CommuniShare

I took a “wrong” turn on my hike the other day and ran across this ______ (whatever it is).  There’s no explanation, and certainly no directions.  But, somehow, I immediately felt it was social, and I felt welcome to contribute.

without my contribution

I found a rock that spoke to me.  And I placed it.

I didn’t want to put it in a precarious place.  And I definitely didn’t want to risk any of it tumbling down like a giant Jenga puzzle.  I found a flat rock, and placed it on a much larger, supporting (load bearing) flat rock.  About ¾ of my rock lies on the surface of the rock under it, and about ¼ extends out, cantilever.

Just as I feel welcome to build upon what’s there, my rock and its placement invite others to build upon it.  Some extra weight placed on the supported ¾ would allow someone else to place a rock on the extended end.  And I feel good about my role in this creation.

Now that I think about it, though, it’s probably not a single, ever-accumulating structure.  Rain and wind must knock it down – or some of it.  And people will build it back up again.  One stone at a time.  And it becomes a dance.  People taking their multipart turn; then nature takes its turn.  (I was at first thinking that nature’s turn was with one devastating blow.  But it’s not true.  Nature also has a multipart turn.  Each raindrop that hits.  Each gust of wind.  One rock falls over.  Two.  Three. A mini-landslide.  A fallen rock gets shoved again and again, until the storm is over and the sun comes out and it’s the people’s turn again.)

And, like with nature’s turn, the people’s turn is not neat and orderly.  The absence of stated (let alone enforced) rules makes sure of that.  Each person who encounters it determines their own rules.

with my contribution

When I encountered it, I just knew that I could place a rock – one rock.  I chose the rock.  I chose the placement.  I chose to sit down and appreciate it, to write down these impressions.

Someone else may decide to place several rocks.  Or rearrange existing rocks.  Or tear some (or all) of it down.  Or just move on with a passing glance.

Who’s “right”?  Is “right” even meaningful here?

I invest in this thing whatever meaning I choose.  I can name it… a collaborative expression?  Rock art?  Terraforming?  I choose to allow it to move me.  As others choose to regard it in their own ways, with profound meaning or with passing nonchalance.  And the vast, vast majority of people (including, quite possibly, everyone I’ve ever known) will never encounter it themselves.

I may try to share it with others, as I’m doing now, along with the meaning I derived from it.  And, while I can hope that others appreciate what I share, it’s unlikely to have the same depth of meaning for anyone else.  More significant, perhaps, is that I let others know that it is meaningful to me.  That’s how to connect with people – not to try to convey the meaningfulness per se, but to convey that it was meaningful to me.

I can’t convey meaning to others.  I can only be(come) and express myself.  And by doing so – authentically, honestly – then others can more deeply appreciate who I am, and, perhaps, find their own meaning in knowing me.

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Tags: Hiking, Meaning, personal insight, Rock art, Shingletown Gap Trail

Like lots of people, celebrities (musicians, artists, authors, actors, etc.) often support various charities and causes.  Sites like Look to the Stars and Celebrity Charity Magazine document celebrity giving, as do special sections of more general sites, from Charity Navigator to Celebrity Gossip.net.

But celebrities are special cases (aside from their relative wealth).  Although some celebrities are private about their charitable contributions, others take advantage of their popularity to influence their fans to join them in supporting causes they care about.   And, when this happens, everybody wins. 

• The charity, of course, raises more funds and broadens their donor base. 
• The celebrity leverages her own support to have a greater impact, and also builds  a potentially meaningful connection with her fans. 
• And the fans themselves enjoy that same meaningful connection with their celebrity (and with fellow fans), in addition to the warm feeling of helping a good cause.

Celebrities try to persuade their fans to reach into their pockets in a number of ways.  They may appear on TV, endorsing their favorite charity.  Or they may appeal to their fans when they are gathered together and paying attention.  (Alicia Keys persuaded 90,000 American Idol viewers to text-donate $450,000 to Keep a Child Alive.)   And this is all great. 

But as any marketer knows, it’s easier to appeal for money when consumers already have their wallet out – like in the supermarket check-out line.

So, why not combine these two phenomena… Enable celebrities to invite fans to support their cause of choice at the point of a pending transaction?

Imagine going to iTunes to download I Gotta Feeling from the Black Eyed Peas, and seeing an appeal from them asking if you’d like to add $0.10 to your purchase to support Green For All, one of their favorite charities.

Or when you pick up a Harry Potter book from Amazon, and J.K. Rowling asks if you’d like to add a dollar to your purchase for one of her causes, like Book Aid International.

Or being asked by Andre Agassi for an extra $5.00 for Education Africa when you buy his Nikes from Zappos.

The big role here is played by the vendors, who present the interface and handle the transaction. And let’s push their role even further.  Imagine if the vendors enabled celebrities (or any of the creative voices whose products they sell) to submit or modify their appeal details directly, sans intermediary, thereby making the potential connection between celebrity and fans more direct and transparent. … and if the vendors didn’t charge a handling fee, so that 100% of the incremental contribution went straight to the charity.  Why would the vendors do this?  Because they just might sell more product – especially if they build this into their image, and artists urge their fans to buy from them.

I’m sure I’m glossing over (or totally ignorant of) plenty of technical and financial details.  But I like the idea of reducing the friction of charitable contribution, while at the same time increasing the opportunity for meaningful connection.  What do you think?

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Tags: celebrity, charity, meaningful connection, point of purchase

In her terrific and inspiring new book, Share This: How You Will Change the World With Social Networking (Berrett-Koehler, 2010), media technologist Deanna Zandt describes and applauds the new information environment of widespread, prolific sharing of information.

When we read a new story online, there’s usually a tool on the page that encourages us to “e-mail this to a friend” or post it to one of dozens of social networks.  When we watch a funny video, we embed it on our own site or link to it so that others will watch.  When something happens that makes us go “Wow!” we want to tell everyone we know.  (Zandt, p. 7)

It’s easy enough to read this, and say, “Sure, it’s fun to share stuff, but so what?  The world is a serious place with lots of problems.  Why should we waste our time and effort on fun and games like this?”

Ms. Zandt asserts that, though many of the shared items may seem frivolous in isolation, the collective stakes are really quite a bit higher. 

When we share our own and others’ experiences and opinions, we can begin to overhaul traditional power dynamics and relationships.  We start to determine for ourselves what’s relevant and important, and subvert the institutions that seek to keep the status quo.  (Zandt, p. 56)

Woah! This is a big claim.  Can it be true?  How can uncoordinated sharing of miscellaneous information “overhaul traditional power dynamics”?  Isn’t it really all just a bunch of random bits and pieces of information, spread helter-skelter among friends and strangers alike?  This can’t possibly add up to anything coherent or meaningful. 

Or can it?

In Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Holt, 2007), David Weinberger of Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet & Society takes a more epistemological view of these scattered pieces of information and connection:

… For the first time, we have an infrastructure that allows us to hop over and around established categorizations with ease.  We can make connections and relationships at a pace never before imagined.  We are doing so together.  We are doing so in public.  Every hyperlink and every playlist enriches our shared miscellany, creating potential connections that we can’t often anticipate.  Each connection tells us something about the connected things, about the person who made the connection, about the culture in which a person could make such a connection, about the sorts of people who find that connection worth noticing.  This is how meaning grows.  Whether we’re doing it on purpose or simply by leaving tracks behind us, the public construction of meaning is the most important project of the next 100 years.  (Weinberger, p. 221-2, emphasis added)

In other words, sharing and connecting is not just a self-serving exercise.  It’s actually creating meaning — profoundly and long-lasting.  It’s changing how we collectively view the world and our relationship to it, and to one another.  And in today’s world of ecological destruction and other ills, a shift in our collective world view is critical.  

So, for those of us who want to join this “most important project”, how do we decide what information to share?  What are the most important connections for us to make?  Ms. Zandt provides some guidance:

… it’s not enough to put random things out there.  What you share in social networks needs to come from a real place in your personality: your own experiences, opinions, hopes, and fears.  It’s those authentic tidbits that are going to create connections of empathy and trust with other people… (Zandt, p. 50)

Put another way, the formula for effectively contributing to this critical effort to shift our collective world view is …. to be yourself.  Be your authentic self.  Trust your instincts.  Share what you think is important.  In a continual process of self-discovery, use your own voice (in any medium).  Be you.  See me.  Become we.

And will it make a difference?  Mr. Weinberger thinks so.

Every phenomenon of meaning will emerge from the miscellaneous, from limericks to marketplaces, from new products to poetry to peace.” (Weinberger, p. 172)

I think so, too.

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Tags: David Weinberger, Deanna Zandt, Meaning, Sharing

I was at my optometrist’s office the other morning.  Discovering my interest in social media, he mentioned to me that he was on the committee working to develop social networking tools within the American Optometric Association (AOA).  I commented to him that I thought it would be an important milestone when optometrists began to connect to one another on non-optometric topics.  And he replied, “Oh, no. This is a professional network.  We don’t want people saying what they had for breakfast.”  So, I tried to clarify, suggesting that an important element of community building involves a diversity of relationships.  And he replied, “Oh, sure. We’re building that in, but we’re going to have somebody monitor usage so that people don’t post what they’re having for breakfast.  This is not Facebook.”  To which I replied…  well, nothing.  Because I couldn’t articulate my response.  (But, perhaps here, I can.)

While I imagine most optometrists don’t care a whole lot for what their colleagues ate that morning, the first thing that came to mind is the wonderful metaphor recently conveyed by Deanna Zandt that social media is like a pointillist painting, with each self-revealing statement contributing another point in portraying one’s identity.

And I tried to think more deeply about why I thought my optometrist’s attitude was short-sighted (or, at least, un-networky) in terms of making the most of the opportunity to nurture bonding social capital within this professional group.

• Leaving the borders loose.   Sure, the AOA social networking initiative clearly wants to help its member optometrists discover new connections among themselves in areas related to their profession.  And, probably would like to discover new connections outside of the professional realm – like who likes to ski, or what’s a good brand of binoculars.  But, what somebody had for breakfast?  That’s off-limits.  And I think this can be problematic because if you create strict, arbitrary borders, you risk limiting meaningful connection for a couple of reasons.
  • Sometimes what’s meaningful may not fall clearly on one side of the border or the other.   One can contrive examples for a situation like this, like “I’ve been drinking carrot juice with my breakfast for years…”  (Yes, I know this is contrived, but you get the point.)
  • Just being aware of boundaries promotes a degree of self-censorship among participants.  If the network intends to welcome authentic contributions, the fewer “rules” and boundaries that participants need to be cognizant of, the more freely they may express their authentic voice.
• Having a border patrol.  Although a stronger argument can be made re: the value of having somebody “police” what people share within the network to reduce the likelihood of slander or other illegal expression, it’s much harder, for me at least, to appreciate the value of having somebody monitor the “border” of what subjects are legitimate and what are not.  Whoever the monitor is, s/he necessarily applies a subjective perspective.  A human monitor is usually put in place because of the perceived need for judgment.  (If no judgment were needed, the border could be “patrolled” automatically – like by rejecting any posts that contain the word “breakfast”).  So, by having a human monitor in place to say that this content is OK, and that is not, the network centralizes responsibility for shaping/steering the conversation.  Far better (I think) to distribute such responsibility among all participants.  Let them hash out what’s appropriate or not, like with Wikipedia’s Discussion pages.
• Who maps the borders.  It’s understandable that AOA’s network organizers have a vision of appropriate (and inappropriate) use of this new venture that they are initiating.  And I would bet that most optometrists would tend to concur with such intentions.  (Few participants are likely to howl in protest that they really want to share their breakfast choices.)  But here is a group of professionals being invited to participate in a social network – an ecosystem of relationships in which each member has an equal right to self-expression.  I believe that if the network is to be most effective (i.e., most valuable to most participants), then it’s better to let its shape emerge organically.  I can imagine the organizers, in announcing the new service, sharing their expectations and vision to kick things off.  And then relax, sit back and watch what evolves.  If allowed to develop organically, in response to the authentic contributions of those members who choose to contribute, it will more likely grow into something that members find really useful and meaningful (with borders that nobody can predict today.)

I re-read this, and some of it sounds dogmatic, elitist and theoretical.  I think it’s great that the AOA is getting into this world, even if their steps are influenced by old paradigms of their role and what is professional.  But it gets close to what I’m feeling, and I think I’ll post this now, because I’m hungry and haven’t eaten anything since my breakfast of shredded wheat with blueberries.

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Tags: AOA, bonding social capital, breakfast, content boundaries, Deanna Zandt

I have fond memories of my father putting out the flag on Flag Day as I was growing up in the 60’s and 70’s. It was a 48-star flag, a bit worn, and for a time I was embarrassed by its out-of-datedness; but later I came to appreciate just a bit of the sentimental value my father placed on this flag that he had proudly possessed for so many years.

I’ve thought about the American flag a lot lately, and, since today is Flag Day, I decided to put some thoughts down in writing. It pisses me off that the flag, and the pride in this country that it symbolizes, has been yielded to the political right. When I see a flag on a car bumper or window, for instance, I immediately pigeon-hole the driver as right-wing, and feel a sense of alienation. I’m sure it’s not always true, but I think it’s mostly true.

There’s plenty that I’m not proud about the U.S. The hubris and imperialistic attitude toward the rest of the world, and the so often misplaced priorities at home. But there are reasons to be proud as well.

Earlier today I went to pick up some knives I had dropped off at A&A Tool Sharpening in Upper Darby. I’ve used this place before, and enjoyed dealing with the elderly proprietor with the thick Italian accent. His name is Tony Borrelli. This time, I asked him about his background. He told me he learned his craft growing up in Italy, and then lived in Argentina for some years before emigrating to the U.S., which he called “the best country on the planet”. I asked him why, and he lit up. He looked me in the eye to make sure we were connected, and he told me several things. I can’t remember them all, and they weren’t all about America per se, but a couple things I recall…

• In this country, if you want to work you can live. He felt he had a chance to live here in a way that was, among other qualities, more respectful than he felt in other countries. You have to live with people and eat with people and work with people from other countries, he said, to appreciate America, implying that I, native-born, take it for granted (and he’s probably right).
• The most important thing is “knowledge of other people”, he told me. “More important than money; more important than gold.” If you meet someone who knows more than you, show them respect, he advised. Then you can learn from them. He probably wouldn’t know the term “social capital”, but that’s what he meant.

I don’t know Mr. Borrelli’s politics. I suspect that they are not congruent with my own. But for a few moments, he and I connected on a special level — this man whose long and challenging life had taught him to love this country, and myself, who wants to be openly proud of my country.

I believe that America CAN do great things – things that I and others on the left would agree were great. But this means reinforcing (or creating) themes of what America is about that are not dominant today. And the signal that this has occurred will be when people see flags on bumper stickers, and cannot guess the politics of the drivers.

As he handed me my knives, Mr. Borrelli held my gaze and said, “I tell you this. You tell someone else.”

And so I am.

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Tags: flag, Flag Day, patriotism

(cross-posted from phillynetsquared.org)

On our last Net Tuesday (December 1), we held the Philly Net Tuesday Book UNclub at Robin’s Bookstore.  The idea was pretty straightforward… We would discuss books in Net Tuesday’s scope of interest: social networking/media, nonprofit technology and social change.  (That’s the “biblio” part.)  And we would use the style of an unconference, in which participants set their own agenda.  (That’s the “social” part.)  As far as any of us knew, this wasn’t really done before.  (And that’s the “experiment” part.)

We were fortunate that Lindsay Tabas video recorded parts of the evening (and also led one of the book discussions).  She put together a really great, short piece that nicely captures the spirit of the evening.  Thank you, Lindsay!

A Biblio Social Experiment from Lindsay Tabas on Vimeo.

We had about 16 people show up, exhibiting our typical mix of techies and nonprofit/activist types.  And, thankfully, people were open-minded about taking part in an experiment.  We started with 3×5 cards with names of the 25 books that people had submitted to the Google spreadsheet over the previous month.  Then we added additional books suggested by the folks who showed up.  We eliminated those books from the spreadsheet that nobody present had read, or felt comfortable enough to generate a discussion, and came away with the following 9 ititles.

1. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software by Steven Johnson
2. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger
3. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
4. Our Choice:  A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore
5. Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide by Mark Warschauer
6. The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas by G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussa
7. The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web by Tamar Weinberg
8. The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott
9. Twitterville: How Business Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods by Shel Israel

We arranged the cards into a 3 by 3 matrix for 9 breakout groups  (a 15-minute round of 3 breakout groups, followed by a second round, and a third).  Inevitably there was some chaos, especially during switching times, but discussions seemed quite engaged.  In fact, one of the most obvious problems was that 15 minutes was just too short for a discussion on almost all of these books.

So, this was our biblio-social experiment.  And, I believe it went fairly well.  We did some whole-group debriefing at the end, and the following constructive suggestions were made:

• Have more time to talk about each book, which might be accomplished in a couple of ways:
  • Talk about fewer books (i.e., fewer, but longer rounds)
  • Pre-select the books before the event, since the selection process at the beginning of the evening was too heavy and time-consuming.  This could be done with the group (crowd) still making the selection, as opposed to any individual.
• Narrow the subject focus more.
• Try this format with media other than books, like blogs, articles.
• Circulate information about the items to be discussed before the meeting, so people could do some prep if they wanted.

I think these are all great suggestions.  As an experiment, I think it was successful, and certainly worth trying again, incorporating some of these ideas.  But Philly Net Tuesday probably won’t return to this format before later next year at the earliest.  And, maybe this format could work elsewhere.  Anybody have the phone number for the Free Library of Philadelphia?

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Tags: biblio-social, Book UNclub, books, social change, social networking

I like to read non-fiction books in my “field” of information and social empowerment.  And, like a lot of people, I sometimes annotate books as I read them.  In doing so, I am, in effect, “tagging” portions of the book with metadata.  I’m applying my own, personally meaningful expressions to words fixed on the page.  These tags may be explicit (as with a word or phrase jotted in the margin) or more subtle (like by underlining a particularly interesting passage).  Sometimes, that’s the last I see of these markings – which is usually fine.  Other times, I’m sure I’ll want to find the tag again.

But how?  An electronic tagging system isn’t convenient on the subway where I do a lot of my reading.  So, I thought about jotting down these tags, along with their respective page numbers, on the blank pages at the back of the book.  Then, it occurred to me (duh!) that such an idea was called an index, that there already is one at the back of the book, and that it was created for the same purpose – to help me, the reader, re-locate items and concepts scattered throughout the text.  So, why not just annotate the index itself?

This is not such a radical idea, not so different from annotating the body of the book in the first place.  And maybe “everybody else” already does this. But it had never occurred to me before (nor to several others that I mentioned it to). 

from my copy of David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous

I realized that, though I had overcome my childhood qualms about writing in a book, I felt hesitant to mess around with the book’s index.  Its terse order and structure, its separation from the content of the text per se, and its accepted role of providing keys into that text, all conspire to imbue the back-of-the-book index with an authority distinct from that of the author’s written words.

And, as in information professional, I’m well aware that many (though not all) back-of-the-book indexes are constructed by conscientious professional indexers, who do a great job of identifying, disambiguating and articulating concepts that the author has carefully assembled for presentation.  But index quality is beside the point.  A back-of-the-book index – no matter how good it is – necessarily reflects somebody else’s conceptual framework and priorities.  Not mine.  A good index is a tremendously valuable tool, which I deeply appreciate and use.  But it can never reflect my own, changing intellectual perspective or emotional response.  Which is why different people’s annotations of the same book are different.

And, with this modest insight, I feel liberated to “personalize” a book’s index, to merge my subjective tags with the indexer’s “objective” terms, to make an already useful access tool more personally meaningful.  And, in this flush of discovery, I’ve only just begun to identify ways to annotate a back-of-the-book index, including:

• adding new entries in their approximate alphabetical positions;
• alphabetically adding tags in “my language” and referring to their synonymous index terms;
• adding page numbers to existing entries (which the indexer had not considered significant enough to include);
• flagging existing entries, or specific page references of existing entries, that feel particularly important or interesting;
• highlighting references to other books, authors or concepts that I want to pursue independently;
• augmenting existing entries, or specific page references of existing entries, with additional info about why they feel important;
• drawing lines between two index terms and/or tags to reveal connections not expressed by the author or indexer.

Maybe this is interesting to nobody else but me.  But if you’ve annotated your books’ indexes, please share your experience.  Was it useful?  Do you have some tips?  Did you run into problems?  Have you discovered alternatives?

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Tags: indexes, tagging

My wife is taking some classes at Beadfest, an annual gathering of people interested in making beaded jewelry. And it made me think of the Origami convention that a friend of mine goes to every year. (I’ve remarked on this convention before because of that event’s use of labels that attendees can wear, indicating either “I’ll teach you…” or “Please teach me…”)

In both cases, I remarked to my wife, you have a bunch of skill-based enthusiasts who come together to share their skills. But she pointed out a key difference. Beadfest is produced by the trade publisher Interweave Press, and is not particularly interested in facilitating sharing of expertise among participants. It’s really designed primarily for one-way flow of expertise – from Interweave’s sanctioned “experts” to the paying attendees. I don’t know if it just doesn’t occur to the event organizers to facilitate expertise sharing among attendees, or if they deliberately avoid doing so, perhaps for fear of diluting their underlying marketing message. Regardless, though, they do not have the types of explicit networking labels used by the origamists at their convention.

HOWEVER, my wife noted, most of the women (and most of the attendees are women) tend to wear some of their own creations. And “How did you do that?” questions inevitably ensue. I take this as an indication that people’s innate desire to share what they know with others will find a way to express itself. Though they’re not wearing explicit, written labels, the jewelry itself nevertheless serves as a “networking hook” to invite connection and sharing among attendees. People want to share with their peers – even when their environment doesn’t necessarily encourage it. Beadfest might want to look at this as an opportunity, rather than a threat.

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Tags: Beadfest, in-person networking, origami

Perhaps I laud him too much (I see his name is quite big in my tag cloud), but here is a 17-minute talk given by Clay Shirky at the U.S. State Department last month.  It is the epitome of what gets me excited about this whole damn thing we’re living through.  “Web 2.0″ is just scratching the surface.

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Tags: Clay Shirky, media, social capital, social media

I expect that N2Y4 (the 4th annual NetSquared conference) to be the only professional conference I’ll attend this year (except, perhaps, for stuff in the Philly area).  As a Net Tuesday organizer, NetSquared generously picked up the hotel and conference registration, but I had to buy the plane ticket out to California and some meals, and, more significantly, I had to forego a week of consulting work.  So, I decided to invest in one trip this year, and this was definitely the right choice.

My strongest motivation for going was to meet and bond with other Net Tuesday organizers.  Officially, there are 33 Net Tuesdays around the world, and 14 were represented at the conference this year:  Austin (Billy Bickett), Chicago (Justin Massa and Dorothee Royal-Hedinger), Guayaquil, Ecuador (Eduardo Bejar) , London (Amy Sample Ward), Montreal (Peter Dietz and Jeremy Clarke), New Orleans (Jessica Rohloff ), Philadelphia (Ivan Boothe and myself), Phoenix (Sandy Sutton Andrews), Portland, ME (Alex Steed), Raleigh (Justis Peters, San Francisco (Rachel Weidinger), Seattle (Sarah Schacht), Toronto (Celina Agaton) and Vancouver (Eli van der Giessen and Joe Solomon).

Last year (at N2Y3) we had a hastily planned lunch with fewer Net Tuesday organizers, only a couple of whom were also here this year.  But this year, the conference organizers much more intentionally acknowledged the Net Tuesday organizers and helping us bond and share.  The kickoff was an entire day before the actual conference began just for us.  Not only did we get to know one another (particularly helpful before the conference got underway), but had plenty of time to discover similarities and differences among our programs, and to share aspirations for the future.  I felt (and feel) a genuine bond with the other organizers that I hope to maintain (we planned some collaborative opportunities before N2Y5).  Unlike last year, when the vast majority of the conference attendees had no idea what “Net Tuesdays” were, this year I felt appropriately validated.  We were acknowledged in the conference program, given specially colored conference T-shirts, and some of us played the vaguely satisfying role of “hosting” (introducing) some of the sessions.   Twice, in plenary sessions, we were asked to stand, and received applause.  In other words, we were much more clearly contextualized in relation to NetSquared.  I feel more pride in my role, and got the (much needed) shot in the arm to return to Philly and keep pushing forward Net Tuesdays and other Philly NetSquared initiatives.  The conference did its job.

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Tags: N2Y4, Net Tuesdays, phlnet2