8 things

Todd Defren, a twitter buddy, passes on the "8 Things You (Probably) Don't Know About Me" meme started by Social Media Group's Maggie Fox.

Here are mine:

1)  I'm engaged to a magician, and sometimes play "Beautiful Assistant" for his acts.  Not only his acts on stage (last gig on NYE), but also in Second Life where he is Tuna Oddfellow, one of the most famous performers in Second Life, and the winner of NBC's "Most talented avatar" contest last summer -- so he got to be on America's Got Talent *twice* last summer.  It's a continuing adventure.  We're getting married this summer. 

2)  In the middling 80's I was an instructor at New England Culinary Institute, teaching Computer Literacy for Restaurant Management Candidates.  It was the dawn of the spreadsheet, and there were no good cheap restaurant inventory control solutions for the PC.  I opened the class by telling my shocked students that they already knew a formal programming language -- the recipe.  After mapping measurements to data types, quantities to variables, procedures like "blend" to subroutines, and the order of operations in the recipe to the order of execution...   Well, I had converted a class of luddites in about an hour.  It was a fun gig, as I got to sit in on classes free, and saved me from my ambition to run a B&B.  I hate making beds.

3)  Just before that, I was a "wunderkind" Chief Software Engineer/Consultant at Digital Equipment Corporation at 22, managing prototype application development for the first commercial multimedia authoring system, DEC IVIS, based on PLATO.  This meant we got to try to break the interpreter and the compiler in creative ways.  We had a total of about 50 people working on the project from seven disciplines, and I was selected to head the group because of my polymath literacy in various disciplines including education, graphics, business processes, compiler design, systems programming and application development -- and herding cats.

4)  It was while I was at DEC that a memo came around one day with a little 8.5" x 5.5" booklet.  It said that DEC had determined that their contract with the government didn't preclude them from routing email traffic over the net, and so if you needed to get up with any of the senior management or engineering staff in that booklet directory -- of emails with weird gateway addresses, at the time -- you were to email them rather than use long distance or the beancounters would come beat you.  1982.  Then, it was discovering USENET, and ftp, and...it was all over.  I left educational software and started to learn network engineering.  Vint Cerf once told me that this made me one of the perhaps first 50, at least the first 100, women engineers on the net. 

5)  My first media commentary was at a civil rights march in the middle sixties in Wisconsin.  I was about five, and because I've always looked young for my age, I looked like a toddler.  My father was a major SCLC organizer in Wisconsin, and people had been in our living room discussing strategy for weeks.  A local news team saw the mop-headed "toddler" and asked: "And why are you here today little girl?"  I looked up at the reporter soberly and assured him that "I am here because our community needs healing around the dialectic of race."  I think there was a bit of dead air after that as the guy recovered.

6)  I won my first essay contest at 13 for a paper documenting the degradation of pond weed beds in Ticklenaked Pond in Vermont, since the introduction of speed boating on the pond, and how that was ruining the fishing.  I got a certificate, and a great day of touring trout hatcheries with state Fish and Game staff.

7) In 1999, I ghost wrote the keynote address for the Bridging the Digital Divide conference immediately preceding the WTO ministerial in Seattle.  This conference brought together some of the great players in high tech, government, nonprofit, foundation, and multilaterals to try to come up with an "enlightened capitalist" solution to the growing gap in access to computer and network technology around the world.  Craig Smith gave the speech, and I was not credited, but at the reception after, Jim Wolfenson -- then president of the World Bank --  pigeonholed me in a quiet corner and asked, "You work with Craig and Digital Partners, are you familiar with the themes of his keynote?"  Suppressing a smile, I assured him I was pretty well acquainted with the speech (as I'd conceived, outlined and drafted it, but I didn't mention that).  For about 20 minutes I got to explain my vision of collective micromarkets and micropayments in the developing world, and how cultures don't need to go through the industrial revolution to join the information aid.  And watched the lights go on.  The hell with 15 minutes of fame.  Give me 20 minutes of influence.

8)  I have developed a way of teaching people time, project and strategic management that could "save the world."  In 90 minutes I can change a large majority of a class into systems thinkers, who understand the role of media in society, and how to break down business, social and political problems into projects they can plan and engage as a group.  I've been working on this quietly for about ten years, and recently decided it's time to write the book and take it all on the road.  The tentative title of the book is How to Raise a Risk Taker, and it centers around the notion that we've lost the American spirit of engagement and innovation in recent generations of overprotected warehoused millenials and Gen-whatevers.  These young people are hungry to effect change, but they've been purposefully blunted by paranoid parenting and schools that are still preparing docile industrial workers.  If we want to compete in a global market we need to understand the origin of "slack" and root it up.  Watch this space! :) 

If you want to continue this game on Gather, include the tag 8things in your article tag, and go forth!