Kiki’s Korner

365me, originally uploaded by kristiewells.

I had put together a tweetup in Palo Alto to introduce the Plaid Nation guys to the local community. Unfortunately, I spent the first hour of the meetup, alone, hanging out upstairs where I thought I said we would meet, with Julio the bartender (thanks for entertaining me Julio!) and their shiny new Wii.

After wallowing in my beer for a spell, the wild hair (aka: common sense) kicked in, so I ventured downstairs where I found the group sitting in a corner, and the Plaid Nation guys had just left so I didn’t get to meet them.

What a dumb ass I am.

Now, the first question everyone asked was ‘why didn’t you look over the railing or come down before’. My answer: I had looked over the railing a couple of times, but only saw a handful of folks from that viewpoint, and the ones I saw I did not recognize and they all had name tags on (thanks Ryan Kuder for thinking ahead) so I thought it was a different group. I had also asked the bartenders to send them all upstairs, so I just thought I was getting stood up…you know, by 20+ people. My bad.

Thankfully, the rest of the group hung out and I got a chance to mingle with them, but I am bummed I missed the Plaid Nation guys. Hopefully, I used up all the dumbassness living within me for a while. Gah.

Went through another ‘Spring Cleaning‘ of the people I follow on Twitter this morning, and at the same time, decided to bump the number from 330 to 400. just for shits and giggles.

I added another 85 folks, then took 15 people off to get me to an even 400. Again, trying to do this systematically by adding every 4th person in my ‘followers’ list and removing every 4th person in the ‘following’ list, so if I happen to have unfollowed you this round – please do not take it personally – it is a little experiment and I am sure I will circle back around again.

As a reminder, the whole point of this ‘experiment’ is to expand and diversify the information flowing in front of me a little bit without overwhelming me in the process, as I am not a ’skimmer’ – I am one of the crazy ones who tries to keep up with a majority of the tweets people post if I can.

The last two months have been nuts. Correction, the last year has been nuts, and my blog has suffered immensely as I fail to find time or the energy to write.

I thought going through the blog update and migration over to Wordpress would ignite my writing, but it hasn’t, and if anything, I stare at my template now and wonder what the heck I was thinking to go with this obnoxious green website. If anything, it has turned me off writing more.

So I am working on it. Again. Not that anyone cares or will be affected by this – but for some reason I thought if someone used the wrong keyword and found themselves on this insanely bright page – I would explain why.

It has been a somewhat long two years, trying to get our labor of love project off the ground and running on its own without requiring full time efforts from Heuer or me. There were times we were able to put love into it, other times our personal and work lives made it impossible to keep up. More times than not, the latter happened.

This makes me forever grateful for the founding folks who believed in the vision of SMC and helped our baby grow from a 14 person kickoff meeting in Silicon Valley on August 16, 2006 to where it is today – a worldwide organization consisting of 200+ paid members, 17 active chapters, another 25+ chapters (today) on the verge of launching, and 1000’s of people who have gotten together to share their knowledge with one another.

/me sheds another tear of pride

While we could simply let people self organize around a wiki, that model doesn’t help our mission to get the local chapters conversing with one another – sharing their knowledge, promoting ethics, working on standards and making sure we ‘lift all boats’.

So today, we put a stake in the ground to show our commitment to the people who believed in us from day one and announced the formation of an interim board to chart strategic direction and advance the goals of SMC.

Now, I know the number of folks on the interim BOD (41, soon to be 42) might seem crazy to some, but there is a large list of things we wish SMC to accomplish, and everyone involved has a ‘day job’ and other responsibilities to tend to, so I think the number makes sense. The problems of the past have always been trying to do too much with too few people involved, and as Heuer mentioned earlier, we will not need consensus on every little item, we will be split into working groups with different responsibilities so I expect us to be successful and able to push projects forward.

I am really looking forward to the next 4-6 months and seeing what this group can do together. Getting the national organization set up correctly and working efficiently is a key focus, as well as making sure the local chapters have what they need to flourish. Other projects on our plate will be shared later, right now…I need some infrastructure in place…like ASAP.

Chris and Kristie, originally uploaded by chrisheuer.

Love one another and you will be happy. It’s as simple and as difficult as that. ~Michael Leunig