No maps for these territories

What are your favorite resources about how collaboration — in a large or small group of people — works? And yeah, the answer probably isn’t “report Michael Jackson dead and see what happens to the Wikipedia pages.”* Though, that works too. * Answer: load spike. Slashdot ain’t got nothing on the King of Pop. See: [...]

This is what I came back to after a mini-vacation at my lovely family reunion. Hmmph.

The summer is a good time to think about planning for the fall, which is our busiest time of the academic year, with lots of orientations and classes. I teach library instruction for a few sections of a class called “engineering writing” every year. The students have to do a research paper with recent citations [...]

As a bit of background to strategic planning (see last post but one), I thought it would be useful to collect previous attempts at doing this. I’ve been seeing strategic discussions in the Foundation every year I’ve been involved; where are they all? I’m starting to collect relevant pages together on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy Take a [...]

Many of my professional friends & acquaintances are at SLA or ASEE this week. I dreamed last night that I had crashed a library conference, for purposes of my own (somehow, I got involved in putting together a display advertising Seattle, but it wasn’t very good). Most all of my friends from library school were [...]

There’s a lot of discussion surrounding the impeding Strategic planning process at Wikimedia, which has been announced but hasn’t yet fully fledged. It’s a good time to take stock of where we are and where we’re going, and hopefully the next year’s formal process will do that well and accurately for the Foundation as a [...]

I’ve been having some vivid dreams lately, vivid as a painting by some second-rate Surrealist who spent too much time sitting in Paris attics getting high. 1) I am in a bright red convertible, with someone else, and we are driving it up a mountain and to our destination backwards. There is much crazy swerving [...]