Tue, Jan 31, 2006
TWiki 4.0 Released #
Congratulations to PeterThoeny and the entire TWiki community for the 4.0 (Dakar) release of TWiki. They're doing a release party tomorrow (Wednesday) night at WikiWednesday in PaloAlto. I'm gonna do my darnedest to make it, but if not, I hope to see many of you Wiki folks this weekend in Portland for RecentChangesCamp. I plan on visiting Seattle afterwards, so if you're in Portland or Seattle and want to meet up, let me know. (K4L)
/tech/wiki | Posted at 11:18pm
Sun, Jan 29, 2006
Morning in San Francisco #
I love living in SanFrancisco. (K4K)
/personal | Posted at 7:29am
Wed, Jan 25, 2006
World Economic Forum Gossip #
BlueOxenAssociates has been working with TomorrowMakers to help with the design process at this year's WorldEconomicForum. Sadly, I couldn't be in Davos this year, so I've had to resort to good ol' fashioned remote collaboration tools to keep up with what's happening. I had this funny exchange with the most excellent AliciaBramlett just now: (K4E)
eugeneerickim: i'll expect full gossip on any world leaders you rub elbows with ;-) (K4F)
abramlett: China's Vice Premiere showed up today and John Gage just strolled thru. Its a strange place :) (K4G)
I'll gladly share any juicy, second-handed gossip with any of y'all, but you'll have to ply me with booze first, and you run the not-so-unlikely possibility that I'll be making it all up. (K4H)
/events | Posted at 9:05am
Sun, Jan 22, 2006
How Hackers Collaborate #
The January SDForum Collaboration SIG meeting is tomorrow (Monday), 6:30-9pm, January 23 at the Pillsbury Winthrop law firm in PaloAlto. The topic: "How Hackers Collaborate." We've got an outstanding set of "panelists": LeeFelsenstein, JimWarren, and DavidWeekly. Lee is a legendary hacker from the HomebrewComputerClub days, the founder of the CommunityMemoryProject, and the founder of the FonlyInstitute. Jim founded the Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference and InfoWorld?, and was the founding editor of DrDobbsJournal. He also founded the WestCoastComputerFaire, a successful series of conferences in the late 1970s and early 1980s that was directly inspired by the HomebrewComputerClub. David is the co-creator of SuperHappyDevHouse, a BayArea-based monthly hacker gathering. (K3V)
I call them "panelists," because this won't be a traditional panel. This will be highly participatory, an opportunity to share your stories about hacking with others. It will be entertaining, engaging, and educational. So please come! (It's free for SDForum members, $15 for everyone else.) (K3W)
/events | Posted at 11:52pm
Thu, Jan 19, 2006
Working With Others: Loose vs Tight Collaboration #
Last November, I explained that I was going to embark on a series of open conversations with KatrinVerclas. Katrin initiated the conversation with a list of life and career desires. I wanted to quote my favorite items here, but I couldn't pick just one. So instead, here's a question for Katrin. Katrin, you say: (K2P)
I want to work with a team of people who know how to be a team, who are flexible, give, take, are giving, competent, smart, have a sense of humour, are creative, passionate about what they do, and good at it, who know how to truly collaborate for a bigger and better whole. (K2Q)
What's been your best experience working with a team? Did that experience match this stated goal, and if not, what was missing? (K2R)
I spent a ton of time in college doing stuff with the campus computer group. We weren't just a group of nerds who got together to hack (although we did plenty of that). At the time, the Internet was on the verge of exploding, and our school had just finished installing Ethernet in all of the undergraduate dorms. We saw ourselves as playing an integral role in getting folks on campus to understand technology's great potential. In this vein, we taught seminars and sponsored a lecture series. We provided support for the network and hosted Web sites for campus groups. We advised campus officials on policy and ways to put new ideas into practice, then we helped them actually do it. We kicked some serious butt, and we had a heckuva lot of fun along the way. (K2S)
The raw talent in that group was remarkable, something that's even more clear today as I look at what many of these people have accomplished post-college. More importantly, there were a lot of good people there, and I became life-long friends with many of them. (K2T)
I've often said that I'd jump at the chance to work with any of those folks again, but experience has shown that this isn't quite true. The opportunity has come up several times, and I've turned down all of them, although most very reluctantly. It has nothing to do with the people, and everything to do with timing, personal values, and the work itself. (K2U)
I don't want to have to choose between working with great people and working on something I'm passionate about -- I want to have both. I don't think I'm alone in this. There are several people with whom I would love to work more closely, but for a variety of reasons, it won't happen soon, if ever. Sometimes, the alignment is only slight off, but having that alignment in values and goals is critical to success and happiness. (K2V)
This has broader applicability when it comes to facilitating collaboration in large groups, and it has to do with the difference between what I call loose and tight collaboration. Tight collaboration occurs when you have a strongly shared, concrete goal, and it usually manifests itself in small, tight-knit groups. Loose collaboration occurs when you are working towards a larger, possibly unbounded goal. (In fact, according to the definition of collaboration I throw around all the time, "loose collaboration" would not always qualify as "collaboration," since the goal could be, but is not necessarily unbounded.) (K2W)
Some people desire tight collaboration to the point of unhappiness. I've seen people complain that their community is not working together, when in fact, the problem is not that collaboration is not happening, it's that it's not aligning itself around a particular person's individual goals and desires. All too often, "We can't agree," actually means, "I can't get the group to agree with me." When you consider collaboration at a large-scale, this kind of thinking is not viable. It is possible to be loosely aligned and to collaborate loosely with others to the benefit of all. (K2X)
Bringing it back to individual goals and desires, I've had wonderful experiences with loose collaboration with BlueOxenAssociates, but only fleeting experiences of great tight collaboration. I'm not too unhappy about the latter, though, because I think it's largely a matter of timing. It's certainly not due to the lack of candidates. As the business continues to grow, I think those experiences will occur more frequently. (K2Y)
I'll end this rambling with a flight of fancy. Towards the end of college, when I was trying to decide what to do with my life, I settled on the following fancy: Pick a neighborhood in the worst part of some urban city, start a K-12 school with ten of my smartest friends, and see it through at least long enough to watch the first kindergarten class graduate from high school. I still fantasize about this scenario, and in a lot of ways, it captures what I want to do with my life and many of the elements of what I'm trying to do with BlueOxenAssociates. (K2Z)
/collaboration | Posted at 4:34pm
The New Year Rageth #
Happy New Year everybody! So much for easing into 2006. Somehow, I deluded myself into thinking that the year would start off slowly, especially after the craziness towards the end of last year. Fortunately, it's been a great craziness. I'm working on several great projects with great people, and I think the results will be important and exciting. Looking forward to sharing my progress and thoughts here. (K2O)
/personal | Posted at 3:12pm
