first pass at a "wtf wade" page

_posts/about.markdown

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+## Why WADE?
+WADE was created to be a side-channel for technical advocates, evangelists and
+organizers. Generally, we aim to be a place you could go with questions like:
+
+* "Hey, who all is going to be at Monitorama next month?"
+* "What's the best place to buy t-shirts that fit people?"
+* "Does anyone want to co-sponsor a hackathon two days before Velocity?"
+* "Our Meetup Venue just burned down. Can anyone in Portland host 35 pyladies on short notice?"
+* "What's the best non-liquid (eg pack-able) laundry detergent that works well on colors in hotel sinks?"
+* "Hello vendors that compete with me, do you want to sit on a panel together at Strangeloop?"
+* "What sticker design is working best for you right now?"
+* "I find myself in Chicago and in want of lunch. Anybody hungry?"
+* "Anybody want a job?"
+* "Where can I ship a Parka general post in Vancouver?"
+
+Questions like those get asked and answered every day in WADE, along with a lot
+of general conversation about advocacy and community management and just plain
+palling around. Developer evangelism and advocacy are relatively new roles, so
+in parallel to the community organization activity, a lot of what goes on in
+WADE is practitioners figuring out what their own roles mean or how to navigate
+making them work in a new place.  What are your quarterly goals as a developer
+evangelist? How much do you travel as an advocate?  What is your corporate
+conference strategy (booths and sponsored talks? or CFP's and prayers?), to
+what extent to you copy-edit your blog content, etc..etc... 
+
+## Who can Join? 
+Our members are generally professionals with the words 'community', 'advocate',
+or 'evangelist' in their titles. Organizationally, we usually fall someplace
+beneath "Product" on the org chart. Right now looking at the active membership,
+we consist mostly of community and event organizers. Many of our members have a
+different day job, but organize conferences and/or meetups on the side. We have
+several others who are students or who do something else professionally and are
+trying to decide if they're interested in switching roles. 
+
+One thing we have in common is that we orbit software engineering, and directly
+interact with software engineers on a regular basis. We organize events for
+software engineers, educate software engineers, take action to smooth
+integration headaches for software engineers, and even perform anthropology on
+software engineers in order to extract and tell an interesting story to other
+software engineers.  
+
+Many of us are, or have been engineers, but at least as many others aren't and
+haven't been engineers. Unlike many engineers however, we aren't bewitched by
+technical aptitude, and don't expect or require that you "code" or anything
+like that. We happily help each other grow in myriad ways because community and
+advocacy are harder than computers, and require a far wider range of expertise.
+
+Another thing we have in common is that we're generally incentivized to be
+cooperative, by which I mean we're very comfortable interacting with, and
+exchanging information with our contemporaries at competing organizations, and
+being open about the deficiencies in the technology we advocate compared to
+competing technology. Despite the religious overtones implied by words like
+"evangelism", our professional success is inseparable from our credibility and
+especially among software engineers, our credibility rests on candor,
+generosity, and sincerity.
+
+## Who can't join?
+We've turned down a few membership requests from folks in positions like sales,
+marketing, and venture capitalism. It's nothing personal, and we don't have
+anything against those things, but we feel that it's important for us to
+maintain a certain... simplicity of intention among our members.  At the
+moment WADE is genuinely useful as a means of creating ad-hoc dialog between
+community and advocacy people in a wide range of organizations, and for that to
+continue and grow, we need to make sure that all of our members are cooperative
+in nature and both willing and able to help each other out.
+
+That said, we're still figuring out what WADE is and what it could be, so by
+all means if you're coming from a marketing or sales or whatever angle, and you
+believe that we can help each other, send us an invite request and talk to us.
+
+## Welcome!
+I guess the TLDR; is that WADE is a place where community, event, and advocacy
+people can learn from each other, network, and grow.  If that sounds
+interesting to you, we'd love to have you join us!