About me
People tell who they are through various stories. Here’s one of mine that’s most relevant to putting out this blog…
In terms of passion, I was asleep until 1976 when I went away to Penn State in State College, PA as a junior. Lost amid tens of thousands of new faces, I wandered into the offices of the “Free University” and found a home. The Free U was a student organization through which anybody (town or gown) could offer a course in anything, and we acted as the neutral facilitators to schedule rooms, register people (if desired), publish a catalog, etc. Adamantly unaccredited, we enabled about 100 courses/quarter, from anthropology to arthropod cuisine (eating bugs); pro-life and pro-choice; taught by professors and street people. This opened my eyes to the notion that every community has a tremendous wealth of resources in the heads and hearts of its people, but often has very limited ways to reveal and share those resources. I became director of the Free U, and also got involved in the national Free U movement. Academically during this period, I engaged in a year-long Honors Program in Liberal Arts, which I devoted to studying the radical educational theories of Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire and others. And, so, I found a passion, and realized that helping people to connect to one another based upon what they find personally meaningful is a radical and profound role that I wanted to play in my life.
Fast forward. After working and living with Movement for a New Society in the early 80’s, I got a Masters in Library and Information Science from Drexel. Then, as a Reference Librarian at the suburban Ridley Township (PA) Public Library, I started a “learning network”. We invited patrons to declare a desire to learn, teach or share something (anything). Then I cataloged these interests and interfiled them in the card catalog (remember card catalogs?). Basically, we posed the proposition to our community members that that they deserved to share whatever was important to them; that the library would validate them as legitimate sources of information, not just consumers. Again, the community’s hidden resources came to the surface. My favorite example: a lonely woman from Quebec invited people to practice their French by joining her for lunch.
Fast forward. After 17 years(!) at Telebase (an online information company), I started CommuniShare in 2002, an early social networking experiment, now defunct. Since 2005, I’ve had a long-term consulting gig with the American Friends Service Committee, working on knowledge management and online collaboration for peace and social justice activists around US and the world.
So, I’ve been passionate about social networking since well before it was popularized by Web 2.0 capabilities. Years ago, I could hardly find anyone who shared my interest; nowadays, I’m trying to keep up with the technical tsunami that has made it ubiquitous. As one strategy to cope with these rapid changes, I’ve been the primary organizer of Philly NetSquared, joining dozens of cities with similar groups associated with NetSquared. Among other things we host a monthly gathering of folks interested in using the social web for social change.
I feel particularly interested in discovering ways to help people connect based on what they feel is most personally meaningful. What’s next? Stay tuned.
