Work Life Balance for the Sandwiched CTO

Never more in my life have I required work-life balance and understand what it means at a personal level. This all started when I accepted a CTO position with Bluedrop Learning Networks ( a great organization with a good alignment to my career journey ). The interview process was extensive and I had the opportunity to meet all corners of the team I would be working with. Overall a good and thorough process. Kudos to everyone involved! The interview process included multiple discussions about work-life balance, and how I (in my mid-50's) have four aging parents over 80 years, two middle-school age children, one young adult age child, a bunch of volunteer activities, personal interests that I wont let go, and three residences to maintain. Oh yes, and a spouse who is an family doctor who also works in palliative care... needless to say I am often the go-to person when a short notice family issue arises. All this said, and after a few important conversations I had to let go of my new CTO role after only six months. I needed to focus on what I consider most important for my family. Though I am not an entrepreneur ( - though, I do think a good CTO needs to have the entrepreneur mindset - ) I completely agree with Randi Zuckerberg about approaches to managing the workload of a senior professional, or also known as the entrepreneur's dilemma.

The entrepreneur's dilemma:

Maintaining friendships. Building a great company. Spending time w/family. Staying fit. Getting sleep.

Pick 3.

— Randi Zuckerberg (@randizuckerberg) December 9, 2011

For me, it's that simple. It's the implementation that will be the hard part. I need to have spending time with family, staying fit (in good health), and getting sleep to be my priorities. And I need to organize my life around these three and the others come in between or when priorities change. Something important to consider is that these five items need to be put into the larger context of a life well lived through a whole lifetime. That means you pick three on a daily, weekly, or yearly basis. Set your priorities for the day and/or week and follow through. This allows for flexibility within the entrepreneur's dilemma. In other words;

Peter's dilemma:

Maintain friendships. Have meaningful work. Spend time w/family. Stay healthy. Get sleep. Be creative.

Iterate around 3 at a time.

— Peter Rawsthorne (@prawsthorne) June 27, 2018

As you can see I also added one, be creative... my thinking around this aligns with having the time to think and create, free the brain to focus on the abstract and artistic and to wonder aimlessly... it is an important part, and keeps your edge in a world where innovation is becoming increasingly important.

Creating Online Learning Communities

Thank-you Bill Pusztai

My recent work has taken me back to thinking about and discussing the effective creation of technically focused online learning communities. Learning online is something I have been doing for a while. And given both my pedagogical and technical background, I often get into the nuts and bolts (or bits and bytes) of building online learning communities as well as the actual building of the community. Much of my recent reflection has been about engaging and building learning communities, particularly technology (or digital literacy) focused learning communities. This post is mostly about the engagement and pedagogical side of this community building. Another post about the technical side of building online learning community may come, but is well articulated in this slideshare from a while back; http://www.slideshare.net/prawsthorne/building-onlinecommunities

Background
I believe some background information on where I am coming from in my thinking is important. There have been a number of experiences (professional and otherwise) that have set my thinking about building technically oriented online learning communities.

• Being a software developer and working extensively with lean and agile teams - what is important: most developers are self-directed life-long learners and they owe a lot to their peers who have contributed to what they are reading and learning.
• Being an enterprise architect and encouraging enterprise2.0 thinking - what is important: collective intelligence and learning/teaching is knowledge management. being patient.
• The musings of Zuckerberg vs. Poole - what is important: anonymity encourages contribution, nuf said, read my post;  http://criticaltechnology.blogspot.ca/2011/03/ignore-copyright-and-blissfully-create.html
• My time as a early contributor to WikiEducator - what is important: recognizing contribution, doing it in the open, monetize activities wherever possible, and governance can be done exclusively online and in the open. love your volunteers.
• Implementing seven major projects in three years with CLEBC - what is important: open approaches work in closed shops. API's allow distributed approaches. recognizing areas of practice (or communities of practice) is important. Video resources can be long-tailed. love your volunteers.
• My graduate studies were exclusively online - what is important: face-to-face and blended opportunities are worth every moment and should be encouraged if you want greater depth to learning. This may seem against the creation of online learning communities and favoring traditional learning environments, but the point I am making is that if the opportunity to get together in the same physical space with any community member presents itself, seize it!
• Communities can be built in many places by many people - what is important: often communities can fracture into other communities, or seasoned contributors will disengage, move-on or start other communities. Be supporters of this action for it increases the overall size and reach of the subject and its growing content.
• Authenticity can be community policy - what is important: based on an articulated policy the authenticity of the dialogue can be increased. While anonymity can create contribution and authenticity, the community can also set and enforce policy to encourage authenticity.

Engagement, engagement, engagement
Contributors are the MOST valuable resource, they are the community! Yes, lurkers are also a huge part of any growing community, and lurkers sometimes convert into micro-contributors. The people who are, or see themselves as, stewards of the community need to engage often and with reckless abandon. They also need to encourage the stewardship to be a shared activity. Engagement should be across social media, and where possible use tagging to bring it all together.

Tagging For Community of Practice from Peter Rawsthorne

Freedom (without scholarly egos, well... all egos)
Its the micro engagements that grow into macro engagements. If people aren't given the freedom and support to make small contributions they will rarely make the larger contributions. And once a contribution has been made facilitating discussion should come from elsewhere (not the contributor themselves) with great encouragement and recognition being given to the initial contributor. An amazing community is grown with many small and meaningful events. People should never be made to feel badly about their contribution... and don't feed the trolls.

Small is beautiful
Encourage contribution in small chunks, build discussion and shared understanding around these chunks. Allow the chunks to coalesce into larger works. Trying to complete a larger works without community engagement, ends up teaching the creator. And the online community becomes passive...

Facilitators are stewards (and need to be tech savvy)
Online learning communities that are technical in nature need to be facilitated by the technically savvy, if they are not this is quickly noticed and the community will lose credibility. The facilitators must eat their own dog-food and be exemplars in engagement and encouragement.

Its all about love!
I know it sounds smoltzy, but building a great online learning community is an activity of the heart... finding people who are deeply committed to the subject matter of the learning community is essential for longevity and depth of learning. People quickly get a real sense of a community (online or otherwise) and if it is not genuine people will recognize this.

Building successful online learning communities has a lot to do with reaching-out and encouraging others. And for technology focused learning communities this includes drawing in people who make small technical contributions who often contribute in small and quiet ways. Surprisingly, it is often these small contributions that have the biggest impact.

An end for education

Last week I was reading a post from my friend Brad. In his post he asked the question what is the end of education. Not the kind of end meaning over/finished, but the kind of end meaning purpose. For me the answer to this important question is;

to be a positive and loving contributor to the local and global community as a whole.

This pretty much means, do what you are good at, do what you enjoy, find a place for yourself where you help the local community and the world be a better place. In other words the end of education is to help people to know who they are and where they fit, and then provide them the skills and knowledge to support this self-understanding.

Volunteer work from home

A while back when I was cutting my teeth in the ICT4D world, I attended a symposium that was one of the more significant and person forming events of my adult professional life. Yes big words, but I reflect upon the days I spent at Royal Holloway with fondness knowing it influenced the direction of my life. Many thanks to the ICT4D people who put so much energy into creating the event! Tim Unwin is an exceptional person and academic who would still be my preferred mentor if I ever undertake a PhD.

During this time I read a "paper" written by Tim Unwin in July 2004 titled "Doing development research 'at home'". For me, the point of his paper is there is an amazing amount of volunteer and development work you can do from home. I also find that since this paper was written in 2004 a lot more tools have become available on the Internet to assist in doing volunteer work. From a philosophical perspective I also deeply agree with doing volunteer work from home;

1. It's reduces travel and is therefore good for the environment.
2. Staying close to home also focus your work on your local communities needs.
3. It is more based on attraction rather than promotion in that the people who want your assistance will 'virtually' come to you.

This is what I see important to my practice of doing international work from home;

• Working on things I am really passionate about
• Publish all my work and materials for free using the appropriate licensing scheme. With faith that someone somewhere will find the work useful.
• Offer my expertise in Communities of Practice and if people make comment or want further information about my works, engage and share expertise.
• Engage, engage, engage... it is an amazing and growing community of learners online. All learners, regardless of stage of learning, require assistance. Its iterative and amazing what you will learn from others, even in topics you believe yourself an expert.