vanderwal.net

Today will be filled with mixed emotions. It is my last day working in a building I have been in since November 1999. I have been a program manager (translation: over see many projects) who is also charged with keeping his hands dirty (less dirty than I wished) and providing solutions) for the same group since December 2001. I have been working for the same company since October or November of 2001. All of these are records for me. I am somewhat amazed I have made it this long (I know others are too) as I have short attention span and like to iterate quickly and build, test, and tinker toward perfection then move on. That is not the environment where I have been. It took more than 3 years to do what I believed would take 6 months.

I will deeply miss working with the great people that have been around me. I will miss working for INDUS Corporation as they have been a wonderful company to work for, even long before I worked for them. When I was working on a previous project they staffed and lead one of the GIS portion of the project. They would always ask what I needed to make the project run better and meet our goals and deadlines. If I needed a Java developer they would make one available the following day and the developer was usually stellar. I had never seen this before, particularly not in government contracting. They believe deeply in their employees and the success of their client%#039;s projects.

But, it is time to move on and focus my full work attention on the things that have been keeping me up at night and inside on sunny weekends. My passion for building and helping others design and build tools for people to use and reuse information more easily. This information in social contexts in the digital and physical environments needs more attention. The Model of Attraction and InfoClouds (Personal InfoCloud and Local InfoCloud), which include folksonomy, are my focus. Today findability of information and media is getting rather good, but refindability sucks. It is long past time to fix this.