Ramblin' Dan

It could be a sign of age, but I enjoy thinking back occasionally and consider where I was and what I have done and learned through the years. It’s a wonderful gift we have of somehow storing a lifetime of experience within our minds. The easiest way to get it out and share is what I am doing right now.

Early man (I despise the term “primitive”) was also aware of this. (I use the word man in its generic sense.) Primitive may be a correct term in its purest meaning, but it conjures up the idea that early man was dumb or stupid. I believe we were exactly opposite that, at least the survivors were.

There has always been a desire to somehow share what each of us knows. Gossip is probably one of the lowest forms of sharing thoughts and probably the oldest. Ha! I don’t write gossip. Well… not usually.

The Internet has created an explosion of communication. It has brought simple publication to the masses. I never thought I would be a writer. Maybe I am still not by some definitions, but I do a lot of writing and web publication. I must admit I am not a professional writer, nor do I pretend that I am.

However, I was always the person who ended up writing and publishing the newsletters of every club and association I belonged. Amateur radio clubs, model and EAA airplane clubs, Rotary International clubs, if I was a member, I was editor/publisher. I even shared writing a newspaper column for a couple of years. I was documenting history in a real sense.

Today the Internet rules – as I have more web sites and blogs than I ever thought I could maintain. Actually there are more than I can maintain. Ha! But I keep hacking away.

For me it is like keeping a very public journal or chronicle. I just can’t keep what’s in my mind under lock and key. Like I said, I think it is a very basic need of the human race to share and preserve what we know. Teaching is human nature and writing creates a long lasting record of human thought and activity, a record of lessons learned. Man has always kept a record of history either verbally, by signs, and when able by writing. The Internet and electronic publishing has become the world’s largest journal of information.

So here is what is happening now. I have spent the last week in designing a system for preserving lessons learned in my place of employment. It is intranet based web site with a blog and additional photo and document storage. It is completely searchable with an inquiry system; I cannot think of a simpler, easy to build system to store and retrieve written random thoughts and events commonly called a “lesson learned”.  What wonderful documentation tools we have today.

At work we often have meetings where we discuss “lessons learned.” We all nod our heads in agreement especially after the completion of a difficult project, that we learned something. However, there is no place that “lesson” got published where it could be recalled when needed; it has to stay “stuck” in our heads. Now that’s what I call primitive.

I know there are complete business systems today to manage what I am doing in my internal web site. There is a coworker managing a “LL” for product defects a few cubes away from me. It is 20X more complex than what I need. Perhaps one day I will move my project to such a system. But for now I have to show it can be done and discover if we all will actually use the system. It is shame on us if we don’t.