Category Archives for community

Volumes of a Man

I had lunch with my father yesterday.  I twittered that I was lunching with the most important man in the world – but he in reality has always made me feel like the most important person in his world, and I bet that everyone in my family, and beyond, feels like that whenever they are talking with him.

He brought me some important records from his long and successful working career in different in ascending levels of government in California. He shared wisdom gleaned from all these years of his important career.

Many things he said struck me and will help me, but one thing made me bolt awake early this morning. Whenever he went into meetings, he said, he took a notebook and he always took a lot of notes. Before he met with me he took the time to go through his huge porter, as he called it, to find the essence of what was important to bring to me. He said there are notebooks and notebooks and notebooks in this huge porter.

This struck me in the light of the early morning for two reasons. One is that every day – or maybe just as time goes on – I find ways I am more alike with my family. A bolt of recognition breeds a common understanding, and that’s a special feeling I’m getting used to with my daughter as well. Just like my dad, it turns out, I take tons of notes (coming as no surprise to anyone who works with me).

The second reason has to do with that elusive process of synthesis. To some, the amazing point might be that he kept all those notebooks at all, but to me, the big gift is that my dad pulled out just the right notebooks that would be valuable to me at this point in my working career. What’s funny about blogging this is that I believe this to be the point of “Web 2.0:” the synthesis. The medium might have changed from notebooks (just as from newspapers, editorials, letters, even emails) to blogging – now continuing on to twittering – but the point is still the same: to synthesize.

When it comes down to it, is the huge porter and the process of going through notebook after notebook really a different process of innovation than popping up a browser tab to Google? The tools might have advanced with us, but what’s important is culling through those years of volumes to get to the right point at the right moment – for the right person.  How lucky I am that Dad has always made me feel like the right person.

The third of two things that struck me (yes, I should have kept sleeping) is that innovation is such a continuing process, just like another common thread through our family. Big companies talk about reacting to this or that latest disruption as if it’s the only one. It’s only today’s — this moment is small. What’s important in the next moment will be different.

Goodbye Blogger?

I was one of the original Blogger bloggers.  My Blogger blog is so old that it doesn’t even work properly anymore and some huge long list of complicated post-Google things still has to be done to convert it — especially the archive links.  But I do have one of those nifty Google / Blogger sweatshirts to show for the fact that I “bought” a Blogger blog way back when it cost money – and glad I was. Ev – did you singlehandedly light the fuse of Web 2.0?

At any rate — I feel a little duplicitous to be kicking around in WordPress now.  Until merging/purging/converting/whatever, so be it. I doubt it’s really goodbye Blogger, for now.

Lit Crawl and the Resurgence of the Mission

I was trying to figure out what about last Saturday’s Lit Crawl particularly warmed my heart, and it hit me this morning like a stream of light through the sun down 280 (which if you think about it, makes it clear I wasn’t actually reading at the Lit Crawl).

As I look forward to attending the Web 2.0 Summit tomorrow through Friday in San Francisco, my community, work, and the different roads and travails in between are again on my mind (not like they’re never not on my mind). Those of us who already lived here in the mid-to-late ’90s of the last millenium remember names like Kozmo, Webvan, Bigstep, and slogans like “because pets can’t drive.” Those of us who lived in the Mission district in San Francisco remember the schizophrenia of the times and the huge influx of people striking for a new gold rush. These people could bring excitement and ideas, but they often left frighteningly quickly and with waste in their wake.

In just one of many similar scenarios, Bigstep took over a huge building down at 22nd and Mission. Artists and teachers were evicted, presumably to the outskirts of civilization, because artists and teachers didn’t earn the mint for living there now. Till recently this exodus hasn’t been a memory, but rather a reality.

I don’t know when or if it started to feel like a memory for most, but on Saturday night, the “death of the Mission” was far from my mind. Oceans of people washed down Valencia, Mission, and Guerrero from one pub (or laundromat) to the next and crammed in and on top of every nook and cranny (or agitator) to hear people reading. Reading! Literature, poetry, fiction, travel writing, rock writing were all alive and well and thriving with absolutely masses of people. Only this morning, looking back, did it make me feel like we’ve finally come out, and back into some kind of goodness again.