Own Your Data

Despite being a professional guitarist until about the age of 26, and frequently appearing on a stage, I was a total introvert. Although my BPD wasn't diagnosed until many decades later, colleagues knew better than to put a microphone in front of me.

Flash forward to 1989 Austin: after five years in the Serials Cataloging dept of the Perry-Castañeda Library at UTexas, I found myself managing a small bookstore across the street from said University.

Suddenly I was meeting fascinating people every day: professors, programmers, hackers, musicians, architects, tattoo artists, waitresses from Star Seeds and Les Amis spending their tip money on Rilke - and this was before the web, so except for the very few who were on mailing lists or BBSes - most of them had no idea the others existed.

In the same way that I would assemble musicians in my past life, I was compelled to introduce these people to each other.

So I started collecting phone numbers. Email if they had it, but this was 1990, so many only had a phone number. My request was simple: "I'll be throwing a party here at the store soon. If you'd like to come, give me a way to reach you and I'll send you an invite when I have a date."

I had a wonderful guest book from Germany that sat on the counter by the register. It added to the gemütlichkeit of the store. Every few days, I'd enter all the names into FileMaker (I was a beta tester for the earliest versions). Along with each name, I'd enter a tag or two. The tattoo artists might not want to meet the architects - but they would certainly want to meet the other tattoo artists - and definitely the body art people as well - and maybe the waitresses too - as many of them were recipients of the art.

Once I had about a hundred names worth of Animateurs, I threw the first party. I spent the night making introductions. You need to meet this person. You need to meet that one. We went through at least two cases of wine.

The parties were never advertised. They were simply invitations and word of mouth. People would frequently hear about them after the fact, as an Austin Chronicle writer or two were usually in attendance, along with folks like Frank Kozik, Bruce Sterling, and my next door neighbor Richard Linklater.

The act of attaching tags to people's names was something that I picked up from my librarian days. I was treating records in my database like a Name Authority file. Anyone can keep a list of names, but the tags were what let me look at a hundred people and see which two should be standing next to each other.

The list did other work too. When a new book came in on Linguistic Anthropology, I had a ready-made group of people to tell.

That mattered way more then than it does now. In the early 90s, people responded viciously to spam. One unwanted message could earn you an angry phone call - or a public thrashing. So I was careful. I did not send a German professor a notice about an architecture book unless I had him tagged for architecture as well.

By the time I closed my own bookstore ten years later, my list had evolved into not only a POS / inventory control system, but also a full-fledged CRM - with about six thousand names.

Roughly half of the list was liberal arts, fine arts, culture folks, and the other half was hackers, programmers, sysadmins, and other CS types. All were patrons of the store - and given that there was at the time no Facebook, no Meetup, no MySpace, no LinkedIn, many of them counted on me to help keep them connected.

The hacker half became Geek Austin, which started as a Friday afternoon get-together in the basement of my last bookstore and ran for another decade as a Slashdot-based website for the city.

All of it came out of a FileMaker database I started because I wanted to meet and connect interesting people.

Most of what I was able to do - the first decade with the bookstore, the second with Geek Austin - was possible because I owned my data. Whether it lived in FileMaker, FoxPro, or MySQL, it was always on my own platform.

Platforms come and go. The original Meetup shared everyone's email addresses - and much more. The original LinkedIn shared far more than it does now. Eighteen years ago you could export your LinkedIn connections and get first name, last name, company, title, city, email, sometimes phone, and you could actually sort search results by multiple fields.

I have watched local organizers get caught by this over and over. The platform they relied on to connect with friends and their community degrades - to the point that it no longer serves the organizers at all - only those who harvest data for advertising and profiling.

So build your own list.

Start with the people who matter to you, the people you want to know, the people whose contact information you have. Don't rely on your phone, or someone else's platform.

Start with a spreadsheet. Google Sheets, Excel, whatever is in front of you. Add columns as needed.

It will pay off in ways you will not anticipate. At minimum you will remember birthdays. At maximum you will be able to get the right people in a room on short notice, which is a rare and valuable thing.

-Lynn Bender
July 24, 2026

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