Author Archives for Moya Watson

Wie man sich bettet


Secure Tree

Originally uploaded by moyalynne

“It works both ways — you’ve told me that yourself. Our free exchange of information means swifter progress, even if we do give away a few secrets… We’ll show them that Democracy can get to the moon first.”
Arthur C. Clarke — Childhood’s End — 1953

I had an incredible heart-to-heart with a colleague last week. We were talking about openness vs. closedness, specifically in the world of large enterprises.

This colleague has learned some tricky lessons recently, when work that was achieved was not acknowledged where he thought it counted most. Worse, he witnessed what seemed like more powerful factions taking credit for things that other people had directly initiated or even achieved — unacknowledged. He’s now working within an effort to determine how people can get their due credit for their work. Nearly painfully, he recounted how it’s now his impression that when you work in an open atmosphere, you wind up being punished and even exploited. In the future, his colleagues should learn to contemplate hiding their work until the work is quite ready. This was not his initial attitude.

Herein lies the struggle between openness and closedness — the struggle, some would say, between “Web 2.0” and the enterprise itself. Learning to hide, to me, is risky and counter to productivity and collaboration. The risk is that you focus so much more on hiding your work than actually working that innovation is stifled. And by the way — you’re also not very nice sometimes. If colleagues need help and you don’t stand to gain anything from it, you don’t help, which I find risky to the soul. (Maybe what matters is only whether you can live with yourself either way.)

No, I don’t think that organizations, or people, need to be either all open or all closed, nor do I behave exclusively openly – far from it. But I do know that personally, for me, my life has been a heck of a lot more fulfilling when I approach it openly and I don’t have to hide. I’m more productive within an open, cooperative environment in which information flows freely and people (gasp) help each other. This is “the generosity of the Internet” (as I heard Caterina Fake once describe it) and it resonates with me.

And yes, my colleague is right. I understand that within a system of imbalance of power, openness is perceived to lead to exploitation. True, start-ups also have “stealth modes” for a reason, and if you share your work early on, you are at risk for someone else more powerful taking credit for it or even taking it all together. And I’m sure this doesn’t even begin to compare to the world of academia, where credit for ideas is *everything.* So am I naive? Surely. I keep sharing, helping my colleagues and my neighbors and virtual strangers and friends online whenever I can. At least, it’s the world that I need to live in.

Ultimately I have learned I have all the power I need: I have the power to tell my own story, to speak out where and when I see fit, to speak against injustice and praise generosity, to value collaboration and participation, and, if the system no longer supports it, to no longer participate. And I do thank “the generosity of the Internet” for that.

My gold medal

new lucy

new lucy

Now I remember what it is that feels so familiar about the Summer Olympics. It was this time of year four years ago that they last rolled around. It was August 2004 when I also went into labor.

That first night after my water broke, I felt cramps in waves and I laid awake on the couch trying to do the impossible (ignore them). Late at night, I watched the great San-Francisco-y movie “Dopamine” and I remember it as the drug it felt like.

The following night, we felt more festive and turned on the Olympics to compare people’s extraordinary physical feats with what I was going through in my body. The day after that, Lucy arrived. Though no party, labor was nearly marvelous (I say with the miraculous blog-ability of four years hindsight).

In those first couple of years before Lucy could verbalize as much as she can now, her birthdays seemed like testaments to us making it through another year together. Now they are growing with an abundance of her own special characteristics. But there are those moments I look back to those nights of labor and wonder at that line of demarcation between then and now.

These particular Olympics and their attendant controversy (come on, there is always that) are not nearly the point. The athletes themselves form a band around the world, in their exquisitely practiced form so unearthly yet commonplace, and we all feel like we could be one of them – or they could represent us all. Not so much one country against another, but a union. There are some things that all of us have done.

Lucy watched two Olympic dives tonight (which is all of what I’ve managed to catch so far as well) and then proceeded to demonstrate everything that she could do too – just like while watching the Cirque du Soleil, when she dragged her stool out, got up on it, and cried about how much she too wanted to fly.

As Lucy herself said once, “I’m your special, mama.” She makes everything so common and so singularly unique – nothing felt like this before those Olympics four years ago. Just like she is, I’m still working on it and still get to wonder all the time.  If birth were an Olympic sport…

Licensed to marry

I think we took one just like this in 2004!What else, I asked Leanne this morning when we were in the county clerk’s office at San Francisco City Hall, can you do in a county clerk’s office besides get licensed to marry? “Register to vote?” she offered. We couldn’t think of a single other thing. Indeed, most of the couples we encountered today seemed to be just like us: going down to City Hall to get a marriage license. I never aspired to feeling so normal before, but there’s something so joyous in the fact that it is no circus, just the fact of a couple getting married, anymore.

Many of the pictures we took were nearly the exact same poses from that day in 2004 when Gavin Newsom opened up the licenses to everyone — except today when we got our marriage license, it was hardly as exciting — and yet very profoundly different. For one thing, we didn’t have to wait in line for five hours, but we simply made an appointment and showed up at 10am. For another, no news cameras. For a third, we don’t have to rush to actually have the ceremony on the same day as getting the license — and we can actually plan a wedding. Oh, and we have a four-year-old girl whom we adore (so we didn’t need the “planning for pregnancy” tips handed out with the license — thanks though!). Oh — and it’s legal.Put down the cigarettes!

It sort of sums it up, what we overheard while waiting for our form to be officialized (“now serving: number A40”): “After 20 years, I’m not nervous; I’m just excited!”

So there we have it. For the next three months, Leanne and I are officially licensed to marry. And we plan to execute it in style. Don’t worry — I don’t believe it’s lethal. In fact, after nearly 11 years together (and from those years, a huge pile of blog posts I migrated just today to WordPress that attests to how hard we’ve fought for our success), nothing could seem more regular, normal, human, and about time.