Category Archives for community

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…

These high-riding web2 days

my ride

go ahead - take the high ride

But I digress…

Just about nothing I have ever accomplished in my near-two-decades of work in software technology in the Bay Area has been simultaneously as complicated — or as simple — as implementing a wiki community. I created, evangelized, and administered an internal innovation community where I work, and for over a year it has exhibited tremendous growth and has been a success all around. Nothing could be easier than concocting the right theme and use cases, creating a cool set of templates, applying an agile and sociable design, and harnessing the built-in wiki features that surface fresh content dynamically. Seeding content and shepherding people unfamiliar with the “wysiwig” or markup interface into the world of working in wiki has likewise been fun and dare-I-say carefree. Watching content bubble in and funnel and collect and percolate, all-the-while cross-linking and spreading connections across the organization, has been joy.

However, nothing was a harder decision than to implement a wiki, not to mention choose the “right” platform, and there is a constant education process on “why use a wiki in the first place” (once you get beyond “what the heck’s a wiki?”). Beyond that, there’s something more mysterious — particularly in the large enterprise. Something that’s still hard for me to grasp — something ethereal — that makes it hardest of all. I’m not exactly sure, but I think it has something to do with having shots of tequila as a teenager.

I have had many surprisingly heart-to-heart conversations with colleagues about “why wiki” and “why share all this stuff?” and “why does it work?”, but one of the most enduring memories is a talk about Facebook in which my pal tossed around the old “you have to watch what you say on these things — or your employers will find it and it will come back to haunt you” sentiment. At last impatient with that tired old standby, my response surprised even me. Maybe the key, I said, isn’t learning how to censor ourselves. On the contrary — maybe the key is something more like coming to the realization that a whole lot of us did shots of tequila as a teenager; that many of us are imperfect; and furthermore that instead of being a liability, these are the things that really matter. In the end, I further pontificated, perhaps the profoundest shift of “Web 2.0” is in fact just that: a broader acceptance of all of our humanness in the face of not being able to hide it anymore.

Whoops. I was going to write a post about something entirely (but not quite) different (late-in-coming, the May edition of Governing featured an article on wikis called Working in Wiki). Looks like that will have to wait just a bit longer. I guess this one needed to come out and stay out.

Thoughts on vacation

Indeed, I thought while I was on vacation. Along stretches of Highway Five and down along the Amtrak line, where you’re not found on a map and nobody really knows where you are, I had time to think. And to finish a book.  The long travel-based stretches were about it for thinking though — the rest ranged from peaceful family time to utter chaos, and often the chaos won. Certainly no time for thought there.

I’ve been playing around with SlideShare in attempt to both put a story to vacation and overcome my legendary dislike of PowerPoint.  Let’s see how far I get: