Away from practice

I'm getting pretty far away from the actual practice of Compendium, I was realizing. It's been a long long time since any sustained use (ironic since now there's a real tool!). From 1995 through 2000 or so I was doing Compendium sessions and using the tools for my own projects almost constantly. Most of these involved some form of facilitation, whether of large project groups and distributed teams, or of small local teams. That kind of intensive use fueled a thousand ideas, some of which have found their way into the Compendium software now, some still waiting to be born. I used to always say that we were waiting for the software to catch up with the method(s) that Maarten and I had come up with in the mid-90s. Now it has, largely, and also evolved in unforeseen ways, making new kinds of practice possible -- but I am not doing it and not sure when I will be. Too caught up with day-to-day management at Verizon much of the time, plus thinking more in research-y directions. But the heart and soul was always the practice (and when I start my actual PhD research much of it will be centered around practice and action research issues). I question whether getting so far away from the practice is good (although the long time away has helped fuel some new thinking, hopefully).

I have been doing some support of other people using the tool, though that is still slow to get underway. I don't evangelize for it as I once did, especially now that Simon and others are doing that more (and more effectively).