Dean Meetup, Structure and Iniative

I went to the Dean meetup thing in oakland with . Signed up for a mailing list or two. It was much more structured than I expected. The way meetup.com works is they have people signup, and encourage one or more of those people to be the hosts, give out name tags, print out a sign, whatever.

Apparently, the dean campaign sent out a little something to facilitate these groups. Facilitation was pretty much necessary because there were nearly 100 people crammed into a space maybe 3 times the size of our living room. Mostly it was pep talky stuff, with people interjecting comments about how wonderful dean is, how they want him in office, hate the war, gay rights is a topic we cannot compromise, etc, etc.

As with most unstructured events, there were small conversations of limited relevance on center stage, perseveration over trivia, and pointless interjections. However, I was surprised, given the size, the comparative lack of direction provided by the facilitator, etc, by the coherence, and general on-topic-ness of the group. There were a few concrete suggestions advanced such as production of a distributable media format (ie, dvd, vhs) with his speeches (available at http://www.ca-dem.org http://www.carlwithak.com), group presence in the next peace march (saturday in oakland. I needs to make me a sign), flyer distribution, and general reference passing for websites (horribly done, that, should have arranged some organizational schema, and flyers/minutes to pass around), and affiliation groups (labor, college students, women).

I see alot of potential, but there needs to be a push to develop structure for the group, differentiation to specific tasks, etc. Still, I think it was good, and worthwhile, and I’d like to participate in making this into something bigger/better/more coherent.

Aaron was a little less pleased. The proceedings were too disorganized for him.

And as the requisite bit of hormonal whatever, I did see a cute guy whose planetout ad had appealed to me quite a bit there, I did some look-smile stuff with him, but left without anything more.

Gear switch: General topic, initiative and structure: On the drive back from socal with Josh and Ro, there was talk about how work happens. Most of my jobs have been of a nature similar to elementary schoolwork. An assignment is given by a higher up, the assignment is performed, output is returned to the higher up, and no more thought is given to it until report card/performance review. It’s an easy, stable, secure, highly structured system.

It also has problems. The structure one depends on exerts controlling influences, of course. But it also often takes a cut off the top. A pretty hefty one. It fosters dependency. In most current implementations, it favors a customary way of doing things, rather than creative or specialized approaches. It should be obvious I’m free forming this, but whatever. If one’s nature or tendencies conform ot the norms of the structure, all is well and good, nobody gets hurt. is a good example of this (and from what he’s said, Altera’s a pretty good joint to work for as well). My time at motorola is a good example of what happens when there isn’t a match. It ain’t pretty.

I am not one to be comfortable with customary ways of doing things. I like variety, spontanaeity, and novel stimuli. This puts me at odds with standardized structures, and rigorous traditionality. There are, of course, other options for how to organize one’s work. I’d assumed that independent contractors operated more or less the same way, but with greater freedom. Contracting entity E describes task T to contractor C. C provides output O which performs T for E, and gets $. Which is not too far off, but the steps preceding my little description look very different to the contractor than to the cube-sitter.

Ro looked at it as an almost feudal system, where there are task owners, instead of land owners, and they have serfs, who are the cube-sitters, doing the tasks for them, while they administer the serfs and collect the ‘taxes’. He regards independent consulting as the equivalent of freeholds, where they are beholden only to the other members of the particular freehold, blah, blah, blah. And that’s precisely where he wants to be, and I can understand that. Going from serf to freeholder though, has some implications. The bulk of the time you’ll be doing the same stuff. But the freeholder has to take more responsibility. No ‘taxes’ on their effort, but, by the same token, nobody else saving up grain for famines.

The other big difference is initiative. freeholders, contractors, what have you, must take initiative in order to survive, nobody is telling them what to do. Serfs can just do as they’re told and get by. I am severely un-used to taking the initiative. I can take a task and be creative with it, but I am bad at self direction. I tend to go off on irrelevant sidelines. And need input. Furthermore, working alone is something I just cannot bring myself to do. At least, not on the computer-y things my degree qualifies me to do. (and I would like to take a moment to reflect on just how incredibly broken that statement is “my degree qualifies me to do”. Fuck my degree(s). They are not the source of my power.)

Working with Ro has helped, I think. But I’m still having trouble doing work while he’s gone. <sigh>