I use Twitter a lot. Stating the obvious, really. But it's causing a little bit of a problem, and it's not one I'm sure how to fix. And I am supposed to be 'the expert' in our organisation, so I am somewhat embarrassed and frustrated by my own inability to walk forth and say 'the solution is this, put it in the guidelines'.
The simple fact is, I'm a geek. So, I like the usual things stereotypical geeks like: XKCD, Dr Who, attending random sci-fi conventions, unconferences and bar camps, as well as attending assorted genres of live music gigs, concerts and festivals. Mix this with 1600 followers containing assorted local and national journalists, Heads of Department and Sections, Directors, Ministers and other various 'important people' out in the real world and suddenly it feels as though it would be quite an imposition to tweet that, for example, I thought Matt Smith was looking particularly fit in the Christmas Day Dr Who special.
Added to this that when attending events with hashtags attached to them, I tend to tweet at a rate of 20 or so an hour (or more) you can see where the problem lies.
When someone follows you, it feels as if you're a guest in their digital space. You're taking up pixels. The more people who follow you, the more this becomes true, the more the pressure mounts, to say something worthy, something important. You don't retweet things because no one else would find it interesting. You don't say anything about anything becaue no one would be interested and eventually, the very reason people followed you in the first place - because you are interesting - is snuffed out.
So here's my advice to other people wondering about the weird cross between 'personalisation', 'personal brand' and being yourself on Twitter. If you're the kind of person who has a lot of real life friends on Twitter, and a whole social bubble off Twitter, create a seperate account. Use it to organise D & D sessions, tweet from gigs and festivals, for posting that random picture. Chill out, relax, do what you always did. Set up another account for 'work' and make sure that there's some of you on there as well, but keep the geeky randomness seperate. But if the work you do is Ruby or something equally geeky that not all your friends will be interested in, don't be surprised if they follow your 'work' account and quickly unfollow you. They simply wont be interested in that cool bit of code and while the odd tweet here and there wont annoy, I speak from immediate experience when I say when the signal to noise ratio goes above a certain point, Twitter will no longer be where you can organise a quick present swap at Xmas - no one will be following you.
Most people wont have this problem. Most people are offline more than on. Most people can combine beautifully themselves and their work and irritate neither camp excessively. This problem, I think, might be a uniquely geeky one.
What has been fascinating to me over the last day or so is the kind of person who understands entirely why I've done this, and the kind of person who cannot understand at all. And the demographics don't break down the way you'd think. Non geeks understand, just as much as geeks do, though my geeky friends perhaps understand most of all as they're finding a similar collision of cultures.
There is a new world order out there. Being you is absolutely a good thing. An expected thing. It allows people to trust you, warm to you, understand what motivates and drives you. But there is a line, nevertheless, which must not be crossed and I have finally found it easier to draw the line myself, than expect others to do it for me.
The new world order isn't quite as simplistic and easy to comprehend as I was expecting it to be. I suspect there are some more challenges upcoming in the near future around what constitutes a friend, the connections which are made on social media which don't necessarily transfer into the real world, what happens when you get to know someone on social media, meet them face to face and have nothing to say......
I'll keep writing about them and sharing experiences, because I think it's important. No one is an expert in this, no matter what they might think, we all get caught out. Wrong account tweeted from, wrong thing said, a view harshly and clumsily expressed. Tweets can be deleted but words are still seen.
I'd like to think the world has space for a fluffy little geek, but ultimately, there is a professional expectation of a woman to be a certain way in the workplace, and so that way I will be.
Showing posts with label aboutme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aboutme. Show all posts
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
Sunday, 19 December 2010
Words echoing
Words which have been thrown away, recently:
"the ties that bind"
I dislike intensely being bound to anything. The word bind, or being bound, implies a lack of choice, enforced incapacity. I'm not good at that. I fight back. I kick back. I automatically want to cut the ties, tear them to shreds, break them apart, burn them, destroy them. I want to be somewhere because I choose to be there, like to be there, because being there fires sparks in my mind and hope and joy in my heart. I've endured enough darkness and restrction. You can't put a butterfly back into a bottle. Or maybe you can? But binding me to somewhere, will automatically ensure that I do not wish to be there any longer. Where I stay is where I choose to be, whether it might appear that there are bindings, or no. My ties might not look the same as yours, different knots, invisible restrictions.
"get over yourself Lou. No seriously, get over yourself"
I never realised it came across that way. Had never considered it for a second. Explains so much, the slight hesitancy and confusion, the impatience and frustration. People don't think it's real, that I am, somehow, not telling the truth about the way things were and the way things are, because my friends who know me well, or rather who knew me well, no longer seem to want to have a place in the world where I am now what and who I am. So, to have someone who's earned respect for a beautiful mind and a massive intelligence to tell me, and tell me straight? Needed. Appreciated. Okay. Perhaps this post is part of the process. There's a choice at the end of it, I know there is. In the absence of anyone with the time nor inclination to listen, instead I try and organise the chaos here. There is nowhere else. The conversations which have come after with the idiocy out of the way, with the assuredness of straight talking and none of this complicated dancing around each other trying to play power games, but instead a completely straight clear open exchange of thoughts and concepts have been liberating. Reignited a spark.
"what are you waiting for? permission?"
Back and back and back again. I don't know. A chat in a pub with someone where egos, job titles, money earnt, status, position, gender were checked at the door? Help. I'm waiting for help. Honesty. It's there, I know it is, but I'm 300 miles away and the frustration is in danger of destroying any hope or chance.
"DO IT"
I want to. More than anything. There are no buts. There are no ifs. There is just the crossroads.
Users at the crossroads of life: One
Anyone got time for a pint?
"the ties that bind"
I dislike intensely being bound to anything. The word bind, or being bound, implies a lack of choice, enforced incapacity. I'm not good at that. I fight back. I kick back. I automatically want to cut the ties, tear them to shreds, break them apart, burn them, destroy them. I want to be somewhere because I choose to be there, like to be there, because being there fires sparks in my mind and hope and joy in my heart. I've endured enough darkness and restrction. You can't put a butterfly back into a bottle. Or maybe you can? But binding me to somewhere, will automatically ensure that I do not wish to be there any longer. Where I stay is where I choose to be, whether it might appear that there are bindings, or no. My ties might not look the same as yours, different knots, invisible restrictions.
"get over yourself Lou. No seriously, get over yourself"
I never realised it came across that way. Had never considered it for a second. Explains so much, the slight hesitancy and confusion, the impatience and frustration. People don't think it's real, that I am, somehow, not telling the truth about the way things were and the way things are, because my friends who know me well, or rather who knew me well, no longer seem to want to have a place in the world where I am now what and who I am. So, to have someone who's earned respect for a beautiful mind and a massive intelligence to tell me, and tell me straight? Needed. Appreciated. Okay. Perhaps this post is part of the process. There's a choice at the end of it, I know there is. In the absence of anyone with the time nor inclination to listen, instead I try and organise the chaos here. There is nowhere else. The conversations which have come after with the idiocy out of the way, with the assuredness of straight talking and none of this complicated dancing around each other trying to play power games, but instead a completely straight clear open exchange of thoughts and concepts have been liberating. Reignited a spark.
"what are you waiting for? permission?"
Back and back and back again. I don't know. A chat in a pub with someone where egos, job titles, money earnt, status, position, gender were checked at the door? Help. I'm waiting for help. Honesty. It's there, I know it is, but I'm 300 miles away and the frustration is in danger of destroying any hope or chance.
"DO IT"
I want to. More than anything. There are no buts. There are no ifs. There is just the crossroads.
Users at the crossroads of life: One
Anyone got time for a pint?
Saturday, 4 December 2010
Turning a chrysalis into a butterfly (Twitter)
Used to be, someone saying 'she's such a nice person' made me wince. Used to be, being nice wasn't a personality trait people wanted to have. Connotations of naivety, stupidity, immaturity. No one can reach their 30's and be nice, there has to be some motivation, some manipulative reason, no one gives things for free without wanting something back.
It got old. Real old. And really uncomfortable, frankly. A curse to be dodged, unacceptable to demonstrate kindness. Hide it away, and get grumpier and grumpier because I'm appalling at pretending to be something I'm not.
Then I joined Twitter. You knew it was coming, right? Of course you did, if you're on Twitter. At first I thought it was just the mountain bikers who were lovely, sending kit off to people they'd never met cos they didn't want it any more and they couldn't be bothered to go through the hassle of actually selling it. Then, as I became more immersed in public sector streams and discussions, something became clear to me. For the first time in my life, I was a little bit spiky and a little bit sarky compared to most of the people around me. And it felt really really really good. But that's not the half of it.
There's the being smart thing. Everyone on Twitter with a few exceptions, is incredibly smart. Politically, technically....thousand different ways. Lots and lots and lots of incredibly intelligent people. All of whom are completely unapologetic about it. Comfortable with it. Don't flaunt it but don't hide it either. Bit of a revelation for a kid who's always been a little bit uncomfortable about admitting she knows stuff for fear of coming off as a complete smartass. Actually, to be honest, I got given so much shit at school for getting A's it all went downhill from there really. I just didn't want to stand out so I just didn't own up to knowing stuff. The first time I did a pub quiz with my other half and his friends (now my friends too, thank goodness) it was a bit of a revelation. People knowing stuff. Admitting knowing stuff. Competing to know stuff. Gosh. I knew none of the answers and it was fab. Utterly.
Essentially, those two simple things, suddenly being exposed to a massive amount of people who were nice and shared stuff 'cos it was the right thing to do' and who were smart and liked to think 'cos there's nothing wrong with that at all' have revolved my world.
Shy. Quiet. No opinions. Silent listener. Nothing to contribute. Head down. Invisible. Lacking motivation. Uninspired. Negative.
All those things. Especially the last. I told someone at work that the other day. They looked rather bemused. So they might. But I was. Terribly. And you know, there were reasons, and I'm wise enough standing where I do right now, to know they were good reasons and 99% of the rest of the population would have had the same life attitude I did, but nevertheless I'm not proud it took so long to flip things. I got bored and never learnt anything new to fill the holes. I got bored and never looked for challenges and things to absorb me. I was bored and couldn't see past the end of my nose in order to fix the problem.
You see, I didn't think I could change things. I didn't. Watching (seemingly) ordinary people do extraordinary things via Twitter means eventually there comes a slow realisation that actually, anything might be possible. You might be able to lose weight - person x is. You might be able to ride your bike further than you ever have before - person y did. You might be able to eventually set up your business and become your own boss - person z, a, b & c did. It's not nudge - it's something more than that.
The ability of social networking to expose hicks from dead end backwaters and families where aspiration is not a word ever uttered to thousands of people who do aspire, do inspire, do strive, are driven, are nice, do try, are motivated, aren't negative?
The very demographics of the web currently mean that very few of you will know of the things I speak of. But if you do, then I suspect you too will know what I speak of. Social mobility. Looking from the bottom; up and asking the question, the fundamental question.
What can I do if I really, seriously, passionately and honestly, put my mind to it?
I'm 33 years old. I think, really, it might be a nice thing to do to try and work out how we can accelerate the process a little bit so it doesn't take the people I assume will come after me, quite so damn long to figure all this out. It's not a business plan. It's not a plan at all. But it's an acknowledgement, I think, that there will come a time when my current job or whatever comes after it wont be quite the right thing, despite my loving my current job and I suspect loving whatever may come after it, and that eventually, I must stop talking and start doing.
I only just grew my wings. But I'm going to flap them, because it's feels enormously selfish not to, somehow. Pick it up and pass it on.
It got old. Real old. And really uncomfortable, frankly. A curse to be dodged, unacceptable to demonstrate kindness. Hide it away, and get grumpier and grumpier because I'm appalling at pretending to be something I'm not.
Then I joined Twitter. You knew it was coming, right? Of course you did, if you're on Twitter. At first I thought it was just the mountain bikers who were lovely, sending kit off to people they'd never met cos they didn't want it any more and they couldn't be bothered to go through the hassle of actually selling it. Then, as I became more immersed in public sector streams and discussions, something became clear to me. For the first time in my life, I was a little bit spiky and a little bit sarky compared to most of the people around me. And it felt really really really good. But that's not the half of it.
There's the being smart thing. Everyone on Twitter with a few exceptions, is incredibly smart. Politically, technically....thousand different ways. Lots and lots and lots of incredibly intelligent people. All of whom are completely unapologetic about it. Comfortable with it. Don't flaunt it but don't hide it either. Bit of a revelation for a kid who's always been a little bit uncomfortable about admitting she knows stuff for fear of coming off as a complete smartass. Actually, to be honest, I got given so much shit at school for getting A's it all went downhill from there really. I just didn't want to stand out so I just didn't own up to knowing stuff. The first time I did a pub quiz with my other half and his friends (now my friends too, thank goodness) it was a bit of a revelation. People knowing stuff. Admitting knowing stuff. Competing to know stuff. Gosh. I knew none of the answers and it was fab. Utterly.
Essentially, those two simple things, suddenly being exposed to a massive amount of people who were nice and shared stuff 'cos it was the right thing to do' and who were smart and liked to think 'cos there's nothing wrong with that at all' have revolved my world.
Shy. Quiet. No opinions. Silent listener. Nothing to contribute. Head down. Invisible. Lacking motivation. Uninspired. Negative.
All those things. Especially the last. I told someone at work that the other day. They looked rather bemused. So they might. But I was. Terribly. And you know, there were reasons, and I'm wise enough standing where I do right now, to know they were good reasons and 99% of the rest of the population would have had the same life attitude I did, but nevertheless I'm not proud it took so long to flip things. I got bored and never learnt anything new to fill the holes. I got bored and never looked for challenges and things to absorb me. I was bored and couldn't see past the end of my nose in order to fix the problem.
You see, I didn't think I could change things. I didn't. Watching (seemingly) ordinary people do extraordinary things via Twitter means eventually there comes a slow realisation that actually, anything might be possible. You might be able to lose weight - person x is. You might be able to ride your bike further than you ever have before - person y did. You might be able to eventually set up your business and become your own boss - person z, a, b & c did. It's not nudge - it's something more than that.
The ability of social networking to expose hicks from dead end backwaters and families where aspiration is not a word ever uttered to thousands of people who do aspire, do inspire, do strive, are driven, are nice, do try, are motivated, aren't negative?
The very demographics of the web currently mean that very few of you will know of the things I speak of. But if you do, then I suspect you too will know what I speak of. Social mobility. Looking from the bottom; up and asking the question, the fundamental question.
What can I do if I really, seriously, passionately and honestly, put my mind to it?
I'm 33 years old. I think, really, it might be a nice thing to do to try and work out how we can accelerate the process a little bit so it doesn't take the people I assume will come after me, quite so damn long to figure all this out. It's not a business plan. It's not a plan at all. But it's an acknowledgement, I think, that there will come a time when my current job or whatever comes after it wont be quite the right thing, despite my loving my current job and I suspect loving whatever may come after it, and that eventually, I must stop talking and start doing.
I only just grew my wings. But I'm going to flap them, because it's feels enormously selfish not to, somehow. Pick it up and pass it on.
Thursday, 2 December 2010
No, thank you
You don't do things for thanks in local government. If you did, you'd die waiting.
But militant optimism takes a sore beating when you've put hours, nay days of time into getting something to work, working around CMS issues and API issues which require paths on virtual servers which we think mirror meaning pages served can come from either server a or server b, making tying an API key to a dedicated server nigh on impossible, trying to stop vanilla Google maps paginating, yada yada yada and all that happens is you annoy people, make them cross, and cause problems.
You wish you'd never bothered. I actually wish I'd never bothered.
Yep, today, I understood why a small minority of local government workers are apathetic, soul destroyed, with no motivation and no hope.
Then I remembered I get to do fun things in my job and it was all okay again. But still. I kind of wish I'd not bothered and that makes me sad. Really really sad.
But militant optimism takes a sore beating when you've put hours, nay days of time into getting something to work, working around CMS issues and API issues which require paths on virtual servers which we think mirror meaning pages served can come from either server a or server b, making tying an API key to a dedicated server nigh on impossible, trying to stop vanilla Google maps paginating, yada yada yada and all that happens is you annoy people, make them cross, and cause problems.
You wish you'd never bothered. I actually wish I'd never bothered.
Yep, today, I understood why a small minority of local government workers are apathetic, soul destroyed, with no motivation and no hope.
Then I remembered I get to do fun things in my job and it was all okay again. But still. I kind of wish I'd not bothered and that makes me sad. Really really sad.
Saturday, 27 November 2010
Why I love the internet
This post was inspired by @timolloyd and his rather wise post on A Victorian advertising director in which he reminds us that we must not lose sight of why we love the web in our constant determination to know as much as is humanely possible about our areas of work.
So, cos 10 is a nice round number, here are my top 10 reasons why I love the web.
Twitter
Well of course? It's solely responsible for my getting consistently dragged into work related stuff, but of course that's entirely because I follow people who talk about the things I am interested in, and the things I am interested in, happen to be entirely aligned with the subjects I work with. This makes me lucky. This also makes it difficult to escape. But somehow, I don't mind.
You see, Twitter keeps throwing me curveballs. It's the gift that keeps on giving. For me, it has become the first tool I log into and the last I log off. There are 3 different apps for it on my iPhone. I follow ridiculous amounts of people and read nearly every single persons tweets at some point during the day though I must confess I can't keep up during work time any more. It's allowd me to argue and discuss, commiserate and sympathise. It's become a little of a support network during the current difficult times. But most of all, very most of all, because of Twitter 2 very important things have happened.
a) I have changed as a person and I think for the better
b) My life has changed and is almost unrecognisable to how it was 12 months ago.
The explanations for those two things are a post in themselves. I've been meaning to write it for weeks.
'Different' shopping sites
I was spoiled in London. Hours at the weekend disappeared in the markets at Camden, in Covent Garden and in 'vingtage' shops around Waterloo and down the Holloway Road. Moving away from London has done wonders for various areas of my life but my shopping habit wasn't one of them.
So, made.com, Folksy and Etsy rock my world on a regular basis, among many others. Want something to wear to a party without getting into that discussion about getting out of bed on the same side that morning? Etsy. Want a coffee table that people wont instantly recognise as coming from a certain store beginning with I but will look fab and is a reasonable price for something designed elegantly? Made.com.
Stack magazines
I know it's not strictly speaking a website, but without the web it wouldn't work, it wouldn't exist and if it did I would never know about it. Pay £4.90 a month. Sit. Wait behind the door (well, not really but....). Every month get a magazine delivered. What's so different about that? Well, each month, I don't know what I'm going to get. And I absolutely love that. For some reason, the more digital I've become, the more fascinated I've become with print magazines. With design. With colours and fonts and layouts and the choice of paper. It's not quite an obsession but I have no idea where I'm going to put them all, so I've resorted to recycling them by finding people to pass them on to, because they're too beautiful to simply throw away.
Last month I got Shook. This month I got Oh Comely and a lovely freebie called Article. Next month? Who knows. In a world full of predictable media, I really quite love not knowing.
XKCD
It's where the geeks go to laugh at themselves. It's where every geek has gone and wondered, 'can they mind read?' It's a comic of such searingly accurate observations and life experiences that occasionally I can't deal with the wince factor, in much the same The Big Bang Theory gets to me (flowcharting how to ask a girl on a date anyone?). The particular strip is linked for a reason. I <3 it very much. I started in tech support and I don't think it ever really leaves you. And hey, someone recognised girls can do tech support too. They may also be entirely responsible for my own pathetic attempts at stick figure comics.
The #uksnow map
It's geeky. It's a mash up. It's a crowdsource of epic proportions which resulted in some very ruffled Americans last year when #uksnow suddenly trended in the midst of their tea party randomness and they were forced to acknowledge an unusual weather event was happening somewhere outside their continent....sorry, country. All you have to do is tweet the first part of your postcode, a rating of between 0 and 10/10 for the rate the snow is falling, and hashtag it #uksnow. The beauty is in the simplicity - instructions a non geek can understand, useful output that a non geek can understand. If all crowd sourcing could be this simple, quick and elegant, we could be doing beautiful things.
In the meantime, if you're me, you can sit mesmerised by the gentle drift of the snow falling outside, while watching the rapid movement of data from all around the country on your screen. Data isn't beautiful? No? Sure?
Design Boom
I've always been fascinated by interesting structures and buildings. The web means I can use sites like Design Boom as a window on a world I'm never likely to see, but which I find fascinating - the world of architects who see no limits, only possibilities. I find most of the buildings inspiring and intricate in their complexity - but also their simplicity, because making living spaces simple seems to me to be a fine art all of itself. It's like a window into a world that you only used to be able to see into if you had a really niche magazine seller around the corner. What the web does best - niches.
The Ashmolean Museum
But it could as well be any other museum which has spent untold time, hours and energy in catalogueing their collection so that sad people like me can wonder at art and archeology from the comfort of their chair, leading to discovering such gems as this neo-Babylonian line art. It's not just the Ashmolean doing it, of course, the power of history can reach out and grab you from many museums across the globe. But for a museum I've never visited (and I do love a good museum), I know a remarkable amount about their collections, and it's entirely down to the world wide web.
Trip Advisor
Mundane. But for one reason or another, booking cheap hotel rooms seems to be a skill I've acquired by necessity and when faced with a page of hotels I've never heard of, all charging me £40 a night for a room, knowing which one to pick used to be down eeny meeny miny mo. Not any more. Now I get to spend hours obsessively pouring over peoples reviews, trying to work out whether the person reviewing the hotel everyone else thought was wonderful had been shoved into a star below what they were used to on a business trip and were just determined to find fault, balanced against whether a room which is fab for £40 a night is actually fab for £40 a night or I'd be better off staying a tent. In a field. In the middle of nowhere. In January. In a snowstorm.
As a result of Trip Advisor (combined excellently, I must say, with lastminute.com), I can attend free unconferences in London, see the Foo Fighters in Milton Keynes and generally swan around the country willy nilly, for not very much money at all. And get a shower in the morning on the way out to Sonisphere. What on earth is there not to love?
Amazon
Not for who they are now. But for who they were in 1998 when I first discovered them. I love books. I didn't have very many when I was younger for various reasons. One of the greatest pleasures in life is still the smell of coffee mixing with the smell of fresh paper and ink. It triggers a relaxation response in me whether I want it to or not. But before I could afford to walk into any bookshop and buy any book I liked, there was Amazon. The biggest bookshop in the world. A start up in the dot com world who succeeded and persister and quite rightly too. The shop of whom I can ask to source the most random books imaginable, back then, and who would deliver every time.
It is, perhaps, testament to the magic of Amazon, that 14 years after launch, I can walk into Foyles on Charing Cross Road and ask for a copy of Freakonomics and be told to try Amazon.
Every computer game walk through site ever created
Me and computer games. You'd think I'd be brilliant at them, probably. Geek, computer games. Surely I'd buy loads, play loads, actually complete all of them.
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Until I discovered the free game walk throughs littering the web, I'd never actually completed a computer game - even the ridiculously simple RPG's on my Nintendo DS - I always got stuck. I either couldn't find the dungeon I was supposed to find, died so epically that it became pointless to carry on, or ran around in circles for an hour without finding an exit. It wasn't until someone pointed out walk throughs weren't cheating if you were genuinely stuck and were going to waste the £30 you spent on the game in the first place without them that I actually managed to finish a game. And then another one. And another one. Suddenly, I could see the point of buying a computer game again. I'm sure everyone else has been doing it for years, but they've been a complete revelation to me which is why they're here.
So. 10 reason why I love the internet. I could list 100, probably a 1000 if pushed. I've been here a while. But this is my current top 10. I'd love to know yours?
So, cos 10 is a nice round number, here are my top 10 reasons why I love the web.
Well of course? It's solely responsible for my getting consistently dragged into work related stuff, but of course that's entirely because I follow people who talk about the things I am interested in, and the things I am interested in, happen to be entirely aligned with the subjects I work with. This makes me lucky. This also makes it difficult to escape. But somehow, I don't mind.
You see, Twitter keeps throwing me curveballs. It's the gift that keeps on giving. For me, it has become the first tool I log into and the last I log off. There are 3 different apps for it on my iPhone. I follow ridiculous amounts of people and read nearly every single persons tweets at some point during the day though I must confess I can't keep up during work time any more. It's allowd me to argue and discuss, commiserate and sympathise. It's become a little of a support network during the current difficult times. But most of all, very most of all, because of Twitter 2 very important things have happened.
a) I have changed as a person and I think for the better
b) My life has changed and is almost unrecognisable to how it was 12 months ago.
The explanations for those two things are a post in themselves. I've been meaning to write it for weeks.
I was spoiled in London. Hours at the weekend disappeared in the markets at Camden, in Covent Garden and in 'vingtage' shops around Waterloo and down the Holloway Road. Moving away from London has done wonders for various areas of my life but my shopping habit wasn't one of them.
So, made.com, Folksy and Etsy rock my world on a regular basis, among many others. Want something to wear to a party without getting into that discussion about getting out of bed on the same side that morning? Etsy. Want a coffee table that people wont instantly recognise as coming from a certain store beginning with I but will look fab and is a reasonable price for something designed elegantly? Made.com.
I know it's not strictly speaking a website, but without the web it wouldn't work, it wouldn't exist and if it did I would never know about it. Pay £4.90 a month. Sit. Wait behind the door (well, not really but....). Every month get a magazine delivered. What's so different about that? Well, each month, I don't know what I'm going to get. And I absolutely love that. For some reason, the more digital I've become, the more fascinated I've become with print magazines. With design. With colours and fonts and layouts and the choice of paper. It's not quite an obsession but I have no idea where I'm going to put them all, so I've resorted to recycling them by finding people to pass them on to, because they're too beautiful to simply throw away.
Last month I got Shook. This month I got Oh Comely and a lovely freebie called Article. Next month? Who knows. In a world full of predictable media, I really quite love not knowing.
It's where the geeks go to laugh at themselves. It's where every geek has gone and wondered, 'can they mind read?' It's a comic of such searingly accurate observations and life experiences that occasionally I can't deal with the wince factor, in much the same The Big Bang Theory gets to me (flowcharting how to ask a girl on a date anyone?). The particular strip is linked for a reason. I <3 it very much. I started in tech support and I don't think it ever really leaves you. And hey, someone recognised girls can do tech support too. They may also be entirely responsible for my own pathetic attempts at stick figure comics.
It's geeky. It's a mash up. It's a crowdsource of epic proportions which resulted in some very ruffled Americans last year when #uksnow suddenly trended in the midst of their tea party randomness and they were forced to acknowledge an unusual weather event was happening somewhere outside their continent....sorry, country. All you have to do is tweet the first part of your postcode, a rating of between 0 and 10/10 for the rate the snow is falling, and hashtag it #uksnow. The beauty is in the simplicity - instructions a non geek can understand, useful output that a non geek can understand. If all crowd sourcing could be this simple, quick and elegant, we could be doing beautiful things.
In the meantime, if you're me, you can sit mesmerised by the gentle drift of the snow falling outside, while watching the rapid movement of data from all around the country on your screen. Data isn't beautiful? No? Sure?
I've always been fascinated by interesting structures and buildings. The web means I can use sites like Design Boom as a window on a world I'm never likely to see, but which I find fascinating - the world of architects who see no limits, only possibilities. I find most of the buildings inspiring and intricate in their complexity - but also their simplicity, because making living spaces simple seems to me to be a fine art all of itself. It's like a window into a world that you only used to be able to see into if you had a really niche magazine seller around the corner. What the web does best - niches.
But it could as well be any other museum which has spent untold time, hours and energy in catalogueing their collection so that sad people like me can wonder at art and archeology from the comfort of their chair, leading to discovering such gems as this neo-Babylonian line art. It's not just the Ashmolean doing it, of course, the power of history can reach out and grab you from many museums across the globe. But for a museum I've never visited (and I do love a good museum), I know a remarkable amount about their collections, and it's entirely down to the world wide web.
Trip AdvisorMundane. But for one reason or another, booking cheap hotel rooms seems to be a skill I've acquired by necessity and when faced with a page of hotels I've never heard of, all charging me £40 a night for a room, knowing which one to pick used to be down eeny meeny miny mo. Not any more. Now I get to spend hours obsessively pouring over peoples reviews, trying to work out whether the person reviewing the hotel everyone else thought was wonderful had been shoved into a star below what they were used to on a business trip and were just determined to find fault, balanced against whether a room which is fab for £40 a night is actually fab for £40 a night or I'd be better off staying a tent. In a field. In the middle of nowhere. In January. In a snowstorm.
As a result of Trip Advisor (combined excellently, I must say, with lastminute.com), I can attend free unconferences in London, see the Foo Fighters in Milton Keynes and generally swan around the country willy nilly, for not very much money at all. And get a shower in the morning on the way out to Sonisphere. What on earth is there not to love?
Not for who they are now. But for who they were in 1998 when I first discovered them. I love books. I didn't have very many when I was younger for various reasons. One of the greatest pleasures in life is still the smell of coffee mixing with the smell of fresh paper and ink. It triggers a relaxation response in me whether I want it to or not. But before I could afford to walk into any bookshop and buy any book I liked, there was Amazon. The biggest bookshop in the world. A start up in the dot com world who succeeded and persister and quite rightly too. The shop of whom I can ask to source the most random books imaginable, back then, and who would deliver every time.
It is, perhaps, testament to the magic of Amazon, that 14 years after launch, I can walk into Foyles on Charing Cross Road and ask for a copy of Freakonomics and be told to try Amazon.
Me and computer games. You'd think I'd be brilliant at them, probably. Geek, computer games. Surely I'd buy loads, play loads, actually complete all of them.
Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Until I discovered the free game walk throughs littering the web, I'd never actually completed a computer game - even the ridiculously simple RPG's on my Nintendo DS - I always got stuck. I either couldn't find the dungeon I was supposed to find, died so epically that it became pointless to carry on, or ran around in circles for an hour without finding an exit. It wasn't until someone pointed out walk throughs weren't cheating if you were genuinely stuck and were going to waste the £30 you spent on the game in the first place without them that I actually managed to finish a game. And then another one. And another one. Suddenly, I could see the point of buying a computer game again. I'm sure everyone else has been doing it for years, but they've been a complete revelation to me which is why they're here.
So. 10 reason why I love the internet. I could list 100, probably a 1000 if pushed. I've been here a while. But this is my current top 10. I'd love to know yours?
Friday, 5 November 2010
Saturday, 16 October 2010
At the end of the day
Maybe a job is just a job. Maybe you can give too much for nothing back at all. Maybe banging your head against barriers all day every day gets to everyone eventually.
So I think it's time to do something a bit different. Get involved with the Social Media Surgery crowd. Maybe stop feeling like an army of one, isolated and alone. Hook up with some inspiring people doing inspiring things for free and relax a little, pick it up and pass it on and help some people for no other reason than I can, and they need it and it's actually really that simple. Feel like I can make a difference to something, that words aren't disappearing into the wind.
Before I was an employed social media and CMS geek I was a GIS geek. Time to go back and dust off the old skills and take some data and do interesting things with it. Time to map out the current digital state so that people can see how far behind we actually are. Time to drop some reality into proceedings and start to ask the difficult questions. And then back off. Walk away. Leave the people who can actually make a difference to do their thing, if they want to, and if they don't? Still got something to hold on to. Still got something to work towards.
I never knew working with people you'd been chatting with on Twitter was going to be so difficult. Didn't realise the transition between people I could say anything to and people I can say nothing to would be so hard. Struggling with it so very much, crossing lines all over the place, struggling to know where the lines now are. Time to step back from that too. I'm done with being a one woman army. Time to get some support and remember that the tech is shiny and can do cool and funky things, but that it's pointless communicating if there is no one on the end to talk back.
I'm done with certain things, but there are other things to pick up. I'll go and see what people have to say, I'll accept invitations with appreciation, I'll go and ask some difficult questions and if I like the answers and other people like the questions, then maybe life will go in an entirely different direction for a while.
It doesn't matter, at the end of the day. Whatever will be, will be. But I'm switching off a part of me that cared too much because one women armies are not needed, not wanted and not liked. And while I don't want to be liked, have never really been bothered by such things, being disliked is not something anyone would ever want.
At the end of the day, you can care too much. Power: off.
So I think it's time to do something a bit different. Get involved with the Social Media Surgery crowd. Maybe stop feeling like an army of one, isolated and alone. Hook up with some inspiring people doing inspiring things for free and relax a little, pick it up and pass it on and help some people for no other reason than I can, and they need it and it's actually really that simple. Feel like I can make a difference to something, that words aren't disappearing into the wind.
Before I was an employed social media and CMS geek I was a GIS geek. Time to go back and dust off the old skills and take some data and do interesting things with it. Time to map out the current digital state so that people can see how far behind we actually are. Time to drop some reality into proceedings and start to ask the difficult questions. And then back off. Walk away. Leave the people who can actually make a difference to do their thing, if they want to, and if they don't? Still got something to hold on to. Still got something to work towards.
I never knew working with people you'd been chatting with on Twitter was going to be so difficult. Didn't realise the transition between people I could say anything to and people I can say nothing to would be so hard. Struggling with it so very much, crossing lines all over the place, struggling to know where the lines now are. Time to step back from that too. I'm done with being a one woman army. Time to get some support and remember that the tech is shiny and can do cool and funky things, but that it's pointless communicating if there is no one on the end to talk back.
I'm done with certain things, but there are other things to pick up. I'll go and see what people have to say, I'll accept invitations with appreciation, I'll go and ask some difficult questions and if I like the answers and other people like the questions, then maybe life will go in an entirely different direction for a while.
It doesn't matter, at the end of the day. Whatever will be, will be. But I'm switching off a part of me that cared too much because one women armies are not needed, not wanted and not liked. And while I don't want to be liked, have never really been bothered by such things, being disliked is not something anyone would ever want.
At the end of the day, you can care too much. Power: off.
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
What are you waiting for?
You hold your breath. You have moments when you are caught in the headlights, a still unmoveable object in the middle of a cacophony of whizzing data. A chip on the motherboard of life, electrical pulses flying, ideas arcing above your head. You are paralysed. Brain still processing, eyes still flickering, other movement stilled.
Tentatively, you step into the edges of the data streams. Blog feeds collected, news streams scanned, conversations sparking and falling away again as fast as the data itself moved, for conversations are only data, care and heart and love colouring some, intrigue and passion and ferocity colouring others. But all of them worthwhile, all of them different colours, a beautiful rainbow created by beautiful minds.
A 10" window on the world. A data world. Pixellated beauty of intelligence and minds coming together in semi public streams, the worlds largest pub, spiderwebbing conversations pulling others in, epiphanies spiralling out of control into the impossible, the speakers resolutely denying that impossible exists. Here is no place for impossibilities, here is for everyone and everything, for the ideas which were ridiculous but now are not, for the lights which have been shaded to shine brighter than anyone thought possible.
The pace is fierce. The intensity of belief is catastrophic in its potential to do something so complicated and yet so simple. Change the world. Change the rules. Don't listen to your parents who told you to never aspire. Don't listen to your friends who told you furiously typing didn't mean anyone was listening. Don't listen to the people who can't understand that inspiration comes only once to some of us and that hard work should be avoided at all costs.
Instead start to believe. Start to ask the questions. The big ones and the small. Go back to the start when we were all innocent and naive and wide eyed with wonder and ask only this? What are you waiting for?
Don't hesitate. Don't pause too long. Stop over thinking, start doing. Stop the noise, stop the statis, stop the paralysis, stop the negative assumptions. Start the future, start the discussion, start the tearing down of the old ways of doing things and lay the building bricks of the buildings other will live in. Move. Get involved. It's not political, it's not dangerous, there is no wrong answer, only the potential to ask the wrong questions but to receive the right answers.
This is a missive to me. To the part of me wants to hide from the tornado of thoughts, ideas, opinions and beliefs. No more hiding. No more furious typing. The point is not in being the person to change the world, it is only to put together the pieces, to suggest and enable the small pieces in the puzzle, so that together we may build a bigger picture which will change the world.
With thanks to @johnpopham, @dominiccampbell and @johnsturgess
Tentatively, you step into the edges of the data streams. Blog feeds collected, news streams scanned, conversations sparking and falling away again as fast as the data itself moved, for conversations are only data, care and heart and love colouring some, intrigue and passion and ferocity colouring others. But all of them worthwhile, all of them different colours, a beautiful rainbow created by beautiful minds.
A 10" window on the world. A data world. Pixellated beauty of intelligence and minds coming together in semi public streams, the worlds largest pub, spiderwebbing conversations pulling others in, epiphanies spiralling out of control into the impossible, the speakers resolutely denying that impossible exists. Here is no place for impossibilities, here is for everyone and everything, for the ideas which were ridiculous but now are not, for the lights which have been shaded to shine brighter than anyone thought possible.
The pace is fierce. The intensity of belief is catastrophic in its potential to do something so complicated and yet so simple. Change the world. Change the rules. Don't listen to your parents who told you to never aspire. Don't listen to your friends who told you furiously typing didn't mean anyone was listening. Don't listen to the people who can't understand that inspiration comes only once to some of us and that hard work should be avoided at all costs.
Instead start to believe. Start to ask the questions. The big ones and the small. Go back to the start when we were all innocent and naive and wide eyed with wonder and ask only this? What are you waiting for?
Don't hesitate. Don't pause too long. Stop over thinking, start doing. Stop the noise, stop the statis, stop the paralysis, stop the negative assumptions. Start the future, start the discussion, start the tearing down of the old ways of doing things and lay the building bricks of the buildings other will live in. Move. Get involved. It's not political, it's not dangerous, there is no wrong answer, only the potential to ask the wrong questions but to receive the right answers.
This is a missive to me. To the part of me wants to hide from the tornado of thoughts, ideas, opinions and beliefs. No more hiding. No more furious typing. The point is not in being the person to change the world, it is only to put together the pieces, to suggest and enable the small pieces in the puzzle, so that together we may build a bigger picture which will change the world.
With thanks to @johnpopham, @dominiccampbell and @johnsturgess
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
A whole lot of heart
Intelligence and heart. And social media, that's here too. But. Intelligence and heart.
I've hidden behind a computer for a long old time. I've kept beneath the parapet, never telling anyone what I thought, never venturing an opinion and sometimes I think never actually having one. I contributed to discussions only when others were drunk so they'd forget the words I'd say in the morning but grabbing the fleeting opportunity to test the water in expressing something. Anything.
Then someone asked a question. I knew the answer to the question. I knew I knew the answer but still I hesitated, because the person asking the question was a Head of Service and whilst I was entirely comfortable with expressing opinions with my then HoS, because he was my mentor and I trusted him and worked so very well together, I didn't know the person asking the question at all.
But I knew the answer. So I wrote the answer in an email. I didn't send the email for 48 hours. I came back on Monday morning, retrieved the draft and reread it. And I sat at my desk in my portakabin and I looked at the words I wrote, and I wondered who'd written them and then pressed Send.
The person I sent it to was @marcschmid
He forwarded the email to @tomstannard - I use their Twitter names because the conversation started on Twitter. A job became available in their team. I was told I had an interview over Twitter. I was told I had the job over Twitter. We still sort work stuff over Twitter too. And email. And face to face. It's as natural to all of us as breathing to use the right channel for the right time in the right way to get hold of the right person at the right time, depending on many different factors.
I explained this today. It got the usual reaction 'wow sounds like you lot have got the hang of this social media thing'. Well yes.......and no. But today I learnt that we can hold our heads high. That we are innovating in company, ever growing company, but we are still ahead some. That I was wrong in my assumption that everyone else was ahead of us. They're not. That we are using social media well and in the right way and I cannot take credit for that, all those foundations were built way before I came along.
But I also learnt that I know what I know. I think what I think. And it is the same as others think, I am not alone, I am not an army of one. I learnt that women can stand in front of conferences and speak and people will listen. I learnt that intelligence and heart are not things to be hidden, but things to be shown with no consideration for those things being unusual or strange.
I learnt. So much. I have 6 pages of notes thanks to the NWEGG social media conference I attended today. I talked and learnt from people, I discussed and enthused, and was enthused at. And oh, but there is nothing I love more than someone enthusing at me. It's the fuel that I need to continue to think, to continue to brainstorm, to continue the epiphanies. These are my dreams for the future, tell me yours, tell me yours, please tell me yours? What do you see? What would you want if there were no barriers at all? Imagine a world built from the ground up, what would you wish for? Can we create that, can we shape that, can we, is it possible? Why must we be constraind by what we've always done? I. need. that.
I need to wrap this feeling up and take it with me. I need to not forget. I am not stupid. I am not leading us down the wrong path. I am not speaking alone. I am not alone, I am backed up by research, great minds, innovative people, shiny people.
Intelligence with heart. Be smart and care. Don't be ashamed of having a brain which you enjoy thinking with and don't be afraid to admit that you care. These are the things I learnt from many many awesome people today.
For the sending of an email, for the pressing of the Send button, for the asking of a question, I am grateful.
I've hidden behind a computer for a long old time. I've kept beneath the parapet, never telling anyone what I thought, never venturing an opinion and sometimes I think never actually having one. I contributed to discussions only when others were drunk so they'd forget the words I'd say in the morning but grabbing the fleeting opportunity to test the water in expressing something. Anything.
Then someone asked a question. I knew the answer to the question. I knew I knew the answer but still I hesitated, because the person asking the question was a Head of Service and whilst I was entirely comfortable with expressing opinions with my then HoS, because he was my mentor and I trusted him and worked so very well together, I didn't know the person asking the question at all.
But I knew the answer. So I wrote the answer in an email. I didn't send the email for 48 hours. I came back on Monday morning, retrieved the draft and reread it. And I sat at my desk in my portakabin and I looked at the words I wrote, and I wondered who'd written them and then pressed Send.
The person I sent it to was @marcschmid
He forwarded the email to @tomstannard - I use their Twitter names because the conversation started on Twitter. A job became available in their team. I was told I had an interview over Twitter. I was told I had the job over Twitter. We still sort work stuff over Twitter too. And email. And face to face. It's as natural to all of us as breathing to use the right channel for the right time in the right way to get hold of the right person at the right time, depending on many different factors.
I explained this today. It got the usual reaction 'wow sounds like you lot have got the hang of this social media thing'. Well yes.......and no. But today I learnt that we can hold our heads high. That we are innovating in company, ever growing company, but we are still ahead some. That I was wrong in my assumption that everyone else was ahead of us. They're not. That we are using social media well and in the right way and I cannot take credit for that, all those foundations were built way before I came along.
But I also learnt that I know what I know. I think what I think. And it is the same as others think, I am not alone, I am not an army of one. I learnt that women can stand in front of conferences and speak and people will listen. I learnt that intelligence and heart are not things to be hidden, but things to be shown with no consideration for those things being unusual or strange.
I learnt. So much. I have 6 pages of notes thanks to the NWEGG social media conference I attended today. I talked and learnt from people, I discussed and enthused, and was enthused at. And oh, but there is nothing I love more than someone enthusing at me. It's the fuel that I need to continue to think, to continue to brainstorm, to continue the epiphanies. These are my dreams for the future, tell me yours, tell me yours, please tell me yours? What do you see? What would you want if there were no barriers at all? Imagine a world built from the ground up, what would you wish for? Can we create that, can we shape that, can we, is it possible? Why must we be constraind by what we've always done? I. need. that.
I need to wrap this feeling up and take it with me. I need to not forget. I am not stupid. I am not leading us down the wrong path. I am not speaking alone. I am not alone, I am backed up by research, great minds, innovative people, shiny people.
Intelligence with heart. Be smart and care. Don't be ashamed of having a brain which you enjoy thinking with and don't be afraid to admit that you care. These are the things I learnt from many many awesome people today.
For the sending of an email, for the pressing of the Send button, for the asking of a question, I am grateful.
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
#geekjoy continued
>Users on iDesk plc's ISP help desk: 30
>What year is this?
>1999
Geek boyfriend (what other kind would there ever be?) points me in the direction of his old workplace. I apply for a help desk agent job. I know nothing. I cram. I know something. I get the highest score in the entrance exam after a weeks training. I'm the only girl. By this point, I'm starting to wonder if I will always be the only geek girl. I've met other girls who geek, but to not the point of being completely entrenched in the shiny world, almost every move a digital one.
I help users of various ISP's sort their connection problems. I ask them to hold their telephone receiver next to the speakers of the computer and diagnose problems by the sound of the modem. It's still a sound which wrenches a particular feeling from me, of sounds lost, and times past. Evocative. I get customers who hear the female voice, ask to be passed to a 2nd line tech, who promptly pass them straight back to me, after being told their being put through to the 'expert'. They're not, but I'm as good as all the other 1st line techs.
The company has a games room. Nope, not that kind, thought there is a pool table down the hall, a room full of gaming rigs loaded with Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike. Someone throws down the gauntlet. Girls don't play first person shooters (FPS's). Well this one does and she snipes the boys asses all over the maps. The web has changed, people are using it, people are connecting to it, people are using ICQ to chat across it. Now the noise has started, the sheer mass of pages and people creating a digital cacophony of thoughts, opinions and pages posted and then never touched again, the web littered with the detritus of the geeks short attention span.
>Users on the iDesk plc's help desk: 300 or so
>What year is this?
>2001
2001. Team Leader of 15 people at the age of 23. Only in a dot com. So much shine, so much promise, so much enthusiasm and determination. Managing geeks when you are one is so simple, the motivation as simple as ensuring that everyone feels that they contributed to the final decision, that there is a democracy, that you will stand in front of them and take the shit as long as they don't give you any and respect that. Still playing Counter Strike, still kicking ass. Except now voice over IP (VOIP) technology has taken off and everyone has a headset and is talking. Including me. And I'm the only female voice for quite some cable length. And it's an issue. Of course it's an issue. I'm shooting the hell out of 17 year olds and I'm a girl and they.don't.like.it. Quit the game, wondered off to Everquest for a while. Pretty, shiny, but not shiny enough to make me stick with working out the complicated interfaces and mathematics.
Dot.com crash. Make someone 32 years older than me redundant. Take voluntary redundancy myself. Bubble burst and the bright side of tech turns dark. Heart sore. I loved that job more than was entirely sensible, my social life, my love life, my world. But it was so so good when it was good, empowering and confidence building.
>Users in the generic office: Some
>What year is this?
>2003
My friends are geeks. My girlfriends, well some of them are geeks too. So are my boyfriends, no change there then. We still chat on the internet, we still arrange big group holidays on the internet, we still live in the dark ages on the BBS we all use. Internet forums have arrived and gone from badly built difficult to understand mess to intuitive streamlined behemoths. I don't work in tech, but most of my friends do, and all of them are earning at least twice what I am. I can't code, I can't system administrate, I can't do anything quantifiable technical. So time passes and I have ideas and I talk them through with friends when drunk and brave but nothing ever comes from them. I am a girl, I am in admin, I am in my proper place in the world, spending my far better paid boyfriends money and accepting that this is the way the world will be. The fire has gone out because there is nothing there to fan it.
>Users in the admin office: 4 (all women)
>What year is this?
>2008
I've been drafted in to fill a tech post. Except it's really not a tech post, it's an admin post with a bit of techy stuff attached to it. But it's not data entry or copy typing which is what has been dominating the previous god knows how many years and so it's grabbed, and gladly. With it my interest in tech and it's ability comes back. Someone takes a chance on me. Someone understands that whatever I don't know I can learn and damn quick. Someone sees past me and past the job history and understands that I love tech.
I play with GIS and Map Info. I help people with their day to day Word and Excel problems. I fix the printer. Then I start to push the edges and make the mapping better, push it harder, ask what it can really do, how can we really represent and visualise our data. I discover I'm a data geek, among many other kinds of geek and disappearing into a spreadsheet makes me happy. I discover Facebook and it's a one night stand, I discover Twitter and it's a long term relationship. I start to wonder what the tech can do for us, whether they're just tools in the dry sense or whether they're tools for change. I talk to people, I write in here. I start to stick my head above the parapet at work.
I regain everything I lost when the dot com crashed. The #geekjoy and the deep seated belief that tech can change the world only this time is the right time, this time the rest of the world is on board, this time the bubble wont burst and it wont all fall down and this time I can switch into top gear, throw everything I have at it and things will change, magic will happen and the fire will continue to burn.
I love technology. I love geeking. I love connecting and linking and introducing and networking. I am the shyest person you will ever meet, but you wont ever see that except in words written down here. Technology enables me, a little geek girl with big big big ideas, to become the spark that lights other flames, the passion and the drive which gets things done and finished and wrapped and completed. Digital allows me to run on 4 streams at once, process all the data, learn as fast as I've always wanted to, to speak and be heard. It enables me to have an opinion, to be gobby, to test my new found confidence and my old love of all things tech and do something with it, make it tangible, stop talking and start doing.
I want to burn the envelope, screw pushing it. I want to turn the sky red, never mind blue. I want to inspire and enthuse and share the possibilities because the possibilities are endless, they really are, the only limitations here are ourselves, our human capacity to comprehend the sheer scale of the world as it opens up and all geographical barriers fall.
I am passionately, resolutely, irrevocably a geek. If I'm talking tech and digital, don't expect me not to be empassioned, fiery, or enthused. This I love and I make no apologies for it.
>What year is this?
>1999
Geek boyfriend (what other kind would there ever be?) points me in the direction of his old workplace. I apply for a help desk agent job. I know nothing. I cram. I know something. I get the highest score in the entrance exam after a weeks training. I'm the only girl. By this point, I'm starting to wonder if I will always be the only geek girl. I've met other girls who geek, but to not the point of being completely entrenched in the shiny world, almost every move a digital one.
I help users of various ISP's sort their connection problems. I ask them to hold their telephone receiver next to the speakers of the computer and diagnose problems by the sound of the modem. It's still a sound which wrenches a particular feeling from me, of sounds lost, and times past. Evocative. I get customers who hear the female voice, ask to be passed to a 2nd line tech, who promptly pass them straight back to me, after being told their being put through to the 'expert'. They're not, but I'm as good as all the other 1st line techs.
The company has a games room. Nope, not that kind, thought there is a pool table down the hall, a room full of gaming rigs loaded with Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike. Someone throws down the gauntlet. Girls don't play first person shooters (FPS's). Well this one does and she snipes the boys asses all over the maps. The web has changed, people are using it, people are connecting to it, people are using ICQ to chat across it. Now the noise has started, the sheer mass of pages and people creating a digital cacophony of thoughts, opinions and pages posted and then never touched again, the web littered with the detritus of the geeks short attention span.
>Users on the iDesk plc's help desk: 300 or so
>What year is this?
>2001
2001. Team Leader of 15 people at the age of 23. Only in a dot com. So much shine, so much promise, so much enthusiasm and determination. Managing geeks when you are one is so simple, the motivation as simple as ensuring that everyone feels that they contributed to the final decision, that there is a democracy, that you will stand in front of them and take the shit as long as they don't give you any and respect that. Still playing Counter Strike, still kicking ass. Except now voice over IP (VOIP) technology has taken off and everyone has a headset and is talking. Including me. And I'm the only female voice for quite some cable length. And it's an issue. Of course it's an issue. I'm shooting the hell out of 17 year olds and I'm a girl and they.don't.like.it. Quit the game, wondered off to Everquest for a while. Pretty, shiny, but not shiny enough to make me stick with working out the complicated interfaces and mathematics.
Dot.com crash. Make someone 32 years older than me redundant. Take voluntary redundancy myself. Bubble burst and the bright side of tech turns dark. Heart sore. I loved that job more than was entirely sensible, my social life, my love life, my world. But it was so so good when it was good, empowering and confidence building.
>Users in the generic office: Some
>What year is this?
>2003
My friends are geeks. My girlfriends, well some of them are geeks too. So are my boyfriends, no change there then. We still chat on the internet, we still arrange big group holidays on the internet, we still live in the dark ages on the BBS we all use. Internet forums have arrived and gone from badly built difficult to understand mess to intuitive streamlined behemoths. I don't work in tech, but most of my friends do, and all of them are earning at least twice what I am. I can't code, I can't system administrate, I can't do anything quantifiable technical. So time passes and I have ideas and I talk them through with friends when drunk and brave but nothing ever comes from them. I am a girl, I am in admin, I am in my proper place in the world, spending my far better paid boyfriends money and accepting that this is the way the world will be. The fire has gone out because there is nothing there to fan it.
>Users in the admin office: 4 (all women)
>What year is this?
>2008
I've been drafted in to fill a tech post. Except it's really not a tech post, it's an admin post with a bit of techy stuff attached to it. But it's not data entry or copy typing which is what has been dominating the previous god knows how many years and so it's grabbed, and gladly. With it my interest in tech and it's ability comes back. Someone takes a chance on me. Someone understands that whatever I don't know I can learn and damn quick. Someone sees past me and past the job history and understands that I love tech.
I play with GIS and Map Info. I help people with their day to day Word and Excel problems. I fix the printer. Then I start to push the edges and make the mapping better, push it harder, ask what it can really do, how can we really represent and visualise our data. I discover I'm a data geek, among many other kinds of geek and disappearing into a spreadsheet makes me happy. I discover Facebook and it's a one night stand, I discover Twitter and it's a long term relationship. I start to wonder what the tech can do for us, whether they're just tools in the dry sense or whether they're tools for change. I talk to people, I write in here. I start to stick my head above the parapet at work.
I regain everything I lost when the dot com crashed. The #geekjoy and the deep seated belief that tech can change the world only this time is the right time, this time the rest of the world is on board, this time the bubble wont burst and it wont all fall down and this time I can switch into top gear, throw everything I have at it and things will change, magic will happen and the fire will continue to burn.
I love technology. I love geeking. I love connecting and linking and introducing and networking. I am the shyest person you will ever meet, but you wont ever see that except in words written down here. Technology enables me, a little geek girl with big big big ideas, to become the spark that lights other flames, the passion and the drive which gets things done and finished and wrapped and completed. Digital allows me to run on 4 streams at once, process all the data, learn as fast as I've always wanted to, to speak and be heard. It enables me to have an opinion, to be gobby, to test my new found confidence and my old love of all things tech and do something with it, make it tangible, stop talking and start doing.
I want to burn the envelope, screw pushing it. I want to turn the sky red, never mind blue. I want to inspire and enthuse and share the possibilities because the possibilities are endless, they really are, the only limitations here are ourselves, our human capacity to comprehend the sheer scale of the world as it opens up and all geographical barriers fall.
I am passionately, resolutely, irrevocably a geek. If I'm talking tech and digital, don't expect me not to be empassioned, fiery, or enthused. This I love and I make no apologies for it.
Tuesday, 28 September 2010
I'm going back to the start (#geekjoy)
Some of you will be too interweb young to know about text adventures, or indeed multi user dungeons, or the history of social media - and I mean the true history of social media, not the history that many think is the history.. I haven't been here from the start, but I've been......around. A digital whore, picking up systems, playing with them and dropping them again, staying with some for long term relationships, Ctrl+C'ing out on others after a brief dalliance on sheets littered with zeroes and ones. This is my #geekstory, tell me yours?
>Users in the college library computer section: zero
>What year is this?
>1993
1993 was the year I first saw a computer. None of my friends had computers. None of my friends were remotely geeky. I was so uncool in school, even the dungeons and dragon players seemed unapproachable, settled in the library with their incomprehensible analogue systems. I went to college and left the uncool behind, somehow, but the curiosity for computers didn't start here. My first interaction with a computer was with a Pentium 286 (I think?) running Windows 3.11, standalone. I learnt how to start software by clicking the .exe and that was it, because all there was was Word and it didn't really fan the flames. It was a box. I could write words on it and they would print out.
Underwhelmed, frankly.
>Users in the Babbage computer labs, ground floor, University of Plymouth: Many
>What year is this?
>1995
Two years. We didn't know then that the speed of development and change would carry on at the same pace, but so much changed in those two years that I got a glimpse, even then on the tour of the university campus, of what the future would look like. And it looked damn fine to a hick from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere in Somerset, let me tell you. Sparks. Curiosity. Macs before they got colourful or white, still at this point a dull beige. Aesthetically unattractive. But.
Netscape. The beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with something I later learned was a web browser. Pages with grey backgrounds. All black text. No understanding of how to use it, playing, clicking, following the spidersweb across the world. Back then, you had two options. Using a directory, the name of which I can't remember but I think might have been Yahoo, which listed, and yes, I do mean actually physically listed, in lists, every website known to man because there were that few then, or to follow the trail of little blue underlined words.
It felt like falling down the rabbit hole.
I can still remember the feeling. I was absolutely completely consumed with following those links. Disappeared into them for hours, coming out two continents and 7 conversations later with people on the other side of the world, asking them incessant questions, them asking me questions too. Nothing seedy, not yet, the incessant wail of Age/Sex/Location (ASL) hadn't filtered through the ports yet, just an innocence as people tried to find out what it was like to live on the other side of the world from real people who were really, actually, talking back. In real time. Type something, hit enter, there the words appeared for both of you to see. My partner in crime during this time? Another girl, as mesmerised as I. I don't know where she is now, but I hope she still geeks well.
>Users in the Babbage Sun lab, 2nd floor: Less than downstairs
>What year is this?
>1997
Another two years. Email is becoming prevalent but it's definitely not the first thing you ask someone for. Web addresses of companies are making their first debut on buses on the streets of Plymouth. Things are.....emerging from the underground? Was there ever an underground? I don't know. I sat with hackers, geeks and cool kids in a lab for 7 hours a day, playing with the tech, learning to use a command line and getting my head around the lack of windows, the lack of pretty pictures.
I discovered Bulletin Board Systems, chat zones, I crossed the country to meet other geeks, I talked into the small hours about absolutely nothing and I made friends that stayed. Friends who have gone on to change the world. Friends who have stepped off the world and off the grid. Friends who have pushed the boundaries of neurological exploration and disappeared down the rabbit hole too. Friends who own Ferraris and friends who build the games we play. Even, perhaps, friends who hacked the Vatican though I never knew if he was lying. The tale was funny to tell all the same. More importantly, I was in a group of people who understood my incessant curiosity, who tolerated my cross examinations happily and who were all, to the very last man, smarter then me. Because this was a lab full of men and I was the token girl, and this was a situation to become replicated later, many many times.They even danced on podiums next to me to Carl Cox and Paul Oakenfold. They lost it next to me on the dancefloor to Bon Jovi and Nine Inch Nails. Geeks. The few. The hardcore. But happy.
To be continued.......
>Users in the college library computer section: zero
>What year is this?
>1993
1993 was the year I first saw a computer. None of my friends had computers. None of my friends were remotely geeky. I was so uncool in school, even the dungeons and dragon players seemed unapproachable, settled in the library with their incomprehensible analogue systems. I went to college and left the uncool behind, somehow, but the curiosity for computers didn't start here. My first interaction with a computer was with a Pentium 286 (I think?) running Windows 3.11, standalone. I learnt how to start software by clicking the .exe and that was it, because all there was was Word and it didn't really fan the flames. It was a box. I could write words on it and they would print out.
Underwhelmed, frankly.
>Users in the Babbage computer labs, ground floor, University of Plymouth: Many
>What year is this?
>1995
Two years. We didn't know then that the speed of development and change would carry on at the same pace, but so much changed in those two years that I got a glimpse, even then on the tour of the university campus, of what the future would look like. And it looked damn fine to a hick from a tiny village in the middle of nowhere in Somerset, let me tell you. Sparks. Curiosity. Macs before they got colourful or white, still at this point a dull beige. Aesthetically unattractive. But.
Netscape. The beginning of a long and fruitful relationship with something I later learned was a web browser. Pages with grey backgrounds. All black text. No understanding of how to use it, playing, clicking, following the spidersweb across the world. Back then, you had two options. Using a directory, the name of which I can't remember but I think might have been Yahoo, which listed, and yes, I do mean actually physically listed, in lists, every website known to man because there were that few then, or to follow the trail of little blue underlined words.
It felt like falling down the rabbit hole.
I can still remember the feeling. I was absolutely completely consumed with following those links. Disappeared into them for hours, coming out two continents and 7 conversations later with people on the other side of the world, asking them incessant questions, them asking me questions too. Nothing seedy, not yet, the incessant wail of Age/Sex/Location (ASL) hadn't filtered through the ports yet, just an innocence as people tried to find out what it was like to live on the other side of the world from real people who were really, actually, talking back. In real time. Type something, hit enter, there the words appeared for both of you to see. My partner in crime during this time? Another girl, as mesmerised as I. I don't know where she is now, but I hope she still geeks well.
>Users in the Babbage Sun lab, 2nd floor: Less than downstairs
>What year is this?
>1997
Another two years. Email is becoming prevalent but it's definitely not the first thing you ask someone for. Web addresses of companies are making their first debut on buses on the streets of Plymouth. Things are.....emerging from the underground? Was there ever an underground? I don't know. I sat with hackers, geeks and cool kids in a lab for 7 hours a day, playing with the tech, learning to use a command line and getting my head around the lack of windows, the lack of pretty pictures.
I discovered Bulletin Board Systems, chat zones, I crossed the country to meet other geeks, I talked into the small hours about absolutely nothing and I made friends that stayed. Friends who have gone on to change the world. Friends who have stepped off the world and off the grid. Friends who have pushed the boundaries of neurological exploration and disappeared down the rabbit hole too. Friends who own Ferraris and friends who build the games we play. Even, perhaps, friends who hacked the Vatican though I never knew if he was lying. The tale was funny to tell all the same. More importantly, I was in a group of people who understood my incessant curiosity, who tolerated my cross examinations happily and who were all, to the very last man, smarter then me. Because this was a lab full of men and I was the token girl, and this was a situation to become replicated later, many many times.They even danced on podiums next to me to Carl Cox and Paul Oakenfold. They lost it next to me on the dancefloor to Bon Jovi and Nine Inch Nails. Geeks. The few. The hardcore. But happy.
To be continued.......
Monday, 27 September 2010
A digital commitment
I am a digital bunny but I do hereby declare:
Digital capability should not be restricted to those lucky enough to be on the end of an unbundled exchange.
Digital speed should not be restricted because of your geographical location.
Digital accessibility should not be an issue. Ever. The software is there, it is our job to ensure it always has something to spell out.
Digital snobbery has no place in this world. Blogeratti, twiteratti - this is about elitism whether you like it or not. Get over yourself.
Digital activism is not militancy.It is not the new army. It is a bunch of geeks giving people a platform to voice their passion, belief and enthusiasm. Engagement doesn't always tell you what you want to hear. Listen. The future is hearing both sides of the story.
Digital worlds can exist next to analogue ones. Analogue tastes better, smells better and the sunshine feels fantastic as you climb out of the freezing cold lake. There will always be a place for it, don't disappear out of it.
Digital friendships are a reality. Treat them with the same respect as you would the friends you meet for coffee/beer. Don't lie, don't disappear without a word, don't assume who the people you are talking to are. Ask them. Engagement isn't just for 'citizens', people need to interact too.
In this world that is changing so fast, sometimes it can feel like ethics are fading away. So this is my commitment to everyone I deal with.
I will play nicely.
- To always explain when you're misusing technical terminology
- To always do the explaining in plain English
- To always be straight about what the tech can and can't do to the best of my knowledge
- To own up if I find out from someone smarter than me that something was possible when I told you it wasn't
- To never use the terms 'reaching out', 'blue sky thinking', 'web n.0', 'thinking outside of the box', or any other vacuous terms unless absolutely necessary and unless they're needed as a bridging tool between tech and non tech.
- To never laugh when you get it wrong
- To never rain all over your enthusiasm
- To explain in clear language why something is absolutely definitely a bad idea technically, but also when I'm saying no because snowflakes falling down an email is just not an option.
- To explain the geek speak in all forms, repeatedly as many times as asked
- To tell you when I genuinely don't know something, but to always try and point you in the direction of someone who does.
- To use the word virus carefully, with due care and attention
- To look away when you're typing your password in front of me in full faith
- To inspire and enthuse others as best I can
- To pass it on, always, and never keep data to myself if it's possible to make it open
- To enable you instead of always showing you how it's done
- To ignore your fear but come back to it another day if that's what's needed
- To pay attention and notice when your eyes are glazing over and step away
- To not squee, LOL, *hug* or ROFL in a professional capacity
- To retain a sense of humour, always, because this shit is complicated and all of us want to throw out PC's out of the window at some point
Digital capability should not be restricted to those lucky enough to be on the end of an unbundled exchange.
Digital speed should not be restricted because of your geographical location.
Digital accessibility should not be an issue. Ever. The software is there, it is our job to ensure it always has something to spell out.
Digital snobbery has no place in this world. Blogeratti, twiteratti - this is about elitism whether you like it or not. Get over yourself.
Digital activism is not militancy.It is not the new army. It is a bunch of geeks giving people a platform to voice their passion, belief and enthusiasm. Engagement doesn't always tell you what you want to hear. Listen. The future is hearing both sides of the story.
Digital worlds can exist next to analogue ones. Analogue tastes better, smells better and the sunshine feels fantastic as you climb out of the freezing cold lake. There will always be a place for it, don't disappear out of it.
Digital friendships are a reality. Treat them with the same respect as you would the friends you meet for coffee/beer. Don't lie, don't disappear without a word, don't assume who the people you are talking to are. Ask them. Engagement isn't just for 'citizens', people need to interact too.
In this world that is changing so fast, sometimes it can feel like ethics are fading away. So this is my commitment to everyone I deal with.
I will play nicely.
Sunday, 26 September 2010
A friendly definition
There is always a sigh of relief when something I've been grappling with is picked up by someone else and the notion of the problem expressed far better than I can. Tim Lloyd is todays provoker of the sigh, with a link he posted to the issues GP's are having with friends versus patients versus patients who become friends versus....well you get the drift.
I'm struggling too but for different reasons. Back when the web was small, when peoples 'handles' would pop up in various places on usenet, web chat systems, BBS chat systems and game zones, you could be relatively sure it was the same person behind all of them. Some of them were hackers in the traditional sense and some in the modern sense. Some had police scanners taken off them in HMV in Plymouth. Some of them just loved taunting me by hacking my node on the network and making it play music - a fate worse than death on behemoth old Suns we used to play on. But there was a playfulness there too, and a big feeling of community. People crossed the country to meet other 'geeks'. People crossed the country to meet people they'd never met before, just for the luxury of speaking the same language as the people they were going to see. Geek.
The community grew, and people joined and left. Time passed. When we weren't looking, the web happened, forums and all that new fangled jazz. We all eventually caught up with Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. Communities drifted apart as the geeks suddenly discovered that a) they were suddenly cool b) there were geeks more local to them than a 100 mile round trip and c) as connections were made in different places based on different hobbies and interests.
The problem is, I'm still struggling with the same thing everyone else is struggling with. At what point does online collaboration become a friendship? At what point is it okay to offer a virtual *hug* (yes I'm old skool, and?) and at what point is someone not of the old skool where that was expected and a *hug* will result in a raised eyebrow and a 'get away from me freak girl'.
I don't know how to tell the different from the geeks who's hearts were absolutely always in the right place and the new school of geeks. The former are still there and I still adore and respect and admire. The latter are bandwagon jumpers, seeing tech as an an economic, financial and career opportunity, not a tool for social change, for engagement, for inclusion, for balancing playing fields, allowing people to do their jobs better and more efficiently, for empowering people and giving them a voice. It's possible to be both I understand this absolutely. But peoples motivations matter to me, and I am catching up with catching up with who is on the right side of the line and who is on the wrong side.
Which brings me to the point. Which is that I am slowly understanding that ideas are a commodity in this brave new world. That the girl who lamented to a friend 6 years ago that no one would ever pay her for her ideas and why didn't the world work that way and what was I supposed to do with all these ideas I had no idea how to implement, that I knew tech could make possible but that I didn't have the tech knowledge to actually implement - in this world right now, those ideas are valuable. Not in monetary terms, perhaps, but in ways that I am only slowly beginning to understand.
So, when the geeks inherited the earth, turns out things got more complicated, and not less. Inheritance means responsibility, means slowing down and taking stock, means that those of us who wear our hearts on our sleeves (not all geeks, I know this) are getting caught in the crossfire of other peoples agendas. I do not like this at all.
It's like swimming with sharks. I knew it would be. I didn't expect it to be so difficult to discern the sharks from the good people. And I am old fashioned, but I only want to collaborate with good people.
I'm struggling too but for different reasons. Back when the web was small, when peoples 'handles' would pop up in various places on usenet, web chat systems, BBS chat systems and game zones, you could be relatively sure it was the same person behind all of them. Some of them were hackers in the traditional sense and some in the modern sense. Some had police scanners taken off them in HMV in Plymouth. Some of them just loved taunting me by hacking my node on the network and making it play music - a fate worse than death on behemoth old Suns we used to play on. But there was a playfulness there too, and a big feeling of community. People crossed the country to meet other 'geeks'. People crossed the country to meet people they'd never met before, just for the luxury of speaking the same language as the people they were going to see. Geek.
The community grew, and people joined and left. Time passed. When we weren't looking, the web happened, forums and all that new fangled jazz. We all eventually caught up with Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. Communities drifted apart as the geeks suddenly discovered that a) they were suddenly cool b) there were geeks more local to them than a 100 mile round trip and c) as connections were made in different places based on different hobbies and interests.
The problem is, I'm still struggling with the same thing everyone else is struggling with. At what point does online collaboration become a friendship? At what point is it okay to offer a virtual *hug* (yes I'm old skool, and?) and at what point is someone not of the old skool where that was expected and a *hug* will result in a raised eyebrow and a 'get away from me freak girl'.
I don't know how to tell the different from the geeks who's hearts were absolutely always in the right place and the new school of geeks. The former are still there and I still adore and respect and admire. The latter are bandwagon jumpers, seeing tech as an an economic, financial and career opportunity, not a tool for social change, for engagement, for inclusion, for balancing playing fields, allowing people to do their jobs better and more efficiently, for empowering people and giving them a voice. It's possible to be both I understand this absolutely. But peoples motivations matter to me, and I am catching up with catching up with who is on the right side of the line and who is on the wrong side.
Which brings me to the point. Which is that I am slowly understanding that ideas are a commodity in this brave new world. That the girl who lamented to a friend 6 years ago that no one would ever pay her for her ideas and why didn't the world work that way and what was I supposed to do with all these ideas I had no idea how to implement, that I knew tech could make possible but that I didn't have the tech knowledge to actually implement - in this world right now, those ideas are valuable. Not in monetary terms, perhaps, but in ways that I am only slowly beginning to understand.
So, when the geeks inherited the earth, turns out things got more complicated, and not less. Inheritance means responsibility, means slowing down and taking stock, means that those of us who wear our hearts on our sleeves (not all geeks, I know this) are getting caught in the crossfire of other peoples agendas. I do not like this at all.
It's like swimming with sharks. I knew it would be. I didn't expect it to be so difficult to discern the sharks from the good people. And I am old fashioned, but I only want to collaborate with good people.
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Geek <=> cool?
Somewhere along the line, something has gone wrong. Or, rather, I'm not sure something actually has gone wrong but I am not entirely sure I am comfortable with it. Or, perhaps it is that it is what it is and I am reluctant to step up to the plate but I know that I must, in the same way that we all must if the big society is to work, and those of us who are dreamers, idealists and wishers, we all want the big society to work.
I know some things. I know these things through being inside something. It's as natural to me as breathing, a framework where I instinctively operate. It's not got a name and it doesn't need a special name. It's not cute and fluffy and it's not going to change the world. Except, that was 3 years ago. Now I know some things for the same reasons but I feel somehow responsible for making those things cute and fluffy and accessible. I feel responsible for passing it in, for teaching people, for explaining in plain English to those far smarter than me. Sometimes I find myself in such ridiculous situations, explaining something which to me seems so damn simple, to someone who could intellectually eat me for breakfast.
I am confused. Bewildered. There is a new world order, why yes there is, but instead of being at the bottom of the pile, suddenly I seem to be in the middle somewhere. Have the geeks inherited the earth?
Well yes. Yes they have. But with inheriting something, as in reality with heirlooms, there comes a certain responsibility if you are a certain kind of a person. I suppose I am a certain kind of a person. I don't believe it's someone elses job. I don't believe someone else should pick up the baton. I wont leave well alone. Some of my friends, who are geeks, think I am ridiculous for getting involved. They think I am talking pipedreams. Others don't understand the need for translation, others sneer at those who need translation, instead wanting to keep the knowledge and thus the power to themselves.
Lets get this straight, right now. I am not cool. I am a geek. Being a geek is not cool. If it is going to become cool to be a geek, and increasingly it seems that this might be the case, then I am not entirely sure I am comfortable with that. I love digital. I love technology. I love burying my head in a book. I want to know everything, all of it, all of the time and right now. I do not want to be cool. Cool is frivolous, cool is unquantifiable, cool does not come in black and white and cool is out of my control. Someone else decides whether I am cool or not and I am simply not interested in that. I'm too old, too grumpy, dress too differently, and frankly, am just too uncool.
But I am a geek. A big geek with a big heart. It used to be that that bemused people. Confused them. I would speak, the words would come out of my mouth, and there would be confusion in the listeners eyes. What is this you speak of? Why are you telling me these things? Why are you so enthusiastic about something as stupid as talking in text? We talk to each other, there is no space or time for your weird ideas here.
Now the world has flipped and I am catching up. And I am the one who is confused and bewildered. I perpetually feel like I am supposed to be doing something where I am not entirely sure what something is. I have ideas, hundreds of them. I sit and listen to other people talking and 90% of the time ideas spark and pinwheel off in my brain and I reach for a pad and I scribble and scribble and scribble some more. Ideas, imaginings, what if's, why can't we's, how about we do it that way, or try it that way.....a constant processing of input and generation of output. That's not cool. That's being a geek. An acknowledgement of a brain which works like a computer, which needs rebooting each night, defragging occasionally, but when running at optimum can crunch masses of data and come to conclusions easily and smoothly at the end of the crunching.
I have spent a long time hiding this. I have spent a long time only letting similar people see.
Slowly but surely, the decision to just see what happens is creeping up on me. To jump, take a risk, do something, do something. But that's not cool and the last thing on earth I want to be is cool. The technology is cool. The digital capability is cool. Faster broadband, smaller chips, more efficient processing, crowdsourcing, village pumps , virtual noticeboards, unconferences and bar camps - they are all cool.
I am not.
I know some things. I know these things through being inside something. It's as natural to me as breathing, a framework where I instinctively operate. It's not got a name and it doesn't need a special name. It's not cute and fluffy and it's not going to change the world. Except, that was 3 years ago. Now I know some things for the same reasons but I feel somehow responsible for making those things cute and fluffy and accessible. I feel responsible for passing it in, for teaching people, for explaining in plain English to those far smarter than me. Sometimes I find myself in such ridiculous situations, explaining something which to me seems so damn simple, to someone who could intellectually eat me for breakfast.
I am confused. Bewildered. There is a new world order, why yes there is, but instead of being at the bottom of the pile, suddenly I seem to be in the middle somewhere. Have the geeks inherited the earth?
Well yes. Yes they have. But with inheriting something, as in reality with heirlooms, there comes a certain responsibility if you are a certain kind of a person. I suppose I am a certain kind of a person. I don't believe it's someone elses job. I don't believe someone else should pick up the baton. I wont leave well alone. Some of my friends, who are geeks, think I am ridiculous for getting involved. They think I am talking pipedreams. Others don't understand the need for translation, others sneer at those who need translation, instead wanting to keep the knowledge and thus the power to themselves.
Lets get this straight, right now. I am not cool. I am a geek. Being a geek is not cool. If it is going to become cool to be a geek, and increasingly it seems that this might be the case, then I am not entirely sure I am comfortable with that. I love digital. I love technology. I love burying my head in a book. I want to know everything, all of it, all of the time and right now. I do not want to be cool. Cool is frivolous, cool is unquantifiable, cool does not come in black and white and cool is out of my control. Someone else decides whether I am cool or not and I am simply not interested in that. I'm too old, too grumpy, dress too differently, and frankly, am just too uncool.
But I am a geek. A big geek with a big heart. It used to be that that bemused people. Confused them. I would speak, the words would come out of my mouth, and there would be confusion in the listeners eyes. What is this you speak of? Why are you telling me these things? Why are you so enthusiastic about something as stupid as talking in text? We talk to each other, there is no space or time for your weird ideas here.
Now the world has flipped and I am catching up. And I am the one who is confused and bewildered. I perpetually feel like I am supposed to be doing something where I am not entirely sure what something is. I have ideas, hundreds of them. I sit and listen to other people talking and 90% of the time ideas spark and pinwheel off in my brain and I reach for a pad and I scribble and scribble and scribble some more. Ideas, imaginings, what if's, why can't we's, how about we do it that way, or try it that way.....a constant processing of input and generation of output. That's not cool. That's being a geek. An acknowledgement of a brain which works like a computer, which needs rebooting each night, defragging occasionally, but when running at optimum can crunch masses of data and come to conclusions easily and smoothly at the end of the crunching.
I have spent a long time hiding this. I have spent a long time only letting similar people see.
Slowly but surely, the decision to just see what happens is creeping up on me. To jump, take a risk, do something, do something. But that's not cool and the last thing on earth I want to be is cool. The technology is cool. The digital capability is cool. Faster broadband, smaller chips, more efficient processing, crowdsourcing, village pumps , virtual noticeboards, unconferences and bar camps - they are all cool.
I am not.
Wednesday, 25 August 2010
Why am I 'public service'?
Over on Spencer Wilsons blog he asks the question by proxy of why people are public service. I work in the public sector and have done for a while now, with a brief foray into private sector life at a shall remain nameless multi-national auditing consultancy, and I hope it's where I will be allowed to stay.
It started with a temp job in the HR Department with the London Ambulance Service, went via an admin post with the Community Service section of the London Probation Service which became a stint as a Probation Service Officer supervising young repeat offenders on the Intensive Supervision and Monitoring Scheme which then became, due to relocation, a stint as a Systems Tech/Admin for a Local Authority which has now become a post as a Multimedia Communciations Officer.
That list spans 13 years. There were gaps in between, as ISP connection tech which became Team Leader when I was but a bairn out of university, and as the aforementioned Team Secretary for the 4 letter auditing employer where I got the highest score on the inbox exercise they'd ever seen but where I fit in about as seamlessly as a penguin in a lion enclosure.
Over on Spencer Wilsons post, someone has already commented, and quite fairly, that there are two kinds of public sector employee.
I'd like to make the point that there used to be two kinds of public sector employee. That the sector is moving on, in some areas quicker than others. That my experience over 13 years has changed, that the people I meet in the jobs I work in have changed.
My current team is a beautiful example. There are no coat tail riders. There are no questions about working as late as necessary to get the job done. If there is an 'emergency', people change plans and work around it. If weekend or late evening working is needed, to attend Board meetings, well so be it. There are jokes made about tedium and hours lost forever, but they are jokes, they are not meant. They are passionate about their jobs. They love analysing, thinking, dissecting issues from numerous different directions. Opinions, I am told, are welcome and I believe that absolutely, and am already expressing my own, carefully. Others tell me there is no blame culture, and I believe that too. I can't think of a single person in the whole department who I would not go to to ask a question of, and not expect to receive a well thought, well reasoned, well argued response back.
I know not all Departments are like this. I know this very well. But every person in that office could be paid oh so much more somewhere else. Every single person in that office makes a conscious decision to stay, despite the 30-40% axe shaped numbers floating above their heads. They pay infinite attention to detail, but they do their jobs with grace and humour still.
None of these things, and I do mean none of these things, have I found in the private sector. Perhaps the difference is a motivation to work hard to earn the fabled 'job for life', perhaps they stay because of the pension promise. I don't think they do, but perhaps I am wrong. Instead I think they do it for the same reason I do it, because they don't mind waking up in the morning. Because going to work isn't a hassle or a chore. Because every day is different and no one knows in the morning how the world will look by evening. Because they are led well and with commitment. Because as a result that commitment filters down, as does the communication. Because thinking outside of the box means jumping up and down on it until it's absolutely flattened with treadmarks printed all over it. Because it's a challenge and it's hectic and it requires keeping very many plates spinning at once, but that's fun, that's the point, that's the challenge and that's the reason.
I perhaps paint an idyllic picture. It's entirely possible I couldn't walk out of the door tomorrow and go and work for some digital media agency and instantly double my salary. Perhaps I might not get such good pension deal somewhere else. Perhaps I might find inspiring passionate people who make me laugh, feel comfortable enough to actually express my opinions and where being a woman hasn't even crossed my mind since I stepped across the threshold of the Department.
I don't really care. I work as hard as I can to earn the money the public contributes to paying my salary. I think as fast and as thoroughly as I can, with as much enthusiasm and passion as I can, for as long as I can each day. I don't sneak off for appointments and not make the time up. I don't sneak off to go shopping for presents either. I don't take inappropriate gifts from people and I never make promises that I can't keep. I try as hard as I possibly can to be the kind of person you would want to give money to to do their job.
I am not alone. I am one of millions. I am proud to be one of millions, just one little cog in the wheel which means my little piece of the public sector keeps oiled and running. But most of all, I am proud to be in the company of an army of people who feel exactly the same way I do. Armies can win battles - and I fear that with the cuts which are coming, it's going to take an armies organisation and attitude to keep things running.
It started with a temp job in the HR Department with the London Ambulance Service, went via an admin post with the Community Service section of the London Probation Service which became a stint as a Probation Service Officer supervising young repeat offenders on the Intensive Supervision and Monitoring Scheme which then became, due to relocation, a stint as a Systems Tech/Admin for a Local Authority which has now become a post as a Multimedia Communciations Officer.
That list spans 13 years. There were gaps in between, as ISP connection tech which became Team Leader when I was but a bairn out of university, and as the aforementioned Team Secretary for the 4 letter auditing employer where I got the highest score on the inbox exercise they'd ever seen but where I fit in about as seamlessly as a penguin in a lion enclosure.
Over on Spencer Wilsons post, someone has already commented, and quite fairly, that there are two kinds of public sector employee.
I'd like to make the point that there used to be two kinds of public sector employee. That the sector is moving on, in some areas quicker than others. That my experience over 13 years has changed, that the people I meet in the jobs I work in have changed.
My current team is a beautiful example. There are no coat tail riders. There are no questions about working as late as necessary to get the job done. If there is an 'emergency', people change plans and work around it. If weekend or late evening working is needed, to attend Board meetings, well so be it. There are jokes made about tedium and hours lost forever, but they are jokes, they are not meant. They are passionate about their jobs. They love analysing, thinking, dissecting issues from numerous different directions. Opinions, I am told, are welcome and I believe that absolutely, and am already expressing my own, carefully. Others tell me there is no blame culture, and I believe that too. I can't think of a single person in the whole department who I would not go to to ask a question of, and not expect to receive a well thought, well reasoned, well argued response back.
I know not all Departments are like this. I know this very well. But every person in that office could be paid oh so much more somewhere else. Every single person in that office makes a conscious decision to stay, despite the 30-40% axe shaped numbers floating above their heads. They pay infinite attention to detail, but they do their jobs with grace and humour still.
None of these things, and I do mean none of these things, have I found in the private sector. Perhaps the difference is a motivation to work hard to earn the fabled 'job for life', perhaps they stay because of the pension promise. I don't think they do, but perhaps I am wrong. Instead I think they do it for the same reason I do it, because they don't mind waking up in the morning. Because going to work isn't a hassle or a chore. Because every day is different and no one knows in the morning how the world will look by evening. Because they are led well and with commitment. Because as a result that commitment filters down, as does the communication. Because thinking outside of the box means jumping up and down on it until it's absolutely flattened with treadmarks printed all over it. Because it's a challenge and it's hectic and it requires keeping very many plates spinning at once, but that's fun, that's the point, that's the challenge and that's the reason.
I perhaps paint an idyllic picture. It's entirely possible I couldn't walk out of the door tomorrow and go and work for some digital media agency and instantly double my salary. Perhaps I might not get such good pension deal somewhere else. Perhaps I might find inspiring passionate people who make me laugh, feel comfortable enough to actually express my opinions and where being a woman hasn't even crossed my mind since I stepped across the threshold of the Department.
I don't really care. I work as hard as I can to earn the money the public contributes to paying my salary. I think as fast and as thoroughly as I can, with as much enthusiasm and passion as I can, for as long as I can each day. I don't sneak off for appointments and not make the time up. I don't sneak off to go shopping for presents either. I don't take inappropriate gifts from people and I never make promises that I can't keep. I try as hard as I possibly can to be the kind of person you would want to give money to to do their job.
I am not alone. I am one of millions. I am proud to be one of millions, just one little cog in the wheel which means my little piece of the public sector keeps oiled and running. But most of all, I am proud to be in the company of an army of people who feel exactly the same way I do. Armies can win battles - and I fear that with the cuts which are coming, it's going to take an armies organisation and attitude to keep things running.
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
140 characters or less
Thursday, 12 February 2009
Well, hello there....
Despite having an internet presence since 1996, in some shape or form, this is my first foray into public blogging.
Until I got a Twitter account, I couldn't see the point of web 2.0. I thought it was reinventing the wheel, simply mimicing what Bulletin Board Systems had been doing for the last 20-30 years. I looked at all the little kids getting excited about being able to talk to each other in real time and share pictures and bookmarks and quietly smirked in the corner.
Twitter has changed my view, and I suspect in some ways will change my digital life. I have always been a very passive viewer. I read forums but never post, I read blogs but never comment, I view pictures but never praise, I find old friends on Facebook but I rarely write the first message. Twitter has forced me to engage with people. It is impossible to watch a stream of humanity scrolling up your screen from all corners of the globe and not be touched, somehow, with the wonder which Twitter is slowly but surely becoming.
A couple of years ago I had a discussion with someone far smarter than me about collective consciousness. He, and I to a lesser extent, couldn't see the point of having all these cabbies driving all over the place with 'The Knowledge' stuck in their head, and satellite navigation systems working entirely independantly, resulting in 30 tonne lorries getting stuck on hump backed bridges in the middle of nowhere. Far better, we thought, to stream the cabbies consciousness somehow - ask them to feed into a database which correlated all their shortcuts, hotspots they avoided etc, and link this somehow to satellite navigation. A lot of people would pay an awful lot of money for something which was 'intelligent'. A web 2.0 satnav system. A way of drawing on so many peoples knowledge, experience and current observations. A way to find out about traffic problems from the people on the ground, not a helicopter in the sky.
Imagine my sheer delight, then, to discover a map of #uksnow. Quite literally, a map of Tweets, tagged with #uksnow, ripped directly from Twitter. All you need to know is the format to post the Tweet in, and bingo! there's your contribution to the collective consciousness for all to see. So now, immediately, we have real time weather reporting, available to anyone who wants it, faster than the Met Office or the BBC can report it.
Welcome to the brave new world.
Welcome to the point of web 2.0. It took me a really long time to see it. But now, I've seen the future, and the future is sharing.
NB: I appreciate that perhaps collective consciousness is not the correct term for this. But I don't know what is, there isn't exactly a dictionary for this sort of thing yet, and suggestions will be welcomed!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)