rdn32

Reflecting on the year as it draws to a close: that’s a thing, isn’t it? Much has happened during the past year, much of which I have no intention of discussing right now. However, I’ve remembered that I set myself some goals for the year, and so now would be a good time for reviewing them.

The goals were: to meet Puffles the Dragon Fairy; to use the word “propinquity” more often; and to do some public speaking.

With regard to the first goal, I should explain that Puffles the Dragon Fairy is the cuddly toy avatar of Antony Carpen, a former civil servant who is now a social media trainer cum politics blogger. One modus operandus he had as a blogger was to go along to public meetings and similar events in Cambridge, dragon in tow, and report on them. “Meeting Puffles” as a goal was therefore a proxy for becoming more involved in political stuff, but with the advantage of being specific and measurable.

Why do politics at all? I don’t have a particularly good answer, and I’m not even sure that “politics” is even quite the right word. One thing that has been playing on my mind from time to time, though, is that the word “idiot” comes from an ancient Greek word meaning someone who avoided taking part in the life of the polis.

With regard to the second goal, “propinquity” denotes the property of being close by. I encountered the word when reading Kim Philby’s autobiography, My Secret War. One of its chapters discusses the wartime activity and organization of SIS’ counter-intelligence section, where Philby worked. It included a discussion of the idea that its office should move from St. Alban’s to central London:

MI5 meanwhile had maintained their pressure for closer co-operation with ourselves. They laboured the virtues of “propinquity,” a word that begun to appear frequently in Petrie’s correspondence on the subject with Menzies. It was indeed clear that, despite the telephone, co-operation would be more effective if the distance between us was less.

I read this and thought: “Ooh. Good word. I must use that one.” It’s more than just a good word, though: it’s a good concept. Despite the advances in communications technology, there is something magical about having people gathered together in the same physical space. It’s what makes great cities work. Cities are dense, people talk to each other, and things happen.

A few years ago I saw a talk by Alan Blackwell about the history of Cambridge as a hub of technological innovation, in which he made a slightly Jane Jacobs-ish point about the genius of attracting the country’s brightest and best into a town small enough that everything is within cycling distance. Whilst it is easy to say that, thanks to the internet, a software engineer like me could work anywhere, the fact remains that in Cambridge I’ve got jobs due to chance encounters in bars. I’m hardly unique in this. This, however, is the kind of unplanned, untidy vitality that gets left out of the authoritarian high modernist vision of a clockwork utopia: smart cities for dumb people.

If the open city feels like Naples, and the closed city feels like Frankfurt then I’d say that Cambridge is towards the Naples end of the spectrum—albeit with push-bikes on the pavements rather than motorbikes.

With regard to the third goal, well, I don’t have to explain what public speaking is, but I’ll say something about why I chose it as a goal. The brief version of this is that public speaking is a potentially valuable skill, and the way you develop any skill is by exercising it.

But why is developing such a skill important to me at this point in my life? Answering that requires some more contextual detail.

A few years ago I suffered a herniated disk in my neck. Although it did respond to physiotherapy, at its worst I had pain in my shoulder and all down my arm as far as my wrist, and half my hand was numb. It made sleep difficult, typing unpleasant, and I found that being in pain was intensely distracting when I was trying to think. All of which was, apart from anything else, very inconvenient for me professionally since my job consisted of sitting all day at a computer, typing and thinking.

I took this as a wake-up call: I needed to broaden my range of skills as a matter of some urgency. Now that I just get the odd twinge my sense of urgency has decreased, but I’m still looking to develop my skills. One thing that makes public speaking particularly attractive is that because so many people dread and avoid it, you often get brownie points just for trying.

So: how did I get on?

Well, I never actually met Puffles—I understand that the dragon itself has now retired from public life—but I have met Anthony at a number of events, which by implication means that I’ve been at a number of that sort of event, most obviously two Be The Change Cambridge conversations.

The most straightforwardly political event I attended in the year was actually an lecture, Where Next for Further and Higher Education, given by government minister Vince Cable. I did start doing a write-up of that, but my digressions rather got the better of me. To make up for that I’ll now relate Cable’s one gaff in a great talk, which was to refer to Hermann Hauser as a German venture capitalist. Fortunately David Cleevely was close at hand to point out that Hermann Hauser was actually Austrian by birth, but in any case what with Acorn and ARM, the Hauser Forum and the Cambridge computing museum he’s definitely Cambridge’s own now.

I haven’t used the word “propinquity” a great deal, it has to be said. It isn’t a word that fits very well in normal conversation. On the other hand, my aim was to use it more and, given that my baseline was at zero, technically I succeeded. I probably did a bit better with the concept than the word itself.

I thought the thing I did best on was public speaking, in that I gave a talk to the Enterprise Search Cambridge meetup. There were two talks for that meeting: mine, and another by one of the founders of the company I work for. There is a write-up by event organizer Charlie Hull, and sketch notes by Francis Rowland.

I had been with my current company less than a year, and so after offering to do a talk I realized I was in a bit of a bind: I didn’t know nearly enough to give a technical talk about what the company does, but I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity to speak. The solution was for the CTO do a sensible talk about what the company’s technology, and for me to provide comic relief with a talk poking fun at some of the pretensions associated with enterprise search and knowledge management.

Taking this contrary stance allowed me to talk about topics dear to my heart: the importance of informal communication channels, the tacit dimension of knowledge, and—yes—the virtues of propinquity. It also allowed me to avoid technicalities whilst still being grounded in concrete examples: my most recent experience of job hunting, the placement of the coffee machines in Red Gate’s offices, the time I got lost in Norwich, etc. It all seemed to go down reasonably well.

So, to sum up the year, I’ll award myself one and two halves.