Ten Years of Blogging

Today is my ten year blogiversary.  This is my 615th blog post.

In my first blog post, I wrote about the tools I used and wrote to support this blog. In my second blog post, I explained why I started blogging. I cited three reasons.

First, I wanted to understand the medium better, and I learn best by doing.

Second, I wanted a platform for carrying out some tool experiments.

Third — and this was the main reason — Chris Dent, my cofounder at Blue Oxen Associates, kept nagging me to do so. If you’re looking to blame someone for 615 posts worth of noise over ten years, blame Chris.

In that first post, I made light of people blogging about their cats and the things that they ate. My intention was to use this medium strictly as a place to share my thinking on collaboration. While I’ve continued to use it that way, I also drifted far away from that. It became much more of a personal sandbox, and yes, that has included many posts about things that I’ve eaten. Based on my analytics, people are much more interested in what I eat than they are about what I have to say about collaboration. So it goes.

In celebration of my blogiversary, I had hoped to do an extensive analysis of the things I’ve written over the past ten years. Then last week, my friend and mentor, Doug Engelbart, passed away.

I’ve been thinking a lot about him and about what he meant to my life and my career. That man literally changed my life. I wanted to write something special about him, but it’s been a hard process, and it will take me some time.

So in the spirit of old school blogging, I’ll point you to two things written about Doug by two friends: the aforementioned Chris Dent and Brad Neuberg, who worked with me on Doug’s HyperScope project in 2006.

Thank you to everyone who ever engaged with me on this blog, whether it was linking to a post, leaving a comment, or simply reading and thinking about what I had to say. The simple act of writing things down has helped me considerably, but I’ve also developed some amazing relationships with people through this blog, and that has meant the world to me. We’ll see if I can manage another ten years.

Aaron Swartz

In July 2001, Doug Engelbart was invited to speak at the International Semantic Web Working Symposium at Stanford. Doug knew very little about the Semantic Web, so he asked me to come along and act as his translator.

When we arrived that day, the registration line was already out the door. As we stood and waited, we saw Ted Nelson, who came over to say hello. No one paid any attention to these computing legends, which wasn’t a surprise, because no one knew who they were. The field evolves at lightning speed, and we easily forget its pioneers. Even if people knew who they were, they wouldn’t have necessarily known what they looked like.

So when a short, pudgy kid walked by, stopped in his tracks, and started hyperventilating like a girl at a Bieber concert, I took notice. After a few moments, he approached and stuttered, “Are you Doug Engelbart?”

Doug smiled, not because he was recognized, but because he is one of the kindest, most gracious person you will ever meet. “Yes, I am,” he nodded.

The young man then turned to Ted. “Are you Ted Nelson?” he asked.

“Yes, I am,” said Ted. Ted is a showman whose public persona is that of an acerbic, yet charming agitator, but at his core, he too is 100% gentleman.

“Oh my god,” the boy breathed. “I can’t believe it! Oh my god.”

“Who are you?” asked Doug.

“My name is Aaron,” he responded.

They began to talk, this shy, 14-year old, who couldn’t believe what was happening, and these two, gentle computing legends, delighted and charmed by his youthful glee. I asked him what he was doing there. “I’m on the RDF Technical Committee,” he explained. I nodded. That wasn’t a surprise to me. The tech world is largely meritocratic and littered with brilliant teenagers making real contributions. It was far more surprising that he recognized and was in awe of Doug and Ted.

Aaron asked if he could take a picture of those two.

“No,” I interjected, before Doug or Ted could say a word. “You have to be in the picture.” Aaron handed me his camera, and I snapped this shot:

Ted Nelson, Aaron Swartz, and Doug Engelbart

I crossed paths with Aaron Swartz several times over the years, and like many, I tracked his work on the web. In person, he was painfully shy, even sullen, a sharp contrast to his incisive, aggressive online persona. The first few times I saw him, I went out of my way to say hello and ask how he was doing. I was always more interested in hearing about him than I was about his current projects. I think he found that weird and uncomfortable, probably rightfully so. After a while, whenever I ran across him, I simply nodded hello and went about my business.

In tech, everybody knows everybody, and we had lots of friends and interests in common — hacking, the Web, free culture, Wikipedia. And of course, we both idolized Doug and Ted. But we were not friends. I barely knew him, I didn’t follow him on Twitter, and I had stopped following his blog years ago.

So I can’t explain why I was so devastated by the news of his passing late last night. I can’t explain why I stayed up late last night, thinking about Aaron, thinking about the many people who cared about him, thinking about all of my own friends, wondering how much I actually knew anybody, whether I knew what people were going through, whether or not I was truly there for the people I cared about.

Maybe it was because I could never get that very first impression of Aaron out of my head, that shy teenager who derived such joy from meeting two legends whom no one else recognized. That Aaron was so different from the Aaron I saw from afar, both in person and online, in subsequent years.

Or maybe it was simply because, when any 26-year old — regardless of who he is or what he’s accomplished — takes his own life, you can’t help but feel heartbreak.

Rest in peace, Aaron.

On Doing Things Well

My business partner, Kristin Cobble, is a Peter Senge disciple, and we’ve been having good conversations over the past few weeks about learning organizations. In the course of these discussions, I was reminded of a huge pet peeve of mine. I hate it when people say things like:

“We’re not collaborating.”

“That’s not a network.”

“We’re not a learning organization.”

when what they actually mean is:

“We’re not collaborating well.”

“That’s not an effective network.”

“We’re not an effective learning organization.”

I’m not just being pedantic. Not only does the qualifier matters, it’s the question that most of us actually care about.

Let’s take learning organizations as an example. Senge defines learning organizations as organizations that are continually expanding their capacity to create their desired futures. (This is almost identical to Doug Engelbart’s definition of organizations that are collectively intelligent.)

By this definition, any organization that is profitable is a learning organization, because more money generally increases the capacity of most groups to create their desired futures. Of course, this is not what most people actually mean when they talk about learning organizations. It’s not because it’s wrong. It’s because what we really care about is what makes organizations effective at learning. Profitably can indicate effectiveness, but it is not the defining factor.

Treating things like learning and collaboration as a continuum rather than as a binary acknowledges what you are already doing and supports you in building on that, rather than assuming (usually incorrectly) that you’re not doing it in the first place. It also gets you out of the mindset of trying to follow someone else’s predefined template. In other words, it puts the emphasis on the verb (to learn, to collaborate) rather than the noun.

Senge’s attributes for learning organizations are great, and I refer to them all the time. But when people ask me about what it means to be a learning organization, I turn the questions back to them:

  • What does it mean for you, individually, to learn?
  • What’s an example of something you’ve learned well?  What enabled you to learn that effectively?
  • What’s an example of something your organization has learned? What enabled it to learn? How could you create conditions that would enable your organization to learn more effectively?

Simply taking the time to explore these kinds of questions together is the first step toward making any group effective at learning.

Leaving Trails and Serendipity

This morning, I’ve been doing some time travel. I’ve been doing a lot of writing and reflecting this weekend. Some of it has been for clients, some of it has been for this blog and the Groupaya blog, and some of it has been on internal wikis. I do a decent job of leaving trails, and tools like blogs and wikis have nice features that encourage serendipitous connections. That’s resulted in some interesting stuff I’ve written in the past rising to the surface.

Here are two previous blog posts that turned up serendipitously because of stuff that I wrote this weekend (including this post):

About five years ago, I wrote a post entitled, “Work Rhythms.” (This post turned up as a “Related post” under my previous blog post, since Nancy White is mentioned in both.) It talks a lot about the merits of slowing down, and it references influential interactions with folks such as Nancy, Chris Dent (my Blue Oxen Associates cofounder), and Howard Rheingold. It’s interesting to see how much I thought about this stuff five years ago, how much that thinking has stuck with me five years later, and how much I still struggle with this.

Here’s a nice historical piece about coworking, a blog post I wrote in 2005 entitled, “Coworking Open House, November 21.” (This post turned up because I was searching for stuff I had written previously about wikis encouraging serendipitous interactions. I couldn’t find what I was looking for, but I found this post instead.) It’s an invitation to an early event my friend, Brad Neuberg, threw to spread the gospel of coworking, a term that he coined. It’s awesome to read and remember this, knowing what a huge phenomenon coworking has become since. What’s even more interesting about that post is that I didn’t know Brad that well at the time, but I had clearly connected strongly with him. A few months later, I hired him to be the architect and chief developer for Doug Engelbart‘s HyperScope, a wild professional and personal experience that I still treasure today.

The Unexpected Pleasures of Open, Transparent Processes

Every project has a team. How those teams form is an interesting question. For the most part, the “leader” of a project decides who is on or off a team, and then they go off on their merry way.    (N2B)

If that work is done openly and transparently, then that opens up the possibility of attracting other contributors. This is the essential goal of movement-building, where the desire is to get other people to act. It’s also what makes Open Source software projects and Wikis work.    (N2C)

The question is, how open and transparent should the process be? Being fully open invites distraction. When the Chandler Project was first announced, list activity went through the roof, and the signal-to-noise ratio was very low. People were galvanized by Mitch Kapor‘s involvement and, of course, everyone had an opinion. It was a dangerous time for the project, because the goals were not concrete, and the process for how to reach concreteness had not yet been established.    (N2D)

How do you balance the desire to be open (and attract outside contributors) with the need to get things done? The key is clarity of vision and process, as well as a realistic assessment of the risks and rewards.    (N2E)

When Doug Engelbart asked me to lead the HyperScope project in 2006, I knew that it was imperative that we deliver. (Visionaries have a sometimes deserved reputation for never actually delivering a product.) At the same time, we really wanted to spread the core ideas widely and galvanize the community.    (N2F)

We had already decided that the project would be Open Source, which meant that some of the processes would inherently be open — open source code repository, open mailing list, open Wiki, and so forth. We also instituted good practices — regularly posting summaries to the community, carrying on much of our activity online (a key principle of the Apache community), and so forth.    (N2G)

I also decided that our weekly face-to-face meetings would be open as well. This was the biggest risk for a few reasons. Doug was going to attend the meetings, and there was a possibility that people would come just to meet Doug. This, in my opinion, was actually a good thing, as long as we weren’t overwhelmed with people and as long as guests did not prevent us from getting things done. I reasoned that we wouldn’t be for two reasons. First, Doug isn’t as much of a household name as he should be, certainly not as much as Mitch Kapor for example. (This is sad and the topic of a future post.) Second, neither was I. I have a large social network, but it’s not enormous, and it’s fairly intimate with lots of trust. I didn’t think a huge number of people would see my announcement, and I trusted those who did to do the right thing.    (N2H)

I was confident in my ability to tightly facilitate the meetings, and I also felt strongly that the rewards of openness, in our case, far outweighed the risks. I was also prepared for the possibility that no one would show up, despite the openness.    (N2I)

I was blown away by who did show up. We had a lot of folks from the old Augmentation Research Center, which was an absolute delight. Many people told me afterwards what a delight it was for them to have us pepper them with questions about their 50-year old work. We had many friends and friends-of-friends visit, all of whom greatly added to the conversation.    (N2J)

Before each meeting, I welcomed our guests, but I also explained that it was a working meeting, and I asked that they respect our need to get things done and participate accordingly. For the most part, that’s all the facilitation I needed to do. I occasionally had to reign people in, but I usually found myself actually encouraging our guests to participate.    (N2K)

At our launch party, I gave special T-shirts to each team member. Two of the people on the team and on the T-shirt were people from the community who found out about our work on their and dropped in. One was John Deneen, a long-time fan of Doug’s, who videotaped and photographed all of our meetings. The second was Craig Latta, a Smalltalk guru who had worked on a variety of old-school hypertext projects in the past and who ended up helping us tremendously on a variety of technical challenges.    (N2L)

https://i0.wp.com/static.flickr.com/97/236665573_2b0e38419e_m.jpg?w=700  T    (N2M)

When I work with groups, I often encourage them to challenge their own assumptions about openness and transparency. Extra effort is required, and sometimes, the hoped-for benefits do not occur. However, more often than not, folks are pleasantly surprised — sometimes even amazed — by what emerges.    (N2N)