find inspiration and insight into their own.

Credits

Our theme song was composed by WillFromAmerica. He does great work at affordable prices! Hire him!

Our logo was done by Marissa Epstein. She also does great work but you shouldn't hire her because I really like working with her.