Couple of things to report regarding cyber-nomads – folks who work where they want to because they work online…

First, a site I ran into months ago, WebWorkerDaily, reports lots of interesting things about people who work online, and you might want to “check them out.” A recent article Web Work Continues Explosive Growth, for instance.

Second, they report on a study from World At Work, which among other things indicates almost 15 million Americans engage in teleworking full time. (You can pick up a PDF of the report by visiting their web site.) If I calculate correctly, that’s about 5% of the population.

And just this week, an article on WebWorker Daily entitled What Type of Web Worker are You? lists four types of nomadic “Web Workers.” I am a combination of Digital Bedouin and Telecommuter. Mostly I work from my home office, but with my phone (on GPRS) and a few visits to client sites, I really distribute my work quite a bit. And I’m completely capable of picking up and working from a remote location for days when I need to. So there goes the classification scheme right away!

My friend Jay Cross (Informal Learning) wrote an article Geek Gatherings, in which he (as is typical for Jay) progresses from thought to thought, starting by defining and refining the word geek, but ending up at BAR Camp. (Also see barcamp in wikipedia.) It’s a great post that you should just go read — especially if you’re sick and tired of regular conferences full of (PowerPoint) presentations and looking for a new way of doing things.

What I like most is that these un-conferences incorporate many of the same ideas from “nomadic working” which I was describing in my original “I’m a Turtle” post. (Calling myself a turtle refers to carrying my work around with me in the computer like the turtle carries his shell, not to the pace at which I work.)

Jay says “Geeks are dedicated learners. They go to great lengths to stay ahead of the curve. Not content to merely implement the ideas of others, geeks are driven to invent the future. The way they meet, share information, and conduct their meetings holds many ideas for corporate meetings, starting with the fact that the geeks love to go to meetings like the two I just returned from.” The two meetings he describes are FOO Camp and BAR Camp.

And one thing I like about BAR Camp is that people go to it and actually “camp out” – they bring a computer, and wi-fi is provided for them, and they interact and are encouraged to be online and F2F all at the same time. I made some comments a while ago about meetings being no good if people weren’t online the whole time checking out the references and looking for new ideas. And so Jay’s description really hit the spot for me.

Also for fun here’s Chris Messina’s blog trail on Barcamp.

Jay’s book Informal Learning can be purchased from Amazon.

And one more reference to un-conferences – Take Your PowerPoint And… in BusinessWeek. (Thanks to Chris for spotting this.)

CIO Magazine has a column written by David Rosenbaum, and titled Cranky Old Guy in which a week ago he wrote an entry Please Stop Playing with Yourself.

I view the column as being partially humor because I personally am such an odd mix of experience and a desire to use new techniques and technologies in novel ways.

David Rosenbaum really does sound like a cranky old guy in this particular entry, because what he’s bemoaning is that people (today) sit in meetings with their Blackberry, or cell ph, or computer in front of them (or in their lap below table level in order to hide it) reading and answering email rather than attending to the topic of the meeting.

Well, it’s easy to understand that he feels neglected and disrespected because people are doing other things while he’s making a PowerPoint presentation. And who hasn’t done this at least a couple of times in some boring meeting? But there are other aspects to be considered. On both sides of the table.

In fact, I feel that bringing a laptop computer to a meeting should in most cases be encouraged and put to good use, and here’s the how-and-why of that… [Read more…]