My Twitter Bio currently says “CEO, Innovator, Strategist, Technoprogressive, Sensemaker, Truthseeker, Freethinker, Altruist, Moderate, Internet Technologist, Entrepreneur, Kiwi, Geek.” – that’s the short version.
On this page I obviously have more characters to work with, so here is some of the detail behind the labels.
Professionally, I’m the CEO of Interclue, a company I founded, and for which I am currently the sole member of the management team. This gives me all sorts of responsibilities, many of which I am not well suited to. Thus I am keeping an eye out for folks who would compliment my strengths and make up for my many weaknesses. I consider myself a reasonably strong Internet Technologist (tho not remotely as strong as say, Tim O’Reilly, Brad Fitzpatrick, Chris Messina or Nathan Torkington), so I might eventually promote someone into my job and become the CTO instead, but I’d also be happy to find someone more technically focussed than I am to take on that role. I am also pretty good at strategy, and especially innovation – I have a neverending supply of new ideas, which is both a blessing and a curse, because they tend to get in the way of executing on the other aspects of my CEO responsibilities.
Politically, I consider myself a technoprogressive, however this is a very new term, and there is some debate as to it’s value and it’s future. Wikipedia currently says “Techno-progressivism, technoprogressivism, tech-progressivism or techprogressivism (a portmanteau combining “technoscience-focused” and “progressivism”) is a stance of active support for the convergence of technological change and social change. Techno-progressives argue that technological developments can be profoundly empowering and emancipatory when they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities to ensure that their costs, risks and benefits are all fairly shared by the actual stakeholders to those developments” – among other things. Now, whether or not the term “technoprogressive” has a future, I am certainly more in favour of it than any of the “traditional” political labels.
Occasionally I also refer to myself as a Freethinker. This is term with a much longer history, but although I claim no affiliation with the Freethinkers of old, I subscribe to Freethought as a “philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or any other dogma.” – but having said that, I’m not fundamentalist about this – I accept that given our human limitations, cognitive shortcuts are often quite useful, some cognitive bias is thus inevitable, and thus opinions shouldn’t be discarded the moment they show signs of being influenced by things other than aforementioned science, logic, and reason. On the other hand,
Actually, I am not really a “fundamentalist” about anything. Thus I include “Moderate” in my twitter bio. Essentially, I can share a pint with almost anyone, and understand most points of view even if I don’t agree with them. I have no problem with people holding unsubstantiated beliefs just so long as they don’t try to force them onto other people. I guess I don’t have much time for opinionated bigots, but I am more inclined to pity them than to hate them. I’m also not a fundamentalist on the technology front – I am interested in where the best solutions are to be found, and thus not really in anyone’s “camp”, although I do have a definite fondness for Google and their vast array of open source and open data solutions, and the Mozilla Foundation’s manifesto strikes me as extremely impressive and worthy of my support. On the other hand, while I greatly respect anyone who contributes their time and other resources to Open Source or Open Data projects, I have no real problem with people who choose to remain with OSX or Win7 as their operating systems – while it’s convenient – or choose to make their living from leveraging intellectual property – while it still exists. I feel much of the commentary in this particular area reeks of tribalism. Geeks, it seems, are far from immune to the aforementioned cognitive biases.
By “Truthseeker” I simply mean that I usually try to tease out the truth from what is often a confused haystack of spin and counterspin. Having come to an opinion about where the truth lies, I only rarely bother to point it out to people, particularly if it would mean getting into an argument. I’m not great in arguments. While offline I don’t really have the great memory and aura of confidence (the fact that people respect confidence much more than they do doubt is the cause of much pain in this world) that makes for a good debater, and while online I find I am prone to spending far too much time explaining the truth to people who really, really do not wish to hear it, because my alternative strategy of “withering contempt”, while viscerally satisfying and often surprisingly effective, is ultimately not the sort of person I want to be. I’d prefer to be a Stephen Fry or a Daniel Dennett than a Christopher Hitchens or a Richard Dawkins, although I fully respect those who would choose otherwise, partly because I’ve been there. These days I pretty much stay out of the fray – I really don’t have the time for it and my fingers can only take so much typing in any given day.
Hence, given my time constraints, when something strikes me as interesting – which frankly, happens far too often for my own good – I usually research it only as far as needed to feel I understand it, rather than the somewhat deeper analysis required to explain it, let alone to defend my interpretation. In the past, this has led to a lot of blog drafts I never got around to publishing, and recently, I’ve just been throwing notes into an ever growing collection. However, I have recently decided that I should try to do some more public Sensemaking – obviously this will involve making a few more blog posts, and eventually I might just have to put “blogger” back into my 160 character resume. We’ll see how it goes.
Still to be covered: the Altruist, Entrepreneur, Kiwi, and Geek labels!
