saraewood.com

Since this is my official first post, it reminds me of my first web page.

In 1995 or so I started playing around with HTML at the urging of my then boss, Jamie Love. He was one of those bosses that handed you a screwdriver and a box of computer parts on your first day of work and thought you should spend some time making a personal web page. I learned alot from him. I spent hours and hours late at night and on weekends using pico, then vi and finally graduating to vim, tweaking my pages. I remember being particularly proud of the wavy purple background and the map of Louisiana I had found somewhere. Most of my work during the day was doing research the old fashioned way – at the library, calling companies for annual reports, etc. Sometimes I would get lucky using gopher and find something useful. But of all that, the email lists we used were the most innovative tool to get new information from people all over the world. I saw that the information we needed to analyze political policy came from people who were trying to get their own work done wherever they lived using the tools and information at their immediate disposal. Though the annual reports served to show discrepancy in what companies said vs did, they did not give a human face and a real application to the data as did the text-based lists and groups.

I have since done alot of web work, alot of tweaking pages to get it just right – knowing that only I would notice the result of all the hours spent obsessing.

A couple of years ago I had the good fortune to have lunch with one of the co-founders of the Web, Robert Cailliau. He is the lesser known (practically unknown in comparison) to his co-founder Tim Berners Lee. We went to lunch at the World Health Organization’s restaurant (where I was working at the time) in Geneva, Switzerland. Just down the road from CERN where he still worked. I remember being nervous not knowing how to take advantage of my time with such a person.

During our conversation, he told me that my philosophical approach to the web as a tool for change and the change I had been able to start at WHO was something far more interesting than anything he had been able to do with the web at CERN. A philosophy I must have learned working for Jamie. I was surprised (not to mention flattered), but realized that CERN still operates very much like an academic institution in that each group has their own funding, their own focus and no responsibility to public discourse, information, sharing or otherwise. In fact, all of that might bring unwanted competition. This was the same attitude I had found at WHO and had been actively trying to change, though it wasn’t always clear by the web products the public could see – not yet anyway.

I have since left WHO, but find the same problem time and time again in many organizations. But I continue to believe that in the areas where it matters most – health, human rights, the environment – that community will eventually become the forefront of the discussion and the web will be there to help further the discourse – and not just about what background image the press release or annual report should use. There is a long way to go though – most of these conversations affect people far away from those of us familiar with terms like “social networking,” “RSS,” or “blog.” But I’d like to think we’ll get there one day.

And, for the record, I did actually use this image on that first site of mine (which was hosted on essential.org).

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