Cognitive Metaphors: Communities By Definition. Know How It Works.
Introduction
Independent Consulting - Phase II
We start our story in the summer of 2006. I had just left my job a local E-Commerce company having walked away from what later would be worth up to $50,000 in remaining options. For most middle class Americans like me, thats a lot of money! If invested properly, it could turn into a lot of things including a college education for my three young daughters. There comes a time in every relationship with your employer where you just can't learn anything more from them and they just won't hear what you have to say anymore. For me, this was one of those times. I took the money I had cashed in on from stock-options, I signed up for 18 months of COBRA health care coverage (COBRA gives you health care at your previous employers rate which is significantly lower than the market price for insurance), and I decided that I would try to make it as an independent consultant at least for the 18 months that I had COBRA working for me.
I set out to fend for myself armed with a small amount of buffer capital, my
education, experience, contacts, and wits. I must mention that in 2006, I had two good friends come to my rescue with paying gigs - Matt Comstock and Bill Dagan. With their help, I was able to stay busy in E-Commerce and Energy Market subject domain contracts in both 2006 and 2007.
As an independent consultant, you get some downtime in between gigs. I used this time to dream. I looked back on my career and how I had grown strong and confident in my software craft, specializing in business intelligence. I wanted to give back to my craft with practical examples of how to improve business intelligence/decision support systems development. I was frustrated with the way things worked and wanted to strategize on how to make things work better. I was reminded of what Bruce Lee did to fashion a style of martial arts that addressed his frustrations with traditional martial arts. I wanted to do the same for my area of expertise.
As a Filipino-American, I also realized that my own personal successes had not translated into help for my family living in America or even more so for my Uncles/Aunts/Cousins living back in the Philippines. I took the downtime in between consulting gigs to focus on giving back to the things that really are a big part of my identity.
Communities
Beginning in 2006, I also started getting more involved with my community in activities. I coaching bowling for Montgomery County Special Olympics. I spent time assistant coaching my eldest daughter's little league softball team. I got involved in the Knights of Columbus. My wife and I also helped out at my daughters' Catholic school. My mom around this time was also starting a foundation and building a 1 room pre-school in the Philippines on land she and her sisters inherited from my grandfather's family. I put together a website for her to help as a marketing tool.
In all these activities, one might think that it takes a lot of time and energy and must drain a person like me who already has three kids to worry about. In fact, I've found that for all it takes away, it gives right back. It gives back in your level of hope and inspiration to see how many movements work without a lot of money. They work well because their stakeholders are united and passionate about the cause and the efficient use of meager resources.
I began to think about how this element was lacking in so many commercial organizations that I had been a part of. Our own commercial organizations had been going through somewhat of a transformation. We had a rough start trying to use resources from India. We had partners who wanted to leave you with the responsibilities of running their business but wanted to pay you inadequate sums of money to do it. Systems grew up in a chaotic brew of reactionary, problem ridden, fear driven, lots of money on the line threatening environment.
Outsourcing, In Sourcing, and Open Sourcing
Open Sourcing
What a difference between the two worlds I was living in - Commercial and Volunteer. I also had been admiring another volunteer movement called open source software. I was involved with a few communities for Java, Ruby on Rails, Google Analytics, Drupal - Content Management, and Pentaho - Business Intelligence. With the help of all the open source and Google crowd, I as a developer could do a lot of things that I previously could only do working with expensive software. I wanted to take advantage of everything the volunteer world had to offer. I wanted to rebuild my ideas for a commercial world into a "learn by example" model. I decided to take my consulting sole proprietorship, Cognitive Metaphors, and make it just that.
Where would I start? Well, first I still need to feed my family so I continued to turn to the commercial world for independent contracts and later took on a full-time employment position. I had a few pieces to the puzzle in my wife and my nephew (her sisters kid).
In Sourcing
My wife , by training is a dentist , but because of regulatory non-sense she has no path in the state of Pennsylvania to practice her craft without redoing her whole dental education. We decided a while back that this was not an option for us. For now we'd focus on raising our 3 girls. However, Melissa started really getting into computers doing elaborate DVD compilations of the kids and the school with Apple ILife. She's since embraced Drupal. I saw her as a perfect in-source resource. She was valedictorian of her high school class so I'm glad to have that kind of brain power as part of a small team.
Outsourcing
My nephew Marc in 2006 started college at 16. They start early back in the Philippines. He happened to also graduate as valedictorian of his high school class. In 2006, I had been married to his aunt for 8 years and he had known that I was a Computer Science graduate. He told me when he started that he wanted to study computer science also - Instant Protege. As his Uncle and also his Godfather (inherited by marrying his aunt), I decided that I would mentor him and he would be the first piece to my study into how outsourcing should work.
What follows in this living document are the events that unfolded up after that. If you want to read ahead - you can get the raw content in the form of my blog(s). This Drupal book is meant to be a pristene, edited and planned version for entertainment and marketing purposes.
