narrating kayoz

Spiral Walk

I was getting frustrated with facebook not posting my (admittedly long) status update, when it suddenly dawned on me - I should write a blog post about this, not a status update!

I went to the 'spiral walk' at school today - a beautiful reverential ritual involving nearly 60 six- and seven-year-old children with candles, slow marching in time to harp music in and out of a spiral of ivy and red camellias: in the near dark and almost complete silence (except for the music). Wonderful.

Edited to add pic and detail:

This is a picture of the spiral the kids walked around before the lights were turned off (and the kids brought in). They walked into the middle to light their candles, then out again while other kids were still on their way in. There were red camellias placed at about each metre along the ivy, and on their way out they placed their candles next to the camellias, so that by the time they had all gone through, it was a spiral of candles as well as ivy. It looked fantastic.

Once they all came out of the spiral they sat down in the far corner of the room, and one of the teachers told them a story, all still by candle light.

Chris didn't come because he had Kaely (they asked us not to bring toddlers because of the need for quiet for a long period - the whole thing went for about an hour). Liam said to Chris tonight "I wish you could have seen the candles, it was so beautiful."

[It is true, twitter and facebook have at least as much to answer for, in terms of my lack of blogging, as work and study do. But that's a whole nother post.]

"When Transparency comes to town"

Because I don't have time to blog properly... I bring you some more link love instead:

When Transparency comes to town:

Along with this President Obama asked agencies to use tools that make the government transparent, collaborative, and transparent. These tools can be wikis, government databases, blogs etc. but the overriding principle is the open and free access to public information in order to create a more dynamic and active participatory democracy.

It's exciting stuff, I reckon. (Of course, I'm a little biased about anything to do with Obama or web 2.0 in government, but still...)

Web 2.0 projects in Australian government

I thought it would be interesting to put together a list of web 2.0 projects the Australian Government is/has been running, if only for my own interest. Only because it seems to me that everywhere you turn at the moment there is another project team/department asking if they should have a blog or how they can do online collaboration or if they should use a wiki setup for their intranet.

I'm sure there are a gazillion, but I'll start with the ones I know of off the top of my head.

• Future Melbourne (run by the city of Melbourne to update their city planning)
• The ATO's Facebook page for eTax (aimed at raising awareness of etx with gen Y)
• The department of broadband had a two week blog to consult on "important questions of the future of the digital economy" in December (comments are closed but it's all still there)
• DEWHA's new one stop green shop project blog (which aims to engage people in the process of developing the website, share learnings along the way, try out some social media and see what works before the website is developed)
• I know a number of departments use wikis internally
• GovDex is the government's own for "collaboration across portfolios and administrative jurisdictions" which has numerous communities, both closed and open.
• The War Memorial has a blog - this is a bit different to most of the other things listed here because it's not a consultation style exercise, but it's the sort of blog I imagine we'll see more of quickly.
• Lots of libaries have blogs.
• The Australian Human Rights Commission had a blog for their sex and gender diversity project, which closed on 5 December. They seem to have also had a forum which may still be open.
• FutureProof is "a place for people to learn more about the NSW Government digital recordkeeping strategy and to share information about their own activities, projects and experiences in regards to digital recordkeeping."
• The NSW Commissioner for Children and Young People has a blog.
• The Sex Discrimination Commissioner had a blog as part of her listening tour last year.
• (edited to add Zoe's addition from comments:) NSW state archives has a flickr account. 

Okay, that wasn't exactly just off the top of my head, I did use Google. And there were dozens more of the style of the library or war memorial blogs. I'm particularly interested in the use of online collaboration tools as part of a consultation process, like the sex discrimination listening tour.

I'm also interested in the idea of building online communities, be it for sharing sustainability information & experience (part of one stop green shop's eventual idea), sharing digital recording keeping experiences (futureproof), or sharing information about books (I don't know if the library blogs allow for this, beyond the librarians doing it I mean, but they may - or a wiki system might work better). But of course, these don't have to set up by government organisations.

Blogging in gov 2.0/identity issues.

Trying to decide if I should set up a different wordpress account (or open id or whatever) - one that doesn't link here - to comment (and potentially post) on the new blog set up by the project team I am involved with at work. Do I keep - or create - two separate identities: a professional one and a "private" one?

If this would be a for profit blog in some way it would be clearer - or less clear maybe.

Let me think about this. If, for instance, I were a web 2.0 professional, and this was a related blog, and I was employed by gov as a consultant, then it would make sense to keep an identity that links back here I guess. But if I were a web 2.0 professional, and this was a related blog, who was *separately* employed by gov (on salary), then it would be important not to link back here, so there could be no suggestion of profiting from my use of public service resources (which, needless to say, is against the public service code of conduct etc).

But as it happens neither of these is the true scenario. This is in fact an entirely non-profit blog which I keep for my own entertainment, and all my paid work is done on salary for the gov.

Then again, I've already established that I don't necessarily want to send all my work colleagues to my personal blog, so that should make it easy to establish that I should set up a separate account, right? but then what of posts here about web 2.0 in gov etc. Should I have an entirely separate blog for them? But that doesn't make sense because I'm not posting about it enough to justify a blog. And I have always mixed up musings about writing, reading, internets, sustainability, and of course my lovely children, do why stop now?

Also, the other weird part is that I have an established blogosphere identity. So if I start posting on some blogs with one identity and some with another, doesn't that get a little confused? Especially since I also have both bloggers and colleagues and IRL friends 'following' me or as 'friends' on twitter and facebook.

What do other people do about this?

I have been de-friended.

Just before Christmas I was de-friended (by email) by an old friend (from my undergraduate years at uni). It was the first time that's ever - at least openly, explicitly - happened to me. It was ostensibly based largely on a misunderstanding (she was mad that I hadn't replied to an email telling me she was pregnant, but I had never received the email), but I'm guessing it's really more a long term resentment that I don't call/write/whatever enough. And, interestingly to me, that impression of hers seems to be partly due to my presence on Facebook.

From her perspective (I think) I spend enough time on facebook that I should have time to call her more often. Actually, I spend very little time on facebook, but because I often leave it open half the day, and check and comment on people's status updates when I pop into the study for five minutes here and there - not to mention update my own status via twitter (which is sometimes via mobile phone, so I'm not even at my desk), it seems to her like I'm there a lot.*

I replied to her cross email immediately, of course, even though I was in the middle of packing to leave for our holiday (which I always do at the last minute, so we didn't end up leaving until really late and didn't end up getting there until 11:30 at night, at which point the kids were so excited by their bunk beds that they didn't get to sleep until 2am - so you can see that stopping in the middle of my packing really meant something). And then later - while we were away - I decided to add her to a limited friend list in facebook so that she wouldnt see my status updates any more. I was starting to feel paranoid about them. That's when I discovered that she'd also defriended me on Facebook (unless she's quit facebook altogether, which is certainly a possibility I suppose).

When I got back from our holiday (we went to Forster to visit my grandfather for Christmas, did I mention that?) I emailed her again, just a brief email to reiterate the main points of my (rather longwinded) first one - that I was sorry I'd hurt her, that I hadn't known she was pregnant but was thrilled to hear it, that I did value her friendship. She hasn't replied, and for all I know she sent my emails straight to the trash without reading them. Or she read my first one and got more offended, I don't know (her email was *quite* sarcastic, so while I thought I was being all objective and conciliatory in my first email, I think I was actually feeling rather defensive).

I've considered calling her. Maybe it's a no brainer that I should have called her to begin with. Email is probably not the best medium for such conversations. But when I got her original email I was in middle of packing and was really needing to get Kaely down for a nap (yeah, we left *really* late). I could have called when we got back from the holiday (I did tell her we were about to leave town for a week), but... the truth is when I re-read her email I felt pretty cross myself. She was awfully sarcastic and frankly she seems to have cut me off over a misunderstanding without bothering to give me the benefit of the doubt, or even a hearing. And given that we see each other so rarely anyway, I wonder if our friendship can come back from that. She could apologise (though she may not), I could apologise (and I have - for being generally unavailable - it's true that she would call me more often than me her, though I'm talking once or twice a year here), but can that make the bad feelings go away sufficiently, or would it simply mean that we were ostensibly friends again only to lose touch less deliberately?

I did value her friendship, she's a lovely person and a pleasure to spend time with. But I'm worried that if I call her she won't apologise, and we'll both get cross, and instead of patching things up it will leave things as they are but with an even worse taste in both our mouths. Or alternatively we'll patch things up but my every interaction with her will be tinged with guilt that I don't make more effort and therefore resentment that she expects me to, and... well, given that we really don't see much of each other anyway - she lives in country Victoria, and I haven't made it down to see her since her wedding four years ago, and she hasn't been up here for even longer - is it really worth it?

And, I admit that I do feel cross that she seems to have written me off so easily, so there's a part of me that wants to just say to hell with her.

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*This is a whole different post that I am probably never going to get around to writing, but it is an interesting side of social networking sites -that they make your every action so open, people can easily measure - how many times did she write on X's wall, compared to Y's wall or my wall? And, especially when there are people who use social media extensively who are 'friends' with people who use them only hesitatingly, there are bound to be some of these issues pop up.

Convergence: work life, play life, blog life

My work life is starting to converge with my blog life. It's a weird thing, for someone who's always blogged semi-anonymously.

My nine year blog anniversary is coming up on 16 January. I started out blogging under the name Kay, an online pseudonym (and IRL nickname of sorts*) back in January 2000. Then I met some local people who I knew through their blogs, and it was a little weird being called Kay by some people and Kirsten by others, since I don't think I'd mentioned on the blog that Kay was a nickname. Finally I switched to using my 'real' name when my IRL and blogger friends collided on Facebook.

But the convergence continues. First, my colleagues at work became facebook friends. That was a little weird, what with it coming just after my miscarriage, which I hadn't told anyone at work about but had blogged about (and my blog was being imported to facebook). So I created a special friend list for colleagues that didn't include my blog feed or blog URL.

But then we started talking about web 2.0 at work, and the fact that I'd been blogging for a number of years came up, and I started doing some work with a project team who want to develop online community/collaboration/conversations around and through the website they are developing. When I say 'work' I really mean having some conversations, but this led to me giving my blog URL to a couple of people at work (though I don't know that they've looked at it).

Meanwhile AGIMO** are talking about web 2.0 in government and releasing draft guidelines for, for instance, public servants who are also private bloggers (that would be me).*** And on Friday I attended a 'workshop' to begin talking about the online collaboration strategy for this project I mentioned. It's early days yet (although things are moving fast, by dint of a close deadline), but we're talking about wikis, blogs, user reviews and ratings, transparency and collaboration.  All in a government context, but also in a public context.

Maybe it makes me an incredible geek, not only being interested in - nay fascinated by - web 2.0 and what it means, but also being interested in government, but I find this all incredibly exciting. Doubly so because the content of this particular project is going to be related to sustainability, another favourite subject of mine.

Still, it's an interesting convergence and I'm not sure yet how I'll handle it. The project team has set up a blog on wordpress. It's not in use yet, so I won't link to it, but I might do when it gets started. I've always been particularly careful not to say exactly where I work since I joined the public service. Which is different to many people who blog quite openly about their work, though this is probably more common for those who are self employed.

I've mused, from time to time, how I'd handle this blog in the context of getting more than an occasional article published.**** Dawn Friedman, for instance, has a blog that mixes the personal and professional (though she's careful what she says about work when she's working for someone else). She is "immersed in web 2.0 marketing" and has recently created a twitter landing page which links to her professional web pages and her blog.

But if I were to publish, say, a novel, would I want my readers to have access to my blog in all its years of openness? Or for a potential publisher or agent to judge me by my blog in all it's unfocussed uneditedness? Because in truth I use my blog mostly as a dumping ground for things I want to remember (about the kids especially) and for ideas I'd like to explore. And I mostly don't do the things I told the project team are the hall marks of most successful blogs, eg edit posts (or at least proofread thoroughly), know what the point/focus of your blog is, and ditto for individual posts.

But I hadn't considered the convergence would come from this side of my professional life. Not at all. On reflection that seems a little short sighted of me, but there it is.

_________

*But as an IRL nickname it was only used by one person, and she lives o/s now so it's really mostly be an in-print thing. And actually that one person doesn't use it now anyway.

**The Australian Government Information Management Office

***I've seen some draft guidelines on paper, but couldn't find anything on the website.

****Publishing world famous, critically aclaimed bestsellers, for instance :)

Things I would be blogging about if I wasn't so tired...

• Web 2.0 in government - it is fun to be getting to be part of this conversation (in my work, not on my blog - because of the tiredness y'see). Interesting post from Lindsay Tanner (and some interesting comments) on his blog at fairfax digital.
• Funny things Mikaela is saying these days - like how she says 'Munooz' for both muesli and music. I keep meaning to record all this for the 'baby book', but I am not doing very well lately.
• How Liam thinks he is going to be Joseph in his school nativity play on Friday morning - he's pretty sure, he says, because he was Joseph again in the practice today and he can carry the candle really straight. This is a sweet little play they do in kindergarten where all the kids sing the whole thing, but some kids also have 'parts', while others are the angels who file in around the outside. It lasts for maybe ten minutes (including the procession in), and then we all get morning tea and school is over for the year.
• The vegie garden, which is finally starting to look like one - we are picking silverbeet and snow peas and stacks of parsley and will very soon be picking zucchinis and cherry tomatoes as well.
• How Liam decided he wanted to get involved in the garden and so he has his own little patch in which we (he and I together) have planted potatos and cucumbers (I know, not really a match companion planting-wise, but they were two things we hadn't been able to fit into the main garden).
• Our littlest Silky chook who has (I think) Mareks disease, which I am treating with, I kid you not, a mix of cranberries, brazil nuts, garlic, plus to drink pomegranate juice and gatorade. I got it from a chook forum (okay, I'll find the link... Backyard Poultry forum), and it seems to be helping.
• Out new car, which we've converted to run on LPG which I'm pretty sure is a good thing (and was helped by a $2000 government rebate) (but how we have to hurry up and sell the old one so I don't get into the habit of driving to work like I did today).
• How hungry I am right now
• But how I need to go to bed and so I think food - and more blogging - will have to wait for another day.
• g'night.

Work is fun

Sometimes two & a half days at work is just not enough. And sometimes two & a half days at home with the kids (not counting weekends) is not enough. I think I've made this comment before - as have many. It's a difficult juggle, and sometimes it feels like everything loses.

But overall I do think it's pretty great. And I feel lucky, although we did plan it this way. Chris and I joined the public service mostly because we knew kids were on the horizon and we wanted jobs with more security, more money, and especially the option to work part-time. Also, for my part, I just wanted to try to figure out what it was they were doing inside all those huge public service occupied buildings here in Canberra. I'd lived here most of my life and still didn't know how they worked or what they could possibly find to do.*

At the moment I'm working in a job where I sometimes feel in over my head and sometimes feel pretty competent. It's not much writing or editing, so that's different for me, but it's a lot of web stuff, so that's familiar - except it's more technical than most of the work I've done before.** In fact, most of my real experience for this job is from my play time, rather than my work time.

So it's challenging, and at the same time I feel like I am formalising and filling out some skills that I've been working on for a while, so that's really nice. And just lately there's even been discussion of Web 2.0 technologies (yo, blogging!), which of course is a particular area of interest for me, even if here (as almost everywhere) my ability to keep up with has been seriously crimped since the birth of Liam.

This week I was flat out at work. Today I arrived at 7:30, left at 5:00 and worked right through lunch. I wouldn't want every week to be like this, but sometimes - well, this may sound odd, but it's invigorating. Of course, the caffeinated coffee and chocolate I finally had at afternoon tea time might have helped with that too...
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*The answer, by the way, is plenty - and then some. But I'm still not clear on what a lot of it is.

**Which isn't to imply that it's terribly technical or anything. Not by the standards of the rest of my team anyway.