After staying up all night to get everything ready for Barcamp Jonesboro and seeing it all finally come together into an amazing day after a year of hard work and planning, I crashed. I slept all day Sunday. I missed #blogchat. I feel better.

Then I got on to read my friend Keith Crawford (@tsudo)'s post: Community Potential

After reading the post, (which was really great), I started to think about all the potential we have as a community.

Then I started to get angry.

Not about what Keith wrote, but about the lack of support we have from local news. When we went to Barcamp Conway, the Chamber was there. They gave their support. They are EXCITED about supporting the tech community there, because they know what it can do. They got in the news , they got television coverage, they got all the support you would expect.

We brought 132 people together with a common interest

132 people were there. At our very first tech event. We had amazing support from the Computer Science department at ASU. But after talking to every person we could find at KAIT , they didn't show up. We sent media packets, emails, news stories already written, made phone calls, but got nothing. They failed to show us support.

Maybe the local newspaper was there right?

WRONG. In fact, from what I recall (though I do not have any hard evidence), when we did get some of the younger crowd interested in what we were doing, they basically got in trouble, got their stories cut or pulled, and were told to avoid us like the plague. I think they are afraid of social media, when they should be embracing it.

Where is the support?

Is it too much to ask? I encourage the local media to come and see what we accomplished in SPITE of your lack of support, and then I ask you to consider what we could accomplish together with it. The ball is in your court.