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Monday, 04 January 2010 06:13 |
2009 saw me moving to U.S. Well, sort of. I still have my company, apartment and dog in Portugal and am renting a house in Grass Valley. I'm suddenly reminded of my father who lives in UK, but has his business in Kenya.I've now lived in Kenya, UK, Portugal and U.S.A. My daughter lives in Rio de Janeiro, my son lives in Spain. For a home-loving Cancer woman it's hardly surprising I get a wobbly identity as people ask me to make knowledgeable assertions about "your" country, family or work. Everything in my life is spread out. I instinctively look outside to make sense of what's happening inside. I've learned to straddle, stomp and pirouette across boundaries whereas I only know how to wriggle inside them. A lot of my social life uncomfortable because I feel like I'm disappointing people who want to know what it's like inside one geographic or metaphoric place. One of the things I want to learn is how to articulate and celebrate this across-ness with people who communicate with me from a space of within-ness.
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Monday, 04 January 2010 06:12 |
2009 saw me trying to integrate social reporting and facilitating in face-to-face workshops. My experience is that tools and workshop processes tend to get separated.Contrary to all the hype in our social media bubble, most people are not using new tools and there is an art we need to develop to integrating the tools so that they don't just stay in the hands of the the techy enthusiasts. Christian Kreutz is also writing about this gap over in crisscrossed. Paradoxically I think that social media tools stand a better chance of becoming a lasting part of practice, if using the tools is integrated into the design, facilitation and activities of face-to-face events. David Wilcox and I started a conversation back in 2008 about this integration of facilitation and social reporting and this year I've been working on it with Etienne Wenger in workshops we have been doing together. More on that later ...
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Monday, 04 January 2010 06:11 |
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I now spend about half my time on the road so internet access is an abiding concern. I need it for work and for staying in contact with my family. My experience is that the more stars a hotel has, the more likely is the internet access going to be expensive and/or crummy. If you need fast, free WIFI you are better off getting work in Armenia, Slovenia, Zambia or Jordan or a budget hotel in Western Europe. Avoid London, Paris or Brussels, especially higher-end brands. There's a similar rant in PCWorld and in TechCrunch Sarah Lacy writes: "The quality of the connection is almost always better in emerging markets than Western Europe." Hotels in countries that should know better often blame it on third party providers. Why they can't manage the network themselves, like any two star hotel, I'm not sure - and, like Lucy, my experience is that the connection is usually poor. iBahn is one of those third party providers. They charge a ridiculous amount of money for a cable in your room. If there are two of you (each with their own computer) you have to pay double even though only one person can be on line at a time. I hope I'm not the only person making complaints because hotels need to know that it doesn't make sense.
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