Paradise Lost and Found and Lost Again: the Mission of Playgrounds

As a parent of a young boy, I spend a lot of time on playgrounds. I like the rock climbing walls and appreciate a good fast slide. I also really like swings that have really long chains since you feel like you are flying.

My young boy likes the animals or cars that rock on large springs, a large sand box, and the dome jungle gyms. There are a lot of other features which are hit and miss. In general, if my little one can play on most of the equipment without getting frustrated, we're happy. It's a bonus, if I can spend some times swinging on monkey bars and refraining from looking too triumphant if I successfully swing across.

I thought that the societal role and social mission of playgrounds was fairly straight forward and transactional relationship. Until I went to New York City where I learned about the Rockwell Foundation and other architect's mission to transform society and create a future paradise through playgrounds.

Some of the quotes from the linked article (which require a subscription to see the full text) include the 1959 United Nations declaration about playgrounds as "as a place where children, by playing, learn to become non-playing adults." Alternative perspectives include playground development as a substitute for war training. On the other hand, playgrounds that introduce too many repetitive tasks like the 3 S's of swings, slides, and see saws are considered to tools of oppressors to stifle creativity in children.

Architects like Rockwell, Gehry, and others that we have never heard fought these pedestrian playground design and developed "Playgrounds in a Box" and "Loose parts." Children were entrusted with more control over pieces of the playgrounds to encourage the discovery and creativity process. Whacking each other with foam noodles is one example of this process.

Overally, their goals were best summed up with the following quote from the article:
Over the past century, the thinking about playgrounds has evolved from figuring out how play can instill youngsters with discipline to figuring out how play can build brains by fostering creativity and independent thinking. The hope of Rockwell's playground project is that children who have experimented with fitting together oversized blocks and cogs-and who have learned to navigate a place where the social challenges of sharing and collaboration are built into the experience-will be better equipped to handle the complexities of twenty-first-century life.

How did our experience with playgrounds changes through these carefully designed New York City playgrounds. Were my youngster and I transformed in anyway? I am going to answer in repetitive bullet points so you can clearly see that I am a lost cause for these playground architects:

• We watched slightly older kids take over water sources or fountains and spray other kids who got too close. As the designers intended, kids learn at an early age that sharing is for the weak and they should dominate key resources.
  


• A group of kids were digging an elaborate canal system in the sand. Two of them yelled at all the other kids to dig more and dig faster. It was inspiring to see their imagination settling on building their own sweat shops.



• One two year old was very vigilant about tearing down any block or "Loose Parts" construction that any child built and left alone for more than 15 seconds. Clad in baggy back shorts, a medallion around his neck, and a pot belly, he looked like a little mob enforcer. Actually, he might have been.

It looks like the playgrounds do mimic the work environment quite well. This is New York City.

Ask Not What your Mentor Can do for You

For the last few years, I have signed up to be a mentor for my MBA program's Social Impact Movement club and Health Care Management program. The most surprising part is that when students were faced with lists of mentors who were venture capitalists, social venture capitalists, and other titans of industry, two were swayed enough by my credentials of working in a non-profits (including a commune), to select me. Unfortunately, being selected was the highlight of my mentor experience.

I had one conversation with each of them and they were eager, pleasant, and polite. I probably spent 5 minutes more than what was tolerable with my diatribes and philosophy of the world. One wanted to know how to connect to the non-profit community while working for a corporation. The other wanted to know how to transition into the payer/provider side of health care after her indentured servitude (or sponsorship from her consulting firm) ended. Like all mentees, they both wanted contacts so I dusted off my network to give them contacts. That was the end of the relationship. I never heard if they called my contacts, any results, or even a thank you when I sent additional information. It was about transactional as cutting in front of someone while boarding a plane.

I don't expect to get on my mentee's holiday card list or even be Facebook friends (although connecting through Linked In would be a nice touch and appropriate). I know that being 10 years older than them is practically the same as being a senior who eats dinner at 5:00 in Generation Y years. However, I do expect communication and acknowledgment that is on par with Amazon when I place an order. At least Amazon thanks me for my order and lets me know when it's about to arrive. With the importance of mentors becoming as popular an accessory as a case for your smart phone and Google search results on the importance of mentors returning 7.9 million hits, one should know how to be a good mentee.

Most mentees know about being respectful of time and being professional. What mentees do not do well is turn the mentorship into a relationship. Most who network are also too transactional. When given a contact by a mentor, let the mentor know the results of the interaction. It will help the mentor's network as they will know who to tap into or equally important, not to tap into in the future. Complete the deal and follow-up with mentors after completing a job search or graduation. It's about the relationship and not turning a mentor relationship into just a 20 minute phone call.

If mentees don't become better at being mentees, mentors like myself will lose interest. We would rather spend that 20 minutes with someone whom we have a relationship or at least the chance to build one.

Then We Were Done or when We have Blogged All there is to Blog

Bloggers do not blog forever. A lot of blogs don't get beyond 1 post. Conscious of the high failure rate and motivated to produce a quality blog, I made sure that my blog reached at least 100 posts during its first year and 8 posts per month. During my second year, I haven't had the same motivation and have settled on a respectable 6 posts per month.

The two main reasons that I got into blogging were to practice my writing and participate in the online blogosphere community. My interest in the blogosphere community did not burn out as much as it faded away. Some of my favorite bloggers that are linked under my "Men Are Smart, Women Are Smarter" section stopped writing. Others no longer seemed as compelling. My fantasy baseball team filled up my internet surfing time as I was no longer interested in what the blogosphere had to say. It had started to feel like everything there was to say on a blog had already been said and the arguments became circular.

1. Who owns social media at company? Marketing was nominated to own social media. No, Human Resources wanted to own it in their quest to get a seat at the table at a place that doesn't involve a buffet. No, everyone owns social media. No, no one owns social media. So, who owns social media again?

2. Be careful about what you post on Facebook. But if you don't want to be careful, understand your privacy settings. Wait, privacy setting changed. Okay, go back to being careful about what you posted on Facebook.

3. Generation Y is unique, special, and going to take over the world with Twitter. Generation X is still bitter and snarky and writes nasty comments back to Generation Y about how they should move out of their parent's house before they take over the world. Generation Y says the the home ownership dream is dead and they'd rather live at home and save money to start their own business. The Boomers are too busy actually running the world to care about either generation. Boomers win. Again.

4. The most important indicator of a blog's success is traffic. No, it's content. No, it's comments. No, none of those things help make money so I'll just become an affiliate marketer like people who sign up for Amway. But it's not call affiliate marketing anymore but multi-level marketing instead.

5. You should blog to show you are an expert about your niche! Get traffic to your blog to show off your expertise! But it's not about traffic, it's about connection and no one cares about your niche expertise in vintage cookie jars. Oh well, there's always multi-level marketing.

6. Resumes will never get you a job. Well, since every job asks for a resume, that's not really true. It's all about networking. And to be a really awesome networker, you should start a blog. Oh wait, forgot about #4 and #5.

7. It's important not to settle and find a career that makes you happy. I don't know what career will make me happy. But I know that I don't want to settle. So I've defined myself by what I don't want to do. Blogging makes me happy so maybe that will be my career. Crap, forgot about the last 4-6

8. I am going to blog about how something sucks. Well, it doesn't really suck since I am going to write a fairly nuanced post. Using words like suck in blog titles is good because it draws traffic. Traffic is important, oh wait, we've done this before.

9. I am a personal finance blogger. However, you shouldn't take advice from me but use a professional financial adviser. So should I ignore the advice about using a professional financial adviser since I shouldn't take financial advice from a random personal finance blogger? This is the ultimate circular argument kind of like those circular Excel formulas that trigger a big warning when I create them.

10. Making lists are great blog posts. Lists that end in a round number like 10 are even better since ending on a random number like 7 or 8 makes it look like you just ran out of ideas. Yes, I reached 10! Victory is mine!

My lack of interest in the blogosphere and lack of motivation to engage with this community is a disappointment. The internet provides many opportunities to join community and I really do like a good community. However, I haven't found it. I do like blogs from more experienced professionals and bloggers like Fred Wilson and Laurie Ruettimann but I'm realizing how unique their blogs are.

This leaves me with a blog that is an opportunity to develop my writing and motivates me to more fully research ideas. I use some of my ideas at work. Sometimes, I just try to impress the marketing department by talking about my blog.

Coming Home Again Again: the Reverse Cross-Cultural Adjustment

One of my favorite local bands, Keep Your Fork There's Pie, introduces one of their songs with, "I wouldn't want to born again again because then I would have to repeat 7th grade again again."

When we leave the United States to travel in distant and foreign lands, we religiously study the local customs, language, and food in preparation for the cross-cultural experience. We are well prepared, open-minded, ready to listen, and invariably mispronounce words and accidentally say something that means penis at least twice per day. I wonder if it's as easy to accidentally say some variation of penis in English or if that's a clever feature of only other languages?

What we forget to do is to prepare for coming home again again. Yes, we spend a glorious week reconnecting with friends, eating our favorite foods, marathon TV watching, or just enjoying a hot shower. We do get overwhelmed with the number of peanut butter options at the grocery store and selecting tooth paste takes 20 minutes, but other than that we're feeling good. Then the reverse cross cultural adjustment hits.

We're faced with finding a place to live, the job search, and trying to regain independence in the United States. This is contrasted with our experience in the other county where we had purpose, carved out a niche in a community, mastered new languages and culture, and had that independence. Being back in the US rapidly loses its appeal. The job search process starts to feel like a Kafka-esque trap and our experience abroad is discounted. Friends lose interest in our stories about the number of barnyard animals on our bus or on our kitchen table. Our interest in friends' stories about office politics or upholstering their couch fades like our metabolism. After a while, there's nothing new on TV and we don't understand why the re-release of the Beatles anthology was such a big deal.

This reverse cross cultural adjustment is the untold story of coming home again again. We were having fun in our former country, are not having fun in the United States, and therefore want to return to the other country because it was fun. However, that's the wrong reason for leaving. We're running away from a difficult reverse cross cultural adjustment and not running to anything productive. Our semester or service or job ended in the former country or our money ran out. If there is a compelling job, study opportunity, romantic interest, or suitcase of gold in the former country, that is worth returning. Otherwise, it's time to move on and properly come home again again.

Here's how to avoid problems with reverse cross cultural adjustment and live in the present. The first step is to recognize that a reverse cross cultural adjustment exists and needs to be addressed. These are the next steps:

1. Don't rush into the job search: A job search is inherently difficult since we are asking strangers to judge us while we struggle not to incorporate negative feedback into our sense of self-worth. Returning home with enough money to delay the job search for a month will make the adjustment more successful. Additionally, we need to be careful about turning a job search into a career search since a career search is even harder. There is already the gap or transition period in our employment history from being outside of the United States so we have an opportunity to experiment or get a slacker fantasy job.
2. Relearn that the United States is fun and look for adventure: Once we've gotten over the joy of being able to easily find good bagels or coffee, it's tempting to go back to the routine or pre-traveling lifestyle. This can lead to stagnation at worst and certainly no new experiences or adventures. The new experience is what made the international experience so appealing and the United States is large enough and diverse enough to offer those same experiences. This can range from visiting old friends to traveling to taking a new class.
3. Establish a sense of independence: It's likely that we were completely independent and fairly free of any schedules other than bus schedules while we were overseas. Moving back to home towns with few opportunities or being overly dependent will turn the trip back home into a real regression. Taking a job too quickly can also destroy our independence because there is only so much readjustment that we can do while working regular hours. Being beholden to no one is a powerful experience and we can't give it away if we want a successful re-entry.

When I returned from the Peace Corps, here's what I did well with my adjustment. On the job front, I waited a few weeks. Then, I went back to my old job as a resource social work at psychiatric facilities because it gave me a completely flexible schedule that I could control. Since that's not the new experience that I was calling for, I combined that with part-time work at a camping goods store as my slacker fantasy job. That was new.

As far as relearning about the United States, I did that very well. My jobs allowed me to take time off and visit friends within a day or two drive, visit graduate programs (where I had friends) to learn about opportunities in this country. I did more backpacking and camping.

What I did not do well as well was move out of my parent's house in the Chicago suburbs. No rent gave me the flexibility to work as needed and relearn the United States. However, it caused me to hate Chicago because I had to experience it as a suburban commuter.

I also learned what new customs to leave behind. Yerba mate is a very bitter South American green tea that is repeatedly sipped through a metal straw in a cup. To the average US citizen, it looks like you're taking bong hits. It caused my slacker fantasy job to end prematurely so I was glad I had that experience with a minimum wage retail job as opposed to something that followed my career path. Track your progress with your reverse cross cultural readjustment so you know when you're make a cultural faux pas or basically saying penis again.

Let S/he Who Has Not Sinned Decide who are the Deserving Poor

I recently read a blog post from one of the few libertarian bloggers, Milena, that doesn't cause me to sputter like Daffy Duck at my computer screen. It was about one of this country's favorite topics which is, who are the deserving poor and who are the undeserving poor? Whenever there is talk of expanding a safety net benefit like unemployment insurance, food stamps, or something really crazy like health insurance expansion, the following proclamations are issued:

• These people live a lifestyle of luxury on $400/month! When you give people just enough money to not starve or be homeless, they have no incentive to ever get a job!
  
• I know an obese person on food stamps who eats junk food all day! They should only let people on food stamps eat vegetables and drink skim milk!
• I have a job with health insurance! Why should people without jobs have health insurance! They clearly must f#cked something up if they don't have a job with health insurance!

Milena's blog post connects the food stamp program with artists and uses that angle to examine the government support/subsidization of art. The idea of using safety net programs for a specific field is an interesting concept. However, the idea of asking who deserves access to these programs is not as interesting.

One of the few things that I learned in social work school is that the country's safety net programs were set up very differently if the recipients were thought to be deserving poor compared to undeserving poor. Medicare and Social Security were for the deserving poor, or elderly who had spent their lives contributing to society and needed a retirement program that didn't involve being broke and slowly dying in a hospital. The enrollment process is very easy. Turn 65 or 62 and the government signs you up automatically.

Thanks to the National Kidney Lobby, if you have End Stage Renal Disease, you are also deserving poor. You automatically get signed up for Medicare health insurance if are diagnosed with the disease no matter how old you are. However, if you have tuberculosis and can't work, it's too bad so sad.

If you need cash assistance from the state or want to qualify for Medicaid health insurance, the enrollment process alone makes it very clear that these are for the undeserving poor. It requires extensive documentation to overcome the assumption that you are not spending extensive amounts of time and effort to cheat the government out of approximately $400-$600/month. If someone was skillful enough to defraud a government assistance program, they would use those talents on a much higher scale and defraud the private sector of millions.

What about Ronald Regan's welfare queen who had "eighty names and 12 social security cards" to defraud safety net and government assistance programs of $150,000/year? She was never proven to exist. There was a story about a woman who managed to defraud welfare programs for $8,000 with 4 aliases before being arrested. As I had said before, it's really hard to defraud government assistance programs for a large amount of money without getting caught. If Regan's welfare queen was as good as he claimed, she would find more lucrative opportunities.

As a result of dividing the poor into deserving or undeserving, we create extremely inefficient safety net programs. Programs spend money on more administrative aspects, create additional bureaucracy, probably deny assistance to beneficiaries who should receive it, and operate a program based on the exception rather than the norm.

If I were president and could force Congress- no, that's not realistic. The president can't even force Congress to be polite during his speeches. If I had enough weapons and bombs and barricaded Congress in a building, here are the 2 choices that I would give them to reform our safety net and assistance programs:

1. Create a program that follows 90% of behavior and assume that all poor are deserving: If someone's income or disease state prevents them from supporting themselves, simply allow access to entitlement programs. Being on these programs is not a life of luxury so 90% of all applicants are not trying to defraud the system but simply need help. There will probably be enough savings from removing the extensive application and review process to expand programs somewhat.

2. Assume all poor are not deserving and end the programs: Let the exceptions rule and just end assistance programs that are a charade or promise of assistance. For those who don't want to subsidize health insurance, then let's end the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), also known as not letting hospital emergency rooms deny treatment based on ability to pay. Why start paying for services when someone collapses on an emergency room floor from a very treatable chronic disease but refuse to pay for the doctor office visit to prevent it? That is completely economically inefficient and still fairly heartless. For the libertarians, let's just be heartless but at least be fiscally consistent.

Why it Looks like Generation Y has not started a Revolution

One of the unanswered questions for most Boomers is not why their kids don't want to be Facebook friends with them. It's more why their kid's generation or Generation Y has not started a revolution. I mean a full revolution with marches, roses stuck in rifles, blown up buildings, protest songs, and a real Iran-style Green revolution. Not just turning their Twitter profile green in support of Iran but physically creating mayhem on the streets.

A former ultimate frisbee teammate was an intern for the weekly respectable alternative paper. She told me that the Boomer publisher would continually ask the young interns why they haven't full-fledged revolted over the fact that the government has raised their university tuition, sent them to war, put the price tag for the current generation's social safety net on their tab, and shown no indication that the safety net will be around in 30 years. Today's corporations and businesses have blown off this generation with unpaid internships instead of real job offers. At least Generation X had the dot.com era to make some money and get some jobs but the best Generation Y got was the real estate bubble. The publisher was seriously befuddled. Boomer musicians were also befuddled as Neil Young was the first one to produce a major war protest album. When a 62 year old Canadian gets visibly pissed off before 20-something Americans over a quagmire, clusterf#ck of a war, we have entered an alternative universe.

As I write this, I realize that there has been major protests on college campuses this week due to tuition hikes. However, there was no lasting collateral damage like the Boomer protests in the 60's. On the other hand, I have realized that Generation Y is not going gently into that good night. They are raging in a much more subtle and clever way. The Generation Y revolution is alive and well and you do not need to stop bathing or shaving to join it. What's made it so potentially powerful is the Generation Y revolution is more like the fox that has you halfway digested before you even realize it.

As I write my Generation Y thesis, I also realize that not all Generation Y is the hyperconnected, digitally bar scanned generation that I depict. The Economist wrote an excellent article showing that a good portion of Generation Y is just as digitally frustrated as any other generation. However, there were also a good portion of the Boomers who cursed out building destruction and national guard provoking protests because they prevented them from getting an afternoon snack at the student union. This part of the bell curve is not blogged about and I will not break that tradition.

Generation Y's protest is so clever because they are building a parallel corporate structure that may get powerful enough to defeat today's entrenched corporate interests. They are tuning out and dropping out of today's corporate America and trying to build the future corporations with their entrepreneurial ventures. Rather than learn folk songs and retreat to communes, they are building new web-based communication tools, web-based businesses, and the corresponding work cultures. While they are revolting, they are creating skills that will also make them valuable to today's corporations if they choose. Generation Y had to develop a resume and learn skills earlier than any previous generation. Their revolutionary activities are resume building and their wardrobe is still business rather than psychedelic casual.

I came to this conclusion after throwing my last fit at a Generation Y business idea that caused me to sputter like Daffy Duck at my computer. Over the last few months, I've read much fewer Generation Y blogs because the lack of nutritional content in their posts made my stomach hurt. I lost interest in more tools to organize and throw up more user generated content that served as rationalizations for choices or decisions, comment bait with unformed ideas that begged for others opinions, another analogy that compared some daily job function to sex or cartoons, and recycled how to lists. All the video blogging struck me as being an excuse for being too lazy to write something. Is all this material creating a hockey stick graph of worthless crap on the internet?

However, the producers of this crap seem to have some talent. Others seemed to be really excited about it. Venture capitalists even funded some of it. The Economist article that I linked above explained how Generation Y uses a you tube video that way that I write an essay. It's the same effort to create the content but different medium.

Therefore, I pictured a world where these Generation Y blog businesses and marketing start-ups became revenue-producing businesses. If that happened, I pictured a world where I would produce videos instead of power point presentations or where I had to learn to compress my business communications into 140 character tweets. On the other hand, these Generation Y businesses could fail, video blogging could revert back to only being the primary marketing tool for the sex worker industry, and the world could decide to lose the attention deficit disorder and learn to read more than 140 characters. If that happens, Generation Y dusts themselves off, updates their resume, and more easily gets hired into the current corporate structure.

A revolution that no one knows about after it already declared war is a very clever and potentially powerful revolution. I may have to decide whose side I'm on.

[Guest Post on Untemplater]: Finding Community Intentionally

I am pleased to share with everyone that my first post was published in the Untemplater website today. Untemplater is a work/life style site that shares stories of those who are pursuing unconventional ventures or trying to live a life less ordinary. Personally, I think that can be accomplished by cross dressing at least once per week but the folks at Untemplater have some other ideas, too.

My post is about the juxtaposition between traditional and digital community development and the professional and social paradigms that exist between the two. Or in other words, it's about how I spent 6 months working in a commune and might have never left if I hadn't applied to graduate school beforehand.

If you are interested in reading more, check out my post entitled "Finding Community Intentionally."

Or if you just want to read it below, here is the post:

There are many studies about the importance of a belonging to a community for our general well-being. The value of it hasn't changed but the definition of community is evolving from neighborhoods that hold block parties and church groups to on-line communities that bond around common interests, activities, or fetishes. I found my on-line community at the Business Week Message Boards from 2003-2005 where I made on-line friends, on-line friends that I met in the real world, even found part-time work, and made lots of jokes about how I work with nuns.

As the notion of on-line community has grown, the Community Manager has appeared as a new profession in the field of social media. Decades ago, these folks' best alternative would probably have been cruise ship social directors but now they have a digital calling. While this new notion of community is growing, the old notion of community is still going strong with a little rebranding. This old notion that I am referring to is the commune movement which is still strong and has diversified. Now marketed as intentional communities, it is described on their web directory as:

Intentional community is an inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing communities, residential land trusts, student co-ops, urban housing, intentional living, alternative communities, cooperative living, and other projects where people strive together with a common vision.

One does not have to leave mainstream society or even move to find an intentional community. While most on-line community managers have only a few years of experience with digital community-building, there is decades of experience, experimentation (lots of experimentation), and culture within the intentional community world. Intentional communities have adopted the digital tools as their directory is on-line and group message boards allow community alumni members to keep in touch. In other words, there are all the tools of the on-line communities in addition to connections based on sharing housing, food, a way of life, or an idea.

One of the classic intentional communities that I've visited is called Twin Oaks, located in rural Virginia. The community supports itself by selling vegetables, tofu, and making really high quality hammocks. I almost abandoned my grad school plans after visiting due a sense of fulfillment that I felt from its members. The community meets Maslow's needs from housing and income to friends and conversation to time and resources to pursue hobbies with moments of self-actualization (like I said, lots of experimentation). The communal lifestyle is not for everyone as members told me stories about how the decision to purchase coffee turned into the most divisive issue since this August's Health Care ReformTown Halls. Half the community thought coffee is an addictive drug and didn't want funds to support the industry while the other half of the community really, really wanted and needed that addictive drug.

Twin Oaks represents the more traditional concept of intentional community. However, for those who resonate with the communal concept but not necessarily the intense debates about their choice of beverage, there are other options in the Intentional Community directory. Communities are forming around the desire for green housing and living as sustainably as possible. There are communities for those who want to dedicate free time to promoting multiculturalism. There are also always communities built around shared meals and shared bulk food purchasing. Food is actually the original community organizer even predating Barak Obama.

My personal story with intentional communities involved 6 months working and living at Innisfree Village outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. I had completed my grad school applications, had 6 months before I started school, no lease, no debts, and no dependents. In other words, it was the perfect opportunity to do something that I would never have the chance to do again. Prior to working on grad school application, I spent 2 nomadic years in South America as a Peace Corps Volunteer so I was looking for something where I could consistently sleep in the same bed.

Located near the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, Innisfree (named after the Yeats poem), was created by parents of children with developmental disabilities who were not happy with the existing residential options. Taking advantage of the community movement of the 70's, they created Innisfree where community members would take care of their children and run the community in exchange for a small stipend and option to follow the lifestyle that they wanted to. All members work in the weaving shop, garden, kitchen, wood shop, or do farm work.

My sense of fulfillment came from an international community membership where I heard great Irish accents and lots of German. I worked with the community director to write a successful Americorp grant and learned how to use a pottery wheel and kiln. My typical day was spent gardening, cooking, or using power tools in the wood shop. I met a girl. If I hadn't filled out those grad school applications before coming to Innisfree, I might still be there.

Next time you think about leaving the commute, your job where you create spreadsheets and power point instead of bread and roses, and entertainment options that always seem to involve a screen or monitor, remember that you are not alone. There's probably an intentional community nearby.

The Business Week Forum: A Community Remembered

I received some good news from my business school clients recently. I worked with 4 clients this year on their essays and this is the 2nd one to be accepted by one of their top choice in this difficult year. A 3rd client got an interview at his top school but I haven't heard the results and the 4th is still waiting for news.

This MBA news got me thinking about my early days as a new MBA. Shortly after graduation, I got involved my the first on-line community and you know how they say that you never forget your first. This on-line community was the rough and tumble world of the Business Week Forum (BWF) that funneled Type A personalities, the unbearable anxiety of the application process due to a lack of direct control, some very smart people, and some very twisted and strong personalities all of whom were in front of computers most of the day and either spilled their worlds into BWF or used BWF to build their own alternative worlds.

BWF was sponsored by BusinessWeek magazine and became the main message boards for MBA applicants, current students, admission consultants, groupies, and alumni. It's peak was probably around 1999-2001 when the Princeton Review's message board was undone by it's donkey powered technology platform. I joined the fun in 2003-2005 as a truth speaking quirky alumni that preached balance, humility, lots of animal husbandry jokes, and a more holistic approach to selecting schools or careers. As someone who had already graduated from a fancy MBA school, I got to be the nicer guy in the fraternity who made it through hazing unscathed enough to try to help the pledges rather than crushing their spirits.

Through about 2005, Business Week Forum had a strong sense of community. Enough of us realized that behind user names like Lawstudly, Maleinrebate, and Classynfun were real people that we would likely meet at school or out in the business world in our overcharged networking enthusiasm. Community norms and rules were set like not to ask people their GMAT scores as though that was the key data point to unlock mysteries of the admission process. New admissions consultants with yahoo or hot email addresses and questionable credentials were virtually poked and prodded (and I'm not talking about a Facebook poke). We also thought that we were really funny and clever. I mean really clever. We'd argue politics, whether Air America radio would survive, or whether Transformers would beat Gobots in a fight or post images of a wholesome 50's style mother preparing fresh vegetables for dinner under the post title "Tossing Salad". We also felt smarter as we learned from other posters what the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) schools were and we even had a feel of which were the best IIT's or a graduate of those school was an IITian. Would also feel altruistic as occasionally, we would try to help someone weigh the pros and cons of their school choice, whether to take a job in a new field, or if their coworker was really attracted to them or not.

The only draw back of this community is others thought we like Dungeons and Dragon's geeks (of which I played until junior high) when we talked abour on-line friends or bragged about how clever we with our on-line posts. However, on BWF, we also questioned whether we were really a community or just all avoiding reality together.

I did meet quite a few of few of the BWF posters in real life and found that people pretty much are who they say they are on-line. Their on-line personalities might different. For example, Classyfun, who said she modeled, really looked like a model but Lawstudly, who had such an insanely different view of the world that some thought he was a hyperactive 16 year old who drank a gallon of Mountain Dew Code Red before posting, was really a very calm, unassuming guy.

Around 2006, the community notion started to disappear. BWF became more transactional with more posts about tell me what you know and don't waste time speculating where was the best school for late 20's MBA's to hook up with undergrads. Applicants started to spend more time on the school's message boards where they could get more factual information and audition for the admissions committee and school's students. The posters seemed to forget that the other posters were potential classmates or coworkers. There was less interest in anyone's personal life and harsher posts. There was still some banter but it was more about getting through the application process together and less about exploring interests, politics, or favorite childhood toys. The current BWF moderator tries to recreate the community by posting questions and creating discussion but response is very half-hearted.

Around this same time that the sense of community disipated, BWF did an overhaul of the message board's platform. The new version was slower, had no new functionality, and had more space for ads. Reception was comparable to the the New Coke rollout and the moderator tried to serve as a liason for posters between unininterested developers who did their best to avoid answering questions by answering every single request with a "What browser version are you using?" Corrections were slow, feedback was given the corporate equivalent of "Let's put that in the Parking Lot for later", and posting activity dropped. Attitudes were changing already but the technology switched accelerated the process.

BWF was very good to me as I made some real friends and got involved in the admission consultant business. As we search for communities, both physical and on-line, I did miss it and wondered why it declined when technology use was growing as well as interest in MBA programs. I think that the growth of other school message boards gave the outlet for advice on the business school application process and social networking sites gave an outlet for finding friends. A site that somewhat combined both got squeezed out.

I think that I also miss it because I was really really funny and clever on that site. Honest, I really was much funnier there than I am on this blog. I mean- like-people-sprayed-their-sodas-on-their-key-boards-out-of-their-nose funny. Realy, I mean it. Okay no one else who wasn't on the BWF believed me either.