What one should not do on a dark and stormy night

My husband is taking the ferry tonight, from Helsinki, Finland to Stockholm, Sweden. It is a windy night, though not up to a real storm. I must admit I felt exeedingly stupid, when, in search of literature for a project, I found I had stopped to read the Swedish final report on the 1994 Estonia catastrophe. I mean, I know by now that I am an easy panicker, so why did I not watch out for the obvious???

Being a professional paranoid is, it seems, just a heartbeat away from quite unprofessional and inefficient worrying.

By the way: I have not managed to stumble upon a net-available English translation of the Swedish final report (the link from the catastrophe commission's English website did not work). If anyone knows where to get one, please log in and comment.

wishing peace of mind to all who read this

Ronja

To blog, or not to blog, - that was the question - until now

When I first heard of blogs some three years ago, my immediate reaction was negative. Why would I want for any stranger to be able to read my diary - and what could possibly be interesting in reading about some stranger's favourite breakfast cereals, vacation on Grand Canaria or discipline problems with their Lhasa Apso??? I was also similarly sceptical about personal web sites: how much can one person have to say that really matters? And if someone had something meaningful to say, how would those interested be able to find just that web site or blog, amongst the hundreds of thousands of documents available on the Net?

Good examples motivate

Since then, my opinion on blogging has changed markedly. Now the question no more is "To blog, or not to blog?" but rather "Do I have something meaningful to say, regularly enough, and can I write my message so that it engages and informs, maybe even entertains?" My views on personal web sites, too, have transformed.

This change of heart came gradually, and like all changes to my behavior it is overdetermined: there are more reasons than just one. A very big thanks goes to quite a few thoughtful, well written, informative, community oriented and positively contributing web sites and blogs, created basically by just one person. I sincerely recommend these:

• Art Botterell's incident blog, well-weighed words on public warning in emergencies (a part of his incident.com website)
  
• Doug Harper's unbelievably generous and versatile Online Etymological Dictionary
• Owen Ambur's personal web page, a collection of wise articles on how we people can function together
  
• Mikko Särelä's Thougths from Id, partly in Finnish, includes many insightful society-orieted comments
• The Halting Point, a blog that mixes the most serious with the most hilarious in an inspiring way

Copyleft & Co. save the day

However, the real driving forces behind my conversion have been the community oriented changes in producing, publishing and lisencing information (well, any content, really). Most notably:

1. The GNU General Public Licence (GPL), the Creative Commons and other copyleft lisence formats that enable open-n-share-alike publishing
   
2. The rise of the wikis, Wikimedia Foundation's wikis-for-almost-everything as the most recognized flagships of this movement
   
3. The availability of free or cheap web site, blog and wiki space for anyone, not just companies and other organizations
   

... and finally, online communities engage

The critial spark towards actively contributing came when I realized, during the summer of 2006, the power of online communities that becomes possible by the socio-technical enablers listed above. I am awed by, for example, the accomplishments of these communitites:

• The ISCRAM community (Information Systems for Crisis Responce and Management), which brings together researchers and practitioners from a global and literally life-and-death importance niche area of learning and expertise. We could not cooperate as efficiently, if the web site did not exist, and it has some blog and wiki characteristics, too.
  
• ACM-W, CRA-W, Systers and ResearcHers, which all bring together women in various fields of ICT
• vote.org, "The National Initiative for Democracy" (USA), which strives to bring descision power back into the hands of ordinary voters
  
• The Brights' Net, which strives to make the naturalistic world view better known and understood
• The geochaching community, which combines a fun hobby with engagement in our environment
  

Conclusions and future prospects

Today there is a well-enough established memetic, practical and legal infrastructure for sharing what I choose, how I choose, and making sure that what I want to donate into the public domain stays in the public domain. So the question "To blog, or not to blog" has now been answered. I have received much from this world - in the global perspective I am comparably well off, well educated, safe and secure. It is time I give something back.

In the future, if I live and stay healthy, look to this site for weekly, bi-weekly or monthly comments on, for example:

• emergency announcement (EA) systems (EAs are also called public warnings, citizens warnings and emergency alerts)
  
• emergency preparedness and crisis management, especially communication, situational awareness and sensemaking
  
• security and safety issues of socio-technical systems
  
• learning, doing and teaching scientific research
• cognitive difficulties, such as reading and writing problems, attention deficit (and/or hyperactivity) disorder (ADHD), Asperger's and Tourette's syndroms, and autism
  
• active local (and global) citizenship
• parenting
• my outdoor hobbies: birdwatching, geochaching, trecking, swimming, bicycling, dingy and other sailing
• my indoor hobbies: reading, movies, music, good food and drink
  

May the Force* be with you!

* Force [in my usage] : the source of empowerment and inspiration of your preference, be it a divinity, and organized belief system or the needs and inherent value of our fellow human beings

Peace,

Ronja