LUDDITE
Pronunciation: \ˈlə-ˌdīt\
broadly : one who is opposed to especially technological change
First of all, let me say that this isn’t meant as an insult to my friends. Hell, if you’re reading this post then that very act excuses you from the following. Relax.
I’m what you call an early-adopter. If I had the money my house would be stuffed with the latest and greatest technology gadgets. I’m always trying new social-media websites. I’ve got a FaceBook and a MySpace and Twitter and a blog. And they all send messages to my cellphone.
All this stuff has promised to make it easier to do things better. I’ve got ideas. But I’ve encountered a road-block.
I’ve become frustrated trying to convince the people around me to embrace technology.
Hell, an embrace may be too much to ask, I’d be happy if I could get my friends to shake hands with technology.
I’ve read that Google insists that it’s employees work one day a week on their own projects. They call it 20% Time. It’s part of the philosophy that says it’s possible to create great things without formal budgets, plans or management support.
I like to think that I do something similar by spending time creating new web pages and applications at work. The fact that the things I create aren’t mandated by management allows me to try things that I know will fail. But it also allows me to test the water to see how feasible an idea really is. Take the humble wiki for instance…
Once upon a time we each had great big binders filled with documentation. Whenever someone generated new docs we were responsible for getting everybody else a copy for their binders. Of course, in about three months, nobody’s binder was up to date anymore. Moving that amount of paper around was beyond our abilities. So three years ago I created a wiki for use in our office. I understood at the time that there is a slight learning curve to using a wiki, but hoped that the ultimate advantages would outweigh the cost of training (there was no cost – it was free software – I just wanted people to try it). It would be far easier to have several people maintain one copy of everything than to have one person maintain several copies.
Alas, it was not to be. Certain users couldn’t grasp the concept of seeing the material on the screen. Some could never remember their password. Others could never be convinced to check the wiki for the information they were looking for. So now, we were not only unable to maintain great big binders, we were also unable to use a common repository of information. Unbelievably, I had actually made it worse.
My next idea was some kind of Content Management System (CMS). Hoping to take the burden of learning something new off my coworkers, I set up a portal where we could post information in a forum format. I could administer the application, they would just need to start filling it up with wonderful data! But again… failure. Most had never seen such a thing and couldn’t grasp the concept. It turned out to be far too tedious to re-type all our scattered notes and documents into one system. PDF’s would have to be created, diagrams would have to be updated and once again – nobody wanted another password to contend with.
Never to be disuaded, I came back the third time with a self-designed portal web page. On this page, I linked to all the different toys and experiments I’d come up with over time: three different help-desk applications, two CMS’s, a blog and a wiki. I even recently installed laconica – a Twitter clone for use just in our office. I hoped that maybe it could replace short emails we send to one another.
Laconica lasted exactly one day.
I’m running out of ideas.
I’ve begun maintaining my own wikis for notes. I have one at home and one at work stuffed with the hard-to-remember minutae of my daily life. I still think it’s a great idea. I’ve started a couple WordPress blogs where I use the “Press This” functionality to capture webpages to use for future reference. Another fine plan.
But my social-media applications aren’t very social.