Travelogue
I'm on the road, in the middle of an eight day trip to the west coast. I don't think I can possibly convey the whirlwind of ideas, images and experiences that are playing in my mind, but here's a taste.
My trip started with one of those serendipitous moments that you occasionally have, where a friendly conversation with the person next to you on the plane from Chicago to Seattle turns out to be a fellow traveler in many more senses of the phrase. I had the good luck to sit next to John Scherer, who is a leadership development consultant, but that barely describes what he really is. I think he uses the term "spirit warrior" but all I can say is that I was absolutely enthralled to meet someone who has gone from being a Lutheran minister at Cornell to working with top corporate execs on how to operate on the maxim that "your work is more than your job, and your life is more than your work." (That's how Sweet Honey in the Rock puts it, but it was just one of the phrases that John and I clicked on.) Believe it or not, our conversation ranged on everything from organizational change in a networked age to blogging to the Jesus Seminar, the Gnostic Gospels and the radical tradition in Judaism. John wrote a book called Work and the Human Spirit which I am now looking forward to reading...
Arrived in Seattle late Wednesday and met up right away with my colleagues Ellen Miller and Mike Klein of the Sunlight Foundation. Since December, we've been close collaborators on an incredible journey--setting up a new foundation funded by Mike and run by Ellen that is devoted to using the Internet and the social web to increase transparency and accountability in government. Ellen is a longtime friend and colleague, from my years at Public Campaign (which she founded in 1996, after leading the Center for Responsive Politics for more than a decade). It's amazing that she can start something new, and learn all kinds of new tricks, at an age when most people would be happily coasting into early retirement. (Ellen, I hope I'm not giving anything away when I say you look and act much younger than you are!) Mike, who I've only known for a few months, is one of the most amazing people I've ever met and certainly the sanest and kindest person of means I've ever worked with (and believe me, I could write a very entertaining essay about the various billionaires and centi-millionaires I've worked for and encountered over my years in political, journalistic and public interest work).
I won't go into all the details of the meetings we had in the last 48 hours, but my head is still spinning from the view from my hotel window this morning:
Thanks, Mike, for ruining me with that view. It was kind of like getting seats in Yankee Stadium right behind home plate. Very hard to go back to the upper decks after that.
My head is also spinning from the many fertile and intriguing conversations we had with people like Craig Newmark of Craigslist (who, yay!, is joining Sunlight's advisory board), Mitch Kapor of the Open Source Applications Foundation (who, yay!, is going to help Sunlight figure out how to bridge the DC and Silicon Valley data wonk cultures), Becky Bond and Michael Kieschnick of Working Assets, Tantek Celik, Peter Hirshberg and Kevin Marks of Technorati (as well as that little brother of mine), Zack Rosen and David Geilhufe of Civicspace, Martin Collier, Chris Messina, Tara Hunt, Al Chang, Peter Waldheim, Jerry Michalski, Shannon Clark, and last but not least Chris Nolan of Spot-on.com, who hosted a lovely dinner party last night for almost all of the above.
I'm looking forward to a few days R&R in the Carmel-Monterrey-Santa Cruz area this weekend, and then gearing up for the NetSquared conference Tuesday/Wednesday, where I'll be "immoderating" a panel on politics and the internet. More thoughtful blogging to come, I hope...
Posted by msifry at May 26, 2006 09:20 PM