geekroom

For personal reasons, I decided to move from Boston to Memphis about three months ago. I finally made the move two weeks ago and am now living in Memphis more or less full time. I am, however, still working in mostly the same position at the Berkman Center. I will be telecommuting most of the time but returning to Cambridge for a couple of days twice a month so that folks will remember what I look like.

I took the past couple of weeks off to settle down in Memphis, and today was my first day back at the center since moving, though I was actually in Cambridge for this my first day of telecommuting. Tomorrow I’ll fly back down to Memphis and start the telecommunting thing for real. A big part of the challenge of this arrangement will be keeping in touch with the day to day happenings at the center and giving folks at the center a sense of what I’m up to each day. To help that process as well as to document the progress of this experiment in work arrangement, I’ll be keeping a daily journal on this blog with the probably mostly boring details of what I’ve spent each day doing. This entry is the beginning of that journal.

Today was spent as I imagine most of these Cambridge return days will be — in meetings nearly the entire day with much of the non-meeting time spent casually chatting with people around the center (and thereby remembering why I love working with these folks so much!). I managed to get in early enough today to work on my email a bit before my first meeting at 9:00. I’ve been triaging my email for a couple of weeks, only dealing with the easiest / most important stuff and saving the rest for my return to full time work (today!). I made a good pass at getting rid of another wave of emails today, so I’ve mostly got only medium to long term tasks left.

I spent my little amount of non-email / non-meeting time today getting the History of IP in the US online reading group setup on H2O and announced through the various Berkman channels. We’ve got 11 great mostly Berkman folks signed up so far, and lots of others tried to sign up but were foiled by a bad link in the announcement on the front page (now fixed!). I’ve also included the Internet & Society project in the first week’s discussion, so it should have critical mass to start.

Meetings today included: a meeting in the server room to figure out why a server we’re running with a partner center was rebooting randomly (bad hard drive); a meeting with Robyn to agree on what more needs to be done to the Internet Law Program site; a meeting with Mary Bridges to go over some issues with the Digital Media Project, AudioBerkman, and Berkman Briefings sites; the luncheon speakers series with John Palfrey and Susan Crawford presenting their work on the accountable Internet; a meeting with the H2O crew about the status of the Rotisserie Ring project and implementation plans to fix the mess that currently is the idea exchange part of H2O (more to follow in another post); and a meeting with the Berkman fellows to figure out how we staff can better help them to continue doing the terrific work that they do.

As planned, I’ve got reams of notes from the various meetings, all very productive in their own ways, to make sense of tomorrow and to keep me busy working on the for the next couple of weeks. My next return to Cambridge will be from Wednesday, 3/3, to Friday, 3/5.