Tonight I sit and share with you my thoughts about our friend who we sometimes call “Mr Human Glue” who has played a creative and interesting role in our lives. At least in mine.

How I Came to It

Way back in the 1970s I created a technology project at Northwestern University where we sought to introduce and experiment with online communication and education. As a young professor I was into the tech and because we were so far “ahead of the curve” part of my role was to discover and meet other experimenters in related work. At some point a fellow called me up (or wrote on paper!) to say that he had a grant to “call people up and introduce them.” I believe it was an NSF grant. My friend who team-taught a seminar with me — Bob Johansen — and I had some number of such calls, introduced and moderated by this facilitator, and relationships were sparked that went on for decades.

I say that by way of introducing here the concept of “professional introducer.”

Not an entirely new concept, of course, because we know that centuries ago artists had studios where they worked together and often novel ideas arose, musicians and intellectuals had salons, and the univeersity concept certainly served to cross-polinate (ccompared to guilds and trades).

Bob and I had done a collaboration at Northwestern — teaming up to create a Seminar on College Teaching (so-named by our Dean Claude Mathis) in which we intentionally brought together graduate students and faculty from many departments, using this mix to spark new ways of viewing and supporting and conducting education (and expanding our use of “distance learning” technologies). (I’ve writen some about this Computers And Teaching project.)

NextNow

So it must have been 2003 — Bill Daul came along (but no recollection of how we met) with his idea to formally bring people together, which he named NextNow, and it was familiar and very natural. I “signed up” immediately. I don’t recall whether NextNow had coalesced around Doug Engelbart already, or not, but early NextNow meetings such as the one at Fort Mason (using World Cafe as its structure – this may have been only the second NextNow meeting) included a wonderfully broad participation from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. I can’t overestimate how many people I met thru those events – they were miraculous. (Also see Engelbart on Wikipedia)

NextNow meetings were held at many venues, though Doug’s house may hold the record, and events held at or with the collaboration of MediaX at Stanford I think were some of the most fruitful.

For a long period – perhaps most of the life of NextNow – operations, events and meetings at The NextNow Collaboratory in Berkley played an underlying structural role and provided more of an ongoing physical presence than the more “itinerant” meetings.

When I decided on a career redirect in 2015 I celebrated by putting together a paroxism of several NextNow meetings in downtown San Francisco (in March then April and May) we used a model we’d been improving over the years – presentations; small groups; re-convene and synthesize. One of many models the group had tried.

In conclusion (of this one note) I want to recognize publicly that Bill’s work as founder and listener-in-chief allowed me, and certainly a number of others, to meet new people and new-yet-connectable ideas, over a period of maybe a couple of decades, that otherwise just might not have happened. And there was often a special synergy when people “collided” from disparate disciplines.