Something that has been bothering me for quite some time, is the limited use of the international nature of deviantArt as a community as well as the community aspect as a whole. Of course we're having contests of our own and lots of deviants feature other deviants on a daily basis within the community. But we should be aware that there are also a lot of other possibilities lying right outside this website. Artcontests created by newspapers, possibilities for exhibitions and magazines begging for fresh artistic blood, all right there in your neighbourhood, your state or your country. DeviantArt could play an immense role in informing the creative people of the world about the things that happen in their surrounding and the possibilities provided for them. So why is it so difficult to use the community as it should be used?

Well, one of the reasons might be that deviantArt is indeed a very wide-spread community, with members from all over the world. Of course there are various club-accounts for most major countries, but they tend to be powerless and small, hardly even able to concentrate on promoting their members within the community, let alone providing them with information from outside. Another problem is that these communities usually are not really supported by the dA-staff. For what reason? I don't know.

So here is my suggestion to the deviantArt staff and the community as a whole: create a central, stable and effective base of support for local activities for and by deviants and artists in general. How to do this is open for debate, of course, and you're most welcome to debate this on the suggestions forum. It might be sufficient if the many people that keep dA running support the groups made for their countries and regions. Maybe it's necessary to establish new functions within the dA staff, allowing some influential deviants to become a sort of ambassadors for their country. It will be necessary to have one single base for each region. So for example, not three different clubs for France, unless these clubs focus on different regions of France in which case there should also be a club for France as a whole.

Either way, helping deviants to become more familiar with whatever it means to be an artist 'in the real world' can only make this website and community better and more fun.