Mount Hood from UAL

Originally uploaded by moyalynne

… and other tales from “Web 2.0 meets the Enterprise”

Last weekend, I flew from San Francisco to Portland (and back again) with Leanne and Lucy for Leanne’s 20th high-school reunion. A pretty normal event (the flight — maybe not the reunion!) for most people. If you know me, you know it was a sheer panic attack for me (the flight — actually the reunion was ok!).

I know I know I know I Know I KNOW: “flying is safer than driving,” “you’ll have less luck crossing Market Street in San Francisco,” “these things can pretty much fly themselves,” and all that bit. I’ve been active on fear-of-flying message boards, gone for hypnosis, worn the rubber band, and done the whole gamut to try to analyze and overcome. In the end, for the present, at least, as little advanced notice as possible coupled with as many pills as I can safely take up until, at, and after the point of embarkation, are what keep me from running off the plane (which I hear they don’t like you to do). That, and trying to stay connected with every single person around me. Oh, and thanks for your hand, Leanne, you can have it back now (if I haven’t mangled it too much).

It was no different on the United flights this last weekend. Sweaty palms the night before turned to downright soggy Moya an hour or before the flight. Pills and my daughter and my wife kept me relatively sane, but of course, the whole thing — both flights — were perfectly beautiful and utterly uneventful (and the flight attendants were supportive) — and the views were nice, as I always find them to be. But one thing was a bit different, and maybe helped me feel a bit more, shall we say, grounded.

The difference this time was that I decided to “crowdsource” my flight anxiety, openly “coming out” about it via Twitter , and asking for help. What should happen but all these people — some I know well, some I don’t know at all — went out of their way to respond with kind words to me: @hambox, @calipidder, @panthea, @finnern, @residentgeek, @jyarmis, and of course @lwaldal. With their generosity, they formed a bridge for me between my isolating anxiety and tolerability.

Some people say that this anxiety reflects a wrestling with a lack of control — but for me, it seems that *being connected* is the key. In the past, I’ve gone up to meet the pilots. I’ve insisted on pre-boarding, and have to identify myself to whatever flight attendant I see when I get on the plane — sometimes they are sympathetic, sometimes they look a little freaked, like they’re wondering if I’m going to be “one of those.” Usually they offer alcohol gratis at one point during the flight. So the connection keeps me going. Perhaps the day I can stay connected online during the flight, it will be all the better.

Whether it’s lack of control or staying connected, it strikes me (of course) that there is a parable for “Web 2.0 and the Enterprise” here. People are saying lately that Web 2.0 for the Enterprise really needs to be about secure internal networks over which we can remain protected, determine permissions, and wield access control. I say the big disruption comes from breaking down, or at least in the attempts to break down, exactly those barriers. Call me crazy (by now you probably are), but once again I find that opening up is the key.

We’ve been playing around with a lot of Enterprise-Internal twitterclones lately and I often find myself confused about whether I should post — or am posting — “publicly” or not. Then there are the several different levels of “public” itself, and “follow” — within your whole company, or a hand-picked group? And the groups themselves: we’ve got people inside our company who don’t want to be talking to other teams much less to the whole company much less publicly. To me as a person, I find these levels of fragmentation confusing.

Of course — there are company-internal and group-internal secrets and plenty of good reason not to be open about everything all the time. And it’s often unwise or illegal to be open — and for good reason — and sometimes it’s just downright hard. But come on: if we’re honest, how much of what we’re closed about is really going to be a competitive secret? Like the good folks at Metaweb say regarding Freebase — is it really a competitive disadvantage if companies share their information about coffees (I think it was Colin Evans who said this at the Web 2.0 Expo)? Some of it is simply about being generous with information — and your person. So time and again I return to just how amazing it is when people *do* cast away these boundaries and access levels (for whatever reason) and truly “come out” in whatever way they want to, without having to think “Oh no — who’s going to see this? I better not say it then.”

That “fear-to-the-wind” moment is what happened to me last weekend, and you can ridicule my anxiety if you want, but I asked for and found a new place for the connection I needed, and furthermore, in the process know a little bit more about those environments in which I thrive best.

Opening up – I don’t care whether it’s to your colleague or to a total stranger or to the passenger next to you – that is the fight-or-flight, and that is the key.