On Friday 4 October I went to Seattle and returned Sunday 13 October. I wanted to visit friends and have coffee.
On 5 October Lee and I went to the zoo to visit animals. It felt good to go there but I was very tired. I missed Lee a lot. I went to Evan’s place that night. I miss him a lot too.
Sunday 6 October I had lunch with Jonathan in Capitol Hill. He had just finished his PhD and had begun working full time at the Wikimedia Foundation. He listened to my pitch about requesting informed consent documents and he told me that Aaron the data researcher had just gotten a job with the WMF. I told him that Aaron and I had been talking about the Research Committee and setting good practices for how research should happen on Wikipedia when it affects community volunteers and especially when it is conducted by visiting non-Wikipedian researchers. That night I met Mark and Kristina and we went to a religious service at the local chapter of the Ordo Templi Orientis.
Monday 7 I met a communications person at PATH in the morning. For some years I had been asking them to contribute to Wikipedia. They went through USD $330 million in revenue in 2012 on global health projects, but they have very little Internet presence. They sort of depend on public support for their projects, in the sense that they are supposed to partner with grassroots community groups when they go into a region and conduct health interventions, but in practice they are secretive about all their work in the way that lumbering international superpowers in plain sight are. They distribute some interesting health products for which I made Wikipedia articles and I had asked them for more information about these things include basic information explaining what they are above the level of a press release and for pictures to distribute. The fundamental problem with organizations is that they hate the idea of anyone discussing them if they are not present as the focus of discussion, so while they develop social media outreach strategies, they simultaneously do whatever they can to prevent people from talking about them and direct people to talk to them on new communication platforms but according to the old media model. I have heard this all before. I pitched their new media guy, showed him what I did to their Wikipedia article, talked to him about health traffic, and suggested to him as PATH’s introduction to new media they find a single promotional image which shows the world what they do and put a free license on it so that it could be distributed through Wikipedia and elsewhere. They could judge the impact of that photo, think about it for a few years, and then if they ever became ready to make a jump to new media (i.e. acknowledge the existence of the Internet) then they could have a base from which to consider precedent. The guy said that sounded reasonable and that he would see what he could do. I will write him again in a few months and ask him again for the picture.
I met Kelly at Roy Street Coffee in the evening. Kelly also heard me about about the informed consent document thing.
Tuesday 8 October I met with Christian at Microsoft for lunch. We talked for a while and he explained the concept of data centers to me, because he puts them together. Microsoft has given him a nice career and I wondered how my life might have been different if I had gotten a paying job rather than done volunteer work for years, and if I would have liked to have years of career money behind me. I am sure that I would – sometimes I think of starting a family and the way I imagine that it costs money. Christian was mentioning how he might like to go to school, and how he wanted to volunteer for things and get involved in issues that mattered to him. His financial success was attractive to me but I was repulsed by the thought in my own life of delaying school for work or of not being able to have free time for travels and reading when I was younger, and how much I would resent myself had I not had time to explore my own interests. Many times in India I met older people who had worked during their lives and were just now after a lifetime finding time to sort their thoughts by traveling and doing all the things I always wanted to do. I was also reminded of my dear Aunt Vicki who told me for ten years about how she looked forward to her retirement then watched herself die of cancer over the space of a year immediately after she retired and before she was able to enjoy all the money she had saved during her life. Of course there should be a balance between spending in the present and saving for the future, and perhaps I wish I had worked and saved more, but I cannot think of any way that I wasted my time in the past and even when I think of my failures I feel that I would feel even worse had I not attempted to do what I wanted to do despite the failure. It seemed to me that Christian was a little trapped. He said that if he could go to a non-profit organization which met his salary demands that he would, but he is an expert on managing the logistics of the physical design of data centers and he makes a lot of money doing that. It is inconceivable that he could make as much money in a non-profit sector using only his most valuable and most scarce expertise, and then also if he went into the areas of activism which most attracted him he would be on an experience level of someone from a technical professional background who has not had years of leisure and student time to think. He is very smart for sure, and I am in awe of his talent and the work he has done, but if I had gone his path and found the success he had, I think that I would feel a bit of regret for what I left behind and also feel bound to the paycheck because I am not sure that I could ever give that up to start volunteering. I really hope he could find an activist issue which could pay him what he wants, but otherwise, I feel like he could be happy at Microsoft indefinitely.
On the 9th I met Brian in the morning. We talked for hours about Open Science Federation, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Wikipedia. At 2pm I went back to Roy Street to meet Cyan. She and I talked about personal stuff. She is another one with a new PhD in something related to bioethics.
Thursday the 10th I went to Portland in the morning and met Rigel and talked about medical school and the informed consent thing, then later Aaron from Snowdrift. That night Aaron, Jason, and this OKF guy Tom Johnson who is a librarian and many other things related to information science. I stayed at Jason’s that night and finally got to meet his partner Adam. The next morning Jason and I met Roman for coffee and I talked with them both about Wikimedia Cascadia and Wikimedia LGBT.
On the 11th I met with Christie Koehler whom I had previously met through Sumana in Hong Kong at Wikimania. She gave me a tour of the Portland Mozilla office and we talked about her very successful community project, Open Source Bridge. This is a Portland conference for people who talk about open source software and politics around free culture. She explained parts of Mozilla’s business model and the market strategy for Firefox OS in the context of consumer rights in the marketplace. I offered that if she ever met anyone at Mozilla who would like to explore consumer issues with Consumer Reports then she should introduce them to me.
On Sunday 12th I went to Infocamp and presented Wikipedia and medicine. It was an unconference so everyone was supposed to pitch their talks to the audience so that everyone would come. I have no idea what I was doing when everyone was presenting their introductions – I should have been on stage and apparently they were calling looking for me, but the wind must have been calling me as I have no excuse at all for not being there and must have been nearby tripping on something. Jonathan introduced me in my absence and assured everyone that I would present, and he must have done a good job because people attended my presentation despite my rude lack of appearance. My talk went well. I did appear for that.
The next day I went back to New York. On my way out I went to Patrick’s place in Capitol Hill and went for breakfast with him, and he is still as charming forever. Previously he was studying geography in school and now he is studying political science, which seems right because what he really wants to do is wander around, chat people up, and introduce them to each other. His social fluency with so many circles of people always impresses me, as does the way he seems to know someone for every purpose. I try to be as positive as I can and I am happy with what I am able to do, but still I wish I could have more of the positivity of his perspective. He rode with me to the airport as he did on a previous visit I had to Seattle.
Seattle still seems to me more civilized than New York City.