James had this reflection about the year and it got me thinking about mine.
I dido on the “One weird stressful year”
I started out last year working as an Evangelist for Identity Commons 1.0. It was clear that the money was running out and I was not sure what I was going to do next. I ended up doing some consulting for a PR firm on blogosphere metrics for a certain web photo company. I learned a lot about how attention is reflected very differently in the Blogosphere and Deliciousphere. From that research. It is clear by affiliation and groups will be something worth creating trusted tools to aggregate information. It is all about niche communities. Early on in Delicious land the choices reflected the early adopter geek world. It reflected their choices and interests… how do you maintain those clusters and look at attention.
My next gig was setting up the first official blog ever on Broadway for the musical Little Women. The show closed just as we did our first official blogosphere showing.
In between all that I took on getting Planetwork going and stepping into leadership there as the Network Director. This fall has been fantastic getting monthly networking going in DC, Seattle, Portland (their first planning meeting is tonight) and Boston (we had our first planning meeting last month). We are producing the Green Digital Be-In on Earth Day, Apirl 22nd.
I guess most importantly I got an ‘identity’ this year as Identity Woman. The name just came to me as I was moving away from being officially with Identity Commons. I kept showing up and more often then not I would be the only woman there.
Things continue to evolve in the Identity conversation and it seems like there might be an Identity Commons 2.0 I am already playing a leadership role in making that happen. More details soon.
Combining both these “identities” I just finished the first draft of a white paper on the Civil Society Gateway – how all this identity stuff can really empower citizens to work together.
I have hopes that in the coming year the community that got me started involved with all of this the values based folks who meet in workshops and retreats might ‘get’ networking tools. Integrative Activism will certainly continue on in that vein this year.
A friend of mine with whom I periodically intense conversations talked about the essence of what I do it seems if you wanted to pin it down it would be “facilitation.”
I guess that is what I enjoy most. Bringing folks together and supporting emergent connections forming. I feel good about the coming year. I hope it will be less crazy stressful though. To get a good start on that I will be leaving on ‘silent’ retreat on December 24th and return on January 2nd.
Technorati Tags: identity, 2005, yearendreview
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