TALE: A Cup of Joey @ Houston

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TALE500

8 min readAug 30, 2023

Developing a Cultural Theme for a Startup Ecosystem

TALE stands for Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement. In Jan 2023, I launched TALE as a Knowledge Center to host the Thematic Engagement project.

On Jan 20, 2023, I wrote a post titled Find 100 Cultural Themes for City Curation and made a call to action:

Build a list of 100 Cultural Themes about city innovation

This post shares a story about a cultural theme called “A Cup of Joey” and its hometown: Houston.

Theme: A Cup of Joey
Space: The Ion @ Houston
Practice: A free weekly coffee happy hour for connecting innovators
Curator: Joey Sanchez

In May 2021, the Cup of Joey was launched by Joey Sanchez who is a cultural innovator and startup community builder in Houston.

I have been following Joey and his posts about the Cup of Joey on Linkedin for many years. Last Friday, I decided to get my real experience of the theme.

It was my first time to attend the Cup of Joey!

Joey Sanchez chatted with me and several people. He said to me, “I will connect you to three people!” Wow, this was a heartwarming message and encouragement!

At the event, I had a great time chatting about Activity Theory and my website Activity Analysis Center with several people.

One meaningful connection can make a real difference! I connected to Ryan Mai at the Cup of Joey. Later, he liked one of my Linkedin posts about “Themes”. His reaction encouraged me to write a long post about the topic.

In 2017, I wrote a series of articles about personal epistemology in order to discuss the relationship between Knowledge, Action, and Person Development. At the end of the series, I use Life Container and Life Themes to discuss the personal journey of knowing.

I have read many books about the concept of Themes. Anthropologist Morris Opler (1945) developed a theoretical concept called “themes” for studying culture. Career counseling therapists and psychologists also developed a theoretical concept called “life themes”.

I realized that “Themes” is an important interdisciplinary topic for connecting Individual Life Experiences and Collective Cultural Innovation. In 2019, I started developing the concept of Themes of Practice for Curativity Theory.

From 2017 to 2023, I have written so many articles about the theme of “Themes”. Each year, I also developed a new perspective or a sub-theme about it.

2019: Themes of Practice
2020: Themes and Human Activity
2021: Themes and Career Development | Possible Themes
2022: Themes and Tacit Knowledge | Thematic Space
2023: Themes and Strategic Innovation | Theme (Concept)

This is a fantastic journey!

TALE: A Journey of Engaging with the Theme of “Themes” (2017–2023)

From “Themes of Practice” to “Thematic Engagement”

medium.com

During the process of writing the long post on Medium, I also collected some links to my old articles about the topic. Eventually, I realized that I could edit a new possible book.

Then, I designed a fake cover for the possible book.

This is the ripple effect of the Cup of Joey! Any meaningful connection could inspire meaningful actions!

The rest of the post will use the three keywords to conduct a tiny case study about the Cup of Joey.

Theme

A theme is a meaningful keyword. Since Themes and Concepts share some significant aspects such as name, meaning, and form, I often used the Concept Dynamics framework to discuss a theme.

The Concept Dynamics framework suggests four views on a concept:

Ecological Reality: real experience with a concept
Conceptual Reality: an idea about a concept
Linguistic Reality: name of a concept or ordinary language
Context: What’s the background of the situation?

Inspired by this framework, we can use the following aspects to talk about a theme.

Name
Meaning
Experience
Context

The Cup of Joey is a creative name! It combines the personal aspect with the cultural aspect. The part of “Joey” comes from Joey Sanchez’s first name while the whole name was inspired by the idiom “a cup of joe”.

Where did the term “Cup of Joe” from?

It is just a nickname for Coffee.

According to WMF UK Coffee Machines Blog, “… the term originates from America in the 20th century, sometime between WW1 and the early 1930’s. The exact source is not strictly known, although there are quite a few ideas out there on where the phrase was first used…” Secretary of the Navy in 1913, Josephus Daniels, prohibited alcohol aboard naval vessels leading to more coffee consumption. Therefore, coffee was insultingly referred to as a “cup of Joseph”, and eventually a “cup of joe”.

Other explanations consider Joe as the shortened version of two other slang terms for coffee: java and jamoke. People also connect Coffee and Joe by the “common man” analogy: while Coffee is considered “a common man” drink, Joe is considered “a common man” name.

An idiom represents an established cultural theme while a person’s first name could represent a life theme of a person’s creative life. When an idiom meets a first name, we see a creative connection between Collective Cultural Themes and Individual Life Themes.

The Creative Connection is the difference between the Cup of Joe and the Cup of Joey.

What’s the difference?

It also means WHY.

The official webpage of Cup of Joey highlights the purpose of meaningful connection.

What is the purpose of Cup of Joey? It is to create a connected culture of coffee shop-open networking across our region. Every Friday morning, you’ll have the opportunity to meet new and expand your current networks, talk about tech, inspire innovation, and create community.
So, what is the difference between a cup of joe and a Cup of Joe-Y? It is the WHY. It’s not what you do. It is why you do it!
At the Ion, these are questions that we want to explore with the tech and innovation community. So, show up, be friendly, and make new connections. Know your why, and we will get to the future together.
The future is only a cup away.

The rest of the two aspects of Cup of Joey are easy to understand.

Experience: A free weekly coffee happy hour for connecting innovators
Context: Building a Startup Community in Houston

This is a great theme!

Space

The Cup of Joey is regularly hosted on The Ion which is the main building of the Ion District.

The Ion District is a 16-acre innovation district in Midtown, Houston. It was established as a joint initiative between Rice University and the City of Houston in order to develop space for accelerating innovations in Houston.

According to Wikipedia, “The Ion is a 266,000-square-foot, six-level building on Main Street in what was formerly a four-story Sears department store built in 1939 and closed in 2018. The $100 million renovation project, which began in 2019 and was completed in 2021.”

The center of the Ion building is an open space that is designed as a sweeping staircase that doubles as seating for 250 people. The staircase connects the first floor and second floor.

Where is the Cup of Joey?

We meet on the second floor and on the first floor.

Joey Sanchez also hosts the Cup of Joey in other spaces such as George R. Brown Convention Center, Cannon West Hoston, Space Center Houston, Sugar Land Town Square, The Woodlands, etc.

Practice

During the past years, the Cup of Joey has been developing some interesting practices.

We can use the Objectification of Concept framework to discuss this aspect. The framework was adopted from Andy Blunden’s approach to Activity Theory. According to Andy Blunden, there are three aspects of objectification of a concept: symbolic, instrumental, and practical. You can find more details in Case Study: TEDx as “Formation of Concept” [Activity Theory].

The above discussion has mentioned the name and the logo of the Cup of Joey. This refers to Symbolic Objectification.

The second aspect of objectification is instrumental objectification. The T-shirt below is a great example of the Instrumental Objectification of Cup of Joey. The Cup of Joey also has a LinkedIn page which is a type of digital instrumental objectification.

Practical objectification refers to participants, participation, and community. This is the connection between concept (theme) and activity. For example, Cup of Joey always takes a picture of all participants.

Taking such a picture becomes a routine in the Cup of Joey community.

The slogan of Cup of Joey is One cup of coffee between you and your future.

Cup of Joey is to connect meaningful relationships to a more fulfilling future. Through respect and honoring your purpose in you, we can create a safe and welcoming environment that shares resources, opportunities and ideas.
We are a coffee meetup for innovative ideas.
One cup of coffee between you and your future.

In 2022, the Cup of Joey expanded from midtown to other areas of Greater Houston. It is a fast-growing practice!

Future

The existing version of Cup of Joey is One cup of coffee between you and your future in a city.

We may see Two Cups of Joey in the future. One cup is for Houston and the other cup is for another city.