Question 336 of 365: What are we without deadlines?

The space between the statement of the task and the completion of that task is infinite. It is the one place where all of our fear and hopelessness exists. It is where we doubt ourselves and find ourselves inadequate. It the space that spits out our evenings as the waste of fruitless tangents, leading to nothing of consequence. It is the back-breaking open ended question of how we get from point A to point B. Even if you know what you are doing, the moments in between the ask and the answer are treacherous. Each deadline is a trap, a complete time-suck that forces attention and eschews free will. We are bent toward the timeline, no matter the cost to sleep or sanity.

And that’s the good stuff.

Without such deadlines, we are nothing. We are aimless and grasping at anything to give structure to the maddening everything in front of us. Without tasks to accomplish, we are never really awake and aware of those around us. We wait and wait and wait. We hope and do not receive. The deadline is a perfect opponent to wrestle. Without it, we are just writhing on the floor with ourselves. We have nothing to reflect upon or accomplishments to be proud of.

It is the submit button that tells our story. It is what we turn in and post that defines us. It is the conduit of information from one person to another that ends up being what ties us together. It suspends us above the precipice of empty days and restless nights.

Even as I maintain my agony over each submission, I know that it is helping me. Every presentation and blog post and email is pushing me forward until I am riding on a crest of contribution and enjoying every moment. The space between action items and due dates also contains all of the people that I want to spend my life with. My children are in that space, always trying to figure out something new, always trying to push some boundary until it is time to go to school or come home or go to the bathroom. My wife is there, ready to balance our home, her studies and her passion for making everyone better than they currently are. My coworkers are there too. And our combined stress of getting things done and rubbing our braincells together is enough to light from one side of the chasm to the other.

I am thankful for my deadlines. I will gladly share them with anyone else who is interested in purpose and moving forward.

Question 194 of 365: What should we brandish?

I could have left the -ish off the question and had it be something completely different. I could have talked about all of the ways in which we need to frame our ideas and link to them and craft a language around them. I could have gone into what it takes to brand a concept from brainstorm to launch. But, that I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to talk about how to massage an idea into what will eventually become. I want to talk about the things we wield.

Our weapons of choice.

What is it that we use above all else to coerce others into doing what we want. We may not be proud of it, or carry it around without a sense of power and responsibility. But, we do it all the same. We pull it out when others question our authority or passion or motives. It becomes our signature and the threat behind which we can hide.

Most often, my weapon is that of obscure expertise. While having never been formally trained on much of anything to do with technology, it so happens that I can wield the most inane details about social networks, web applications, or learning management systems. People come to me believing that the problem they have is so intricate and difficult that they would not be able to parse it out themselves. When, in fact, there are very few things that I troubleshoot or tutorialize that could not be figured out with some simple trial and error. And yet, when I figure them out, there is a sense that I have brandished a fine tool and precisely killed off the beast that was plaguing them.

There is also, hidden within each request for help, a certain fear that everything could come crashing down at any moment with a flick of my wrist. It is a fear of unknown knowledge and unfathomable technologies. If the iPad is magical to people because they can’t understand how it works, then I am the biggest wizard around because everything starts from that singular lack of understanding.

I’m just not sure it is a good weapon to brandish. I’m not sure that being a wizard is what the world needs.

I feel like it might be better just to waive a flag, a rallying cry for everyone else that tells of my quest for the best insight and connections possible. Wouldn’t that allow for less coercion? Wouldn’t that allow for more stories and less commands?

I am under no illusion that people who do not have critical information at their fingertips are in need of some help. It just makes more sense to create the environment with flags instead of guns. That way, no one gets hurt and every time the wind shifts, we will know which way it is going. With a gun, you can only stand in the way of wind and see the everything pass you by as you try to point and shoot at nothing.

Question 185 of 365: What happens when you just watch?

I saw a twinkle of power and awe in my daughter tonight. She held her first sparkler and threw her first snappers (the little bits of explosives that are wrapped in paper). It created something within her that I hadn’t seen before. A kind of hope for creation and destruction and danger all rolled into one.

When I just stared at her and waited for that look to keep developing, I found that I wanted it to. I wanted her to know more danger and more uncertainty for how things would turn out
I wanted her to see the wonder of fireworks for the first time. And I wanted that wonder for myself too.

I think that watching what you have already seen throughout the eyes of someone who has not is the only way to gain genuine perspective. Sometimes I wish that I could bring my daughter into every meeting and brainstorming session so I can know what it means to be green again, to be unjaded by having seen bigger fireworks before.

If my daughter can be in awe of a sparkler, I can be in awe of my existence too. If she can be cautious about fire and throwing explosives, I can reflect on the risk involved in my every action. If she can be unafraid at trying something new, I can push the boundaries of what is possible.

I’m not sure I ever knew how much I would learn from a 3 year old.

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Question 184 of 365: When can we have patches?

I was in the boy scouts for a total of a few months. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the things that happened there, I’m just not sure I ever figured out the idea of someone else giving you a badge when you have done something they deem worthy. Even from a very young age, I always wanted to be able to award myself for great accomplishments.

I was drawn to indie music for just such a reason. Every concert I went to, I purchased a patch or a button and I affixed it to my jacket as an award for being there. I would sew or tape or safety pin all of the things that meant something to me, and it felt as though there was nothing bigger that needed to present me with more.

I was always fascinated with wearing your interests and passions on your sleeve. I did this for many years, at least until it became inappropriate. I wore patches from those that represented who I was. When those things went away, I feel as though I lost a piece of my identity that I have never really been able to regain.

I think that those people I follow on Twitter and those I friend of facebook probably represent the best patches I could muster now. They are there for everyone to see, but they are so virtual that everyone else just looks at me as another young father in the local Safeway. There is nothing for people to react to or take interest in beyond my solid colored shirts and grey pants.

Others are trying to bring back the patches on foursquare and other social media games. And yet, these are ridiculous. There is nothing tangible about the swarm badge or being a mayor. There may be some connection being established as well as some bragging rights, but there isn’t any way to affix these badges in a unique way to represent who you are. There is no equivalent of safety pinning a Link 80 patch to a thrift store t-shirt. And there won’t be until we make the virtual fully tactile.

I envision a day when the places we have been and the people we know are no longer just in the online world. We will no longer have to write our Twitter handles on our name tags because people will know us when they see us by who we claim to be. This will happen when we augment our reality and tag ourselves, but it will also happen when we stop the absurdity of the and/or of technology.

Right now, you have the iPhone or you don’t. You either are on Twitter or you aren’t. You either make movies and post pictures or you don’t. In the near future those things won’t matter. Everyone will have a smart phone of some kind. Everyone will be on a social network. Everyone will be a photographer and movie maker. When this happens, the culture will not be about either/or. It will be about including these things in all daily life. We won’t have to wear “drastically digital” clothing because it won’t be important. Our bracelets that don’t do anything more than hang on our wrists will be about our digital lives as much as our analog existence. When everything online is the backdrop for what we do, we will once again be able to buy patches and own who we are.

I will go into a store and the goods will not be real or virtual. They will just be goods. The money will not be physical or online. It will just be. The nutrition facts on the side of my milk will not be available only while I am looking directly at the side of the carton. They will be a unique attribute of the milk itself. The tagging and metadata will make everything a subset of everything else.

While this may sound utopian (or dystopian to some). I look forward to the day when we do not begrudge physical objects because they aren’t high tech enough and we don’t discriminate against virtual objects because they aren’t real. At that point I think I will regain some of my identity that was lost. Then I will be able to wear my patches with pride.

Question 178 of 365: Are we backwards compatible?

I am on an old computer today. It doesn’t work with all of my newfangled iPads, Keynote files, or the standard version of Gmail. I feel a little bit lost on it, actually. I can’t do the things I would normally. I have to figure out workarounds. I don’t have any issues with doing this. I am energized by figuring out how to do new things with old hardware. But, it does make me think about just how little backwards compatibility really exists. Not just with our technology, but within ourselves.

It makes me think back to when I was using this tech the first time around. Who was I then? Am I compatible with that person, even? Back then, I had no idea about what two children meant. I hadn’t made some of my current closest friends, and I certainly hadn’t figured out that there was something after teaching. In short, I was probably about 25% of who I am now just a few years ago. And I don’t think that today’s me is all that compatible with the one I was. 

I’m pretty sure that the two of us would fight, actually. We would fight about what is the most important thing to be doing with our lives (creating greater change or teaching kids how to think for themselves). We would argue over money and influence and connections. He would probably read books right in my face (seeing as how I hardly have time to do that now). I would probably shoot back about how much I know about life through my son. He would laugh at the grey hairs and the bags under my eyes. I would poke fun at his uninformed workflow and lack of vision.

I am not the man I was, but I don’t want to be. I would never give up what I have for what I have been. That is why I feel as though backwards compatibility is overrated. While it may make sense for some technologies, I realized through the process of having to recreate a presentation from one that stripped out all of the links and some of the images, that the whole thing needed to be reworked anyway. I realized that the person that gave the presentation last time isn’t compatible with who I am today. Why should the presentation itself be that way? 

Sometimes, we should be forced to give up 70 percent of what we had so that we can become what we can become. In a presentation, it will transform the message and the intent. In a person, it will transform our actions and our personalities. 

So, are we backwards compatible? No. And we shouldn’t strive to be. We should go forward, relentlessly. We should forget and retry and revise until we can look at one version and the next and see the actual progress. Kind of like the ways in which we look at Internet Explorer 6 now. It is time to retire who we were (IE6 should die, actually). We can always look back, but we don’t have to keep building who we are so that compatibility is assured. It is convenient sometimes, but most of the time it just holds us back.

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Question 176 of 365: When is networking just drinking with friends?

The largest technology and education conference has come to Denver. Is the one time of the year when people from all over the world get together in a single space and talk about the issues that are most important to them, whether those are of equity and access, 1:1 computing, open source software, social media, online learning, or curriculum standards. All of those conversations are going to happen this week, and it isn’t the first time they have happened, either. In fact, many of the people who are here this year were at this conference last year, and perhaps the year before. And even if they weren’t, it is highly likely that these people have met online or at another conference.

So, networking is hopeless for these people. They know each other. They have had these conversations before. The contexts are different. The setting is different too. Perhaps, even something new is created. But, the unbridled networking that is the signature of seeing new people and figuring out how they find significance in your life is not something that happens when the same people have the same conversations about the same important issues.

Instead, we just have friends sitting down for a drink with one another. And maybe that is the best thing that we can be doing right now. Maybe it has always been about finding the people that we can sit down with and share one true moment, without introductions. We need to know people before we really can see their potential as collaborators. We need to see them as consistent parts of our creative lives before we let them in to the rest of who we are and what we have to offer.

So, let’s sit down and have a drink. Let’s continue the conversations we have started. And for those new people who we have never met before, let’s start the next conversations so that in a few months or years we will be able to see those individuals as collaborators, and more than that, as friends.

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Question 151 of 365: How do we predict the future?

Everyone is trying to devine the next big thing. Reading the tea leaves on Twitter or letting the alerts drift in to the inbox of your choice. We are all looking to get in on the ground floor of the next version of the web (3.0, 3d, etc.). We are looking for what could be, in every cute logo or interesting color scheme.

I keep thinking that I will know it when I see it, too. I look back on what was the next big thing, and I knew it then, right? I saw Google way before they were Google. I was searching with them back in high school. I should have just invested in them when they went public. I didn’t, though, and so many other people are in the same boat. And that is why we keep looking for the next Google.

That’s not the only reason, though. We keep looking because we want to know the future. We are looking for reasons enough to invest our time or effort, if not our money. But we keep looking in the same places. We are looking toward app stores and startups with vowels missing.

Predicting the future requires a little bit of crazy. It isn’t going to be the same companies, although they will be major players. It will be someone that sees something completely different from the same set of rules and situations.

While I know this isn’t going to be it exactly, here is something that the future might be:

There are a special glasses for making things appear to be in 3d, but I believe that there are new glasses coming. I believe that there are glasses that block out every other frame of a movie. The reason they do this is because there are two movies playing, interlaced so that the glasses will display only one and block out the other. The sound will match for the one you are watching. You will be able to sit in the same theatre or in front of the same screen and watch two separate films.

This is crazy talk. It doesn’t exist, nor will it. There are two many unanswered questions. There are too many things that don’t make sense about something like this, but this is the future. The future of ridiculous technology that seemingly is more intrusive and convenient at the same time. These glasses are impractical. They are the unfortunate offspring of wanting to be completely immersed by the media you are consuming and wanting to be with others who are interested in being with you but not in consuming the same media that you are.

The future is in sharing the same space but not the same experience. The future is in finding connections without having to know all of the same people or the same facts. Differentiation is the future, whether that is with glasses or with a single online profile that knows more than it lets on.

The next Google is going to be the first company to let people be who they are with one another. They will present technologies to get people together. People have been trying this for years, but it is the one thing that is still severely lacking. The physical devices have presented screens to separate our learning and understanding. The ones that are coming are ones that bring it all together.

The ones that have already had their shot at this rather elusive prize probably won’t get it quite right. Google, Apple and Microsoft pay lip service to the future, but they really are trying to shore up the markets that have made them profitable. They won’t see someone coming up on the outside with a crazy gadget such as those glasses. They will see it as something that can’t possibly catch on, and then once it does, they will try and copy it or buy them out. But it won’t work this time. This time, the future will be too interested in creating itself anew. And it will.

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Question 147 of 365: Who are the workout haters?

During my first year of college, I decided that I was going to work out every day. And I did. I ate whatever I wanted, but I worked out for at least an hour. I would start off by running on the treadmill or doing the stationary bike and then I moved on to the sit ups. I did about 50 a day for the first few months and then I started adding weights to my chest. This was a hold over from the summer before when I just used my graduation present dictionary.

I would do work on the machines in the fitness center too, but I never felt all that confident on them. I think I always just thought of myself as having more control over my body when I was the only thing that could break.

Throughout that year, I didn’t miss a day. I even found a gym while I was visiting my girlfriend’s family. I was obsessed then with making sure I worked out, much in the way I am obsessed now about writing these questions.

Right in the middle of the year, though, I received a phone call from a good friend of mine. He was worried about my working out so much. He said that my time on the treadmill was going to hurt my knees. He told me that I should take it easier and not worry about it so much. Now, this was coming from someone who didn’t work out at all. It was coming from someone who, while a wonderful friend, had no idea what the workouts were all about.

To him the running on the treadmill was something you did to get into shape. It was something to be avoided, if at all possible. To me, it was the rhythm of my day. It was what was helping to sort things and out them in their place. It was a way of establishing responsibility for something when I really had nothing to take care of. I had nothing tying me to anything else, other than my studies. I worked out because I could rely on it.

And for him to suggest that this thing was going to negatively impact my knees was ludicrous. It was as if he was attacking being healthy and being sane at the same time. I didn’t stand for it, either.

But, people keep telling me to get off of this treadmill too. While they admire my stamina, they keep on asking if I am really able to reflect or write to the depth that I could if I would slow down. They tell me that I am going to get burned out or that I will run out of ideas. I can’t guarantee that either of those things won’t happen, but what I can do is to pound even harder on the keys.

The repetition of writing at this point is much more about fighting of the intense instability that is everywhere else. This is what I can control. And I have continued to add weights to my chest as I go.

At first, it was just answering questions. Now it is something different. Now, I have to tell stories. I have to write over 700 words. I have to tell the truth. Now, I have to challenge myself to write about more and more personal memories, to see just how much I am willing to let out.

This daily habit is breaking me too. I don’t have the option of taking a night off or quitting because my question sucks. I have to follow my idea to its logical end, otherwise I will have wasted a day.

I can feel myself getting stronger, too. I don’t hesitate to state my opinion or couch it within a greater movement. I don’t have to apply everything to a technology or a teaching technique. I can let my posts just stand for themselves, even if no one reads them. I trust myself that given enough time to think and write, I will come up with something that at least I will be interested in reading again someday.

So, don’t tell me I am going to hurt my knees. Come running with me. Don’t say that my torrent of posts in your feed reader is too daunting to catch up. Draw a line in the stand and start there. Don’t say that I am spreading myself too thin. Rip down barriers for me so that I can spread unabated.

If only I could find time for working out now, too.

Question 134 of 365: What can Diaspora teach us?

Until this week I had only ever heard the word Diaspora to describe Jews who are living away from Israel. It had such a specific meaning that I didn’t really think about just how powerful decentralization could be as an idea that can energize people. I never thought of Diaspora as a way to create change.

This week, though, I was delighted to start seeing articles on a new open source project called Diaspora (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr). It is the so-called “anti-facebook.” Now, I don’t pretend to be a Facebook Privacy scholar, and I have no illusions that quitting Facebook at the end of the month is going to change anything. However, I do find the idea of an anti-facebook compelling. I find the idea of a grassroot effort to connect people together rather than have them gather around a central hub to be inticing enough to give money to. Which is more than I can say for Facebook at this point.

Diaspora aims to be the first decentralized social network, kind of a peer to peer connecting service. But, instead of trading files, we will be communicating with all of the other “seeds” (read nodes of a the social network/friends). There will be no one who keeps track of your data except for you, and when you are offline, potentially the access to your private information would go offline too (so long as you didn’t host your Diaspora account elsewhere, just like you can host your wordpress account as well).

Diaspora, as a project, was looking for funding on Kickstarter.com and because of their unique approach to the Facebook privacy problem, they were able to get more than enough (they were looking for $10,000 and the are looking at more than 10 times that now). This is impressive considering that the project was not a whole lot more than 4 geeks who mulled the idea over while trying to create a robot (a makerbot if you want to get specific).

The real question I have is what can we learn from the upstart, Diaspora. Here is a list that I think may be helpful for remembering (especially when some new startup idea is the darling of the tech blogosphere next week).

1. Find an outcry. They found a problem that was so pronounced that you were starting to see official protests and boycotts. They didn’t really come up with a solution for the outcry. rather they came up with an alternative. They took the model that Facebook had and dissected it down to its essentials and then built the rest so that it “didn’t suck.” I feel like we don’t cater to creating an alternative to outcries very often. We really do seem to like solving problems by one upsmanship. While we can’t follow the outcry wherever it goes, figuring out just why people are up in arms is a great way to finding something that resonates with a significant portion of the population.
2. Anti is easier than pro. This is something that I keep having to tell myself when I am reduced to fanboy status. It is so much easier and more effective for creating change when you can discuss exactly what it is that we are against and have that be a part of the daily conversation. If Diaspora would have framed themselves as “a decentralized social network” and not as “the anti-facebook”, they would still be fighting for the $10,000 they were after. Anti galvanizes support, when pro simply appeals to logic. When we feel as though we have been wronged (as many people do in terms of their facebook privacy), anti is really the only option left.
3. Set an achievable goal. I am always interested to find people that have set goals for themselves and then outpace them. I am more impressed when these goals are not meager. Diaspora wanted to garner $10,000 of support before they tried to build their software and they did it many times over. This was not a small amount of money to begin with, but because they actually set a value, they had something to work toward. Often, we don’t put a value on our goals. We just see if we can reach them and if we can’t, so what? We will just lower the bar. Diaspora didn’t lower the bar. They found something that they were passionate about and then they set a goal that was impractical to begin with. It is one more reason why I believe that anything is possible with the power of social media (after techcrunch and read/write web picked them up, they received the majority of their funding).
4. Be a geek, with both words and technology. Diaspora is a good idea. It is something that someone was going to create regardless of if it happened now or a year from now. But, it isn’t immediately something that would be easy for everyone to understand. “Disributed social networking” doesn’t exactly sound like a one-button solution. But, people have latched on to it because it has been put in ways that make sense. The video on their kickstarter page is awesome and the articles on blogs and in traditional media have discussed the project so well (and so deeply) that there really isn’t much more to be explained. They were able to start from scratch and run with it because they were geeky enough to have vision, and then they made their vision into words and visual persuasion. It is my contention that you aren’t really a geek until you can tell the story of your geekdom. And, that is exactly what they have done.

Those are the lessons that I have gleaned from Diaspora, but I’m sure there are bunches more. What can you find?

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#hr10tech Presentation: Ready or Not- The Future of Networks and Community