Werd I/O

I want to write something on Israel / Palestine, and I've tried about six times to gather my thoughts, but there's so much to the situation, and there are so many people who will take you to task no matter where you stand, that it's hard. I think it's important to stand up for human rights at times like this, but I'm struggling to be coherent in the way the situation demands.

Right now it boils down to this: Stop killing children. Stop sieging hospitals. Turn on the power. Let aid flow in. But while there are real human rights violations in progress, it's also absolutely true that there is some anti-semitism in play; some of it unsubtle, and some a contiguous part of the quiet xenophobia that sits under the skin of American and European society. There are a lot of people who don't like Jews and are enjoying the excuse.

And it's also true that the attack conducted by Hamas was abhorrent and inexcusable.

And it's also true that Palestinians have been described as animals, in the most dehumanizing, Islamophobic language imaginable.

It's anti-semitic to conflate Israel with all Jews, or to suggest that Jews are a monolith, just as it's racist to do the same with Palestinians. Criticism of Israeli policy is not inherently anti-semitism, and shutting down those discussions is anti-democratic.

I find the calls to shut up about human rights abuses (on all sides) profoundly depressing. People are being killed. It's not some abstract game of chess. It's relentless death and suffering.

This demand to sit along pre-defined ideological lines rather than stand for the principle of human life and equality for all keeps me up at night. The idea that we either have to stand for Netanyahu or Hamas, or align ourselves with American interests or the interests of any nation, is obviously ridiculous.

Say no.

Stand for life. Stand for peace. Stand for not killing children, for fuck's sake.

The information warfare has been turned up to 11 in this conflict, and it must stop.

I’ve been thinking a lot about supporting shared, informal reflection at work.

In software development, we do a lot of what I’d call formal reflection. These usually take the form of retrospectives after a development sprint, where the team gets together to discuss what went right and wrong, and what they might change about their development process. There’s also space for formal reflection in 1:1 meetings with your manager, where you discuss your progress with respect to your and your team’s goals.

In most development teams, there isn’t a lot of space for what I’d call informal reflection: discussing our hopes, ideas for what we might do in the future, or playing around with ideas that might seem off-topic if you tried to tie them to a direct team goal. Ideas that start “What if …” or “How might we …” or “Here’s how I’m thinking about …” or “I’m struggling with …”, rather than more formal work documents.

But his kind of reflection is important. When shared in writing across a team, I think it serves a few different purposes. These include but aren’t limited to:

• It helps widen the gene pool of ideas for what the team might do (and provides a way for anyone to discuss an idea)
• It reveals your colleagues’ worries and excitements, helping to build empathetic relationships on the team
• It helps the team build a muscle for sharing vulnerably and giving feedback openly
• It helps fill in the culture and communication gap for remote teams, who have fewer opportunities for sharing informally with each other

Some workplaces do this well. When I worked at Medium, we had an internal version of the platform called Hatch that was so good it should have been listed as a perk. Everyone in the company could write and respond to posts, which ran the gamut from people introducing themselves and what they cared about to technical specifications. Posts I remember writing included an exploration of what it might look like to support podcasts as a product, a post about me as a person, some stuff I’d done in the past that might be applicable, and various engineering specifications. Other people wrote rich, eloquent reflections on every aspect of the platform and its community. I mourned its loss when I left.

In a post from 2015, Marcin Wichary included this screenshot of Hatch posts that goes some way of capturing the spread:

I know that other Medium alumni have tried to build similar platforms at other companies they’ve worked at. I think it’s a good idea. This isn’t a traditionally formal company intranet: it’s a relatively-unstructured space where virtually anything goes.

There are a few commercial platforms that approach this. BlogIn allows you to create an internal blog that (as far as I can tell) any employee can contribute to, but the screenshots still make it look more formal than I’m looking for: more like an internal marketing space than a collaborative, freeform space for long-form thought within a team.

I think, in other words, that there’s space for a new kind of internal tool that allows folks to write long-form reflections without having to adhere to a taxonomy or development process. Where they can explore those ideas that start with “How might we …” or “What if …” or “Here’s how I’m thinking about …” or “I’m struggling with …” at length with impunity.

It’s the kind of stuff that folks might do today with a shared memo on a particular topic (if they’re part of a team that communicates well). On the team I’m working with today, a new member of the team writes wonderful weekly reflection documents about her onboarding and then shares links to them on Slack. That works, and her documents really are wonderful, but what if there was a place where everyone could post and find each other’s reflections? I don’t think either Slack or Google Docs are it (although you could simulate it with a shared, dedicated Google Docs folder and a Slack channel). Some people do this via email, and I don’t think that’s it either. I really think it needs a dedicated space.

I shared a survey about this the other day to try and figure out if other people felt the same need. It wasn’t a complete success because I don’t think people understood what I meant by reflection, and I used the word “journaling” which also isn’t quite right.

These ideas are still quite rough, but I’m hoping this blog post makes more sense. And if this idea resonates with you — or, indeed, if it doesn’t — I’d love it if you spent a couple of minutes answering my survey questions. Thank you!

I like to test project ideas from time to time to see if there’s some merit to them.

This is one of those times. If you work on a team of knowledge workers, and use a communications tool like Slack or Microsoft Teams, I’d love to know how you think about reflection as part of your work.

If you have two minutes, let me know your thoughts?

I’ll talk about how I’m thinking about this in a future post.

I love the indieweb carnival. Every month, a new blogger hosts a topic on their website, and everyone else is invited to post about it on theirs. Webmentions link it all together, allowing anyone to browse through all the different points of view and modes of expression. It’s lovely.

This month’s IndieWeb Carnival topic is about community and belonging, so here are some thoughts about that.

I’ve been working with a new therapist who specializes in trauma, after realizing that I wasn’t doing well at processing my mother’s death and the decade leading up to it. My parents had moved to California a decade prior to that in order to look after my Oma (grandmother). When my mother’s condition progressed to the point that she needed oxygen, my sister and I both moved continents to be closer to her. She had a double lung transplant that gave us all lots of extra time — in fact, more time than these sorts of transplant recipients get on average — but this is one of the most invasive surgeries you can do, and there were complications from the drugs, the surgery itself, the underlying condition. It was incredibly hard on her. In turn, it was hard on all of us in a way that’s been difficult to process. I realized lately, for example, that I’ve been having auditory flashbacks. I’m really hoping a specialized therapist will help.

Part of therapy is intake: giving your therapist the lowdown on who you are as a person and your general context. We’ve been going through my childhood; she asked for me to discuss any particular life events of themes that stuck in my mind.

A subset of the things that came to mind for me included:

• An entire factory floor of Albanian seamstresses lining up to pinch my cheeks while my parents looked on helplessly, unwilling to cause an international incident (this really happened)
• Living in Vienna as a seven-year-old and almost becoming fluent in German until the Chernobyl nuclear reactor melted down in Ukraine and we moved back to Britain because my parents were worried about the fallout
• Being a borderline third culture kid: growing up in Britain to American and Dutch / Indonesian / Swiss parents with extended stays in Austria and North Carolina
• Living with the generational aftermath of concentration camp survival (my dad is one of the youngest survivors of Japanese-run camps in Indonesia)

A few of these things made it difficult to connect to people when I was growing up. The thing about third culture kids is that they often don’t get the implicit cultural references that everyone else seems to just know: the result is that I often felt like there must be some kind of hidden password that everyone else was in on that had never been shared with me. At the same time, I’d picked up on a generational anxiety that I didn’t even know existed, which made it hard for people to connect with me. Even now, as an adult, it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t helped care for a terminally ill loved one to really understand where I’m at as a person. Quite often, I don’t even know myself.

I sometimes wonder if religion would have provided me with a stronger through-line of community, but I always remind myself that then I would have needed to believe in one. I’m pleased for people who do have a sense of belief that adds to their life. Even after a childhood of Church of England schooling (and perhaps a little bit because of it) I can’t bring myself to believe in any kind of higher power.

I don’t have the same questions about nationalism (or its cousin patriotism, which I believe sits on the same spectrum). I think putting so much identity into a place that you carry a sense of superiority over other places is so archaic, so unbelievably stupid, that I can’t bring myself to entertain it. There is no greatest country in the world, or greatest state, or greatest town. We’re all just people, and these borders are artificial divisions that serve to separate us.

Case in point: one of the biggest rug pulls of my adult life was Brexit. When I moved to the US to help care for my mother, my intention was always to move back to the UK. Five years into this journey, Britain reminded me that I didn’t really belong there: I was a European citizen, not a real British person, and I no longer had the legal right to return as anything more than a tourist. I already felt like I ripped my life apart (albeit for good reasons), and this came as a huge blow. I was born with American citizenship and can live here forever, but it’s not like I feel like I belong here. There’s a cognitive overhead to living in a country you didn’t grow up in; an ongoing tension, and a sense of loss that never really goes away. Not anything close to the palpable loss that would come a few years later, but enough to tug at your soul.

If there isn’t a place where I feel belonging, there are, at least, people. One of the important facets of family (or at least, a close one, which I’m grateful to have) is that you have shared cultural touchpoints, and shared context. I’ve said before that family is my nationality and my religion, having no use for the traditional versions of either of those things. It’s my primary community, too.

But there are others. When I first connected to the internet, back in the mid-nineties, newsgroups occupied the space that social media and web forums take up now. Not long before, someone had created one specifically for British teenagers; I logged on with my dial-up Demon Internet account, started lurking, and then eventually dove in.

There was something freeing about only being able to express myself in text, not least because I’ve always had a very hard relationship with my own physicality. I’m big, and was big early; I felt like the Incredible Hulk. There were hardly any mirrors in our house, and I’d catch myself in the full-length ones in department stores and recoil. (I still do.) On the newsgroup, I didn’t have to worry about any of that. I could just be me, without being bogged down by my pesky corporeal presence. Everyone else who posted there was kind of awkward in similar ways to me, too; the missed cultural understanding that I felt so profoundly in real life didn’t seem to matter there at all.

Eventually, we all met up in real life, and these people who I’d met through words became lifelong friends. I hosted parties at my house and traveled around the country to visit other peoples’. It was an experience I still strive to recreate; it’s what informed the communities I created later on, although I later learned it wasn’t as completely safe as I thought at the time.

As an adult, my communities have been practice-based: indieweb, for example, or the community of Matter alumni. I’m pleased to say I’ve made lifelong friends from these places: people who mean the world to me. These are people who I do have a sense of belonging with, and I’m grateful for it. And, of course, I have a new family of my own, which carries its own sense of belonging. (I’m writing this as my sick child sleeps his way through a long nap; when he wakes up, I will hug him tight.)

These days, I see my lack of geographic rootedness as a superpower. Sure, I don’t really feel like I belong anywhere, but that also means I can be anywhere. There’s no real tether to one particular place; no need to be in one location forever. And the benefit of being a permanent outsider is that I always have an outsider’s perspective: I tend to see things in a different way to the people around me. Sometimes that turns out to be valuable; sometimes it brings a little scorn. At least it’s something different.