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communicate with severed heads after a guillotining
Wednesday, June 28 2017
Dina and family left this morning, well before I'd gotten up and departed the greenhouse (where Gretchen and I had again spent the night). Today Dina and family would be dropping their now ten-year-old daughter off at a summer camp (M's first summer camp experience) not far to the east near the Connecticut border, less than an hour away. Indeed, it would be so close that we would be one of M's emergency contacts.
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This evening as work wound down, we in IT convened a videoconference on how to proceed in the absence of any strong centralized in-department leadership. I'm not a dogmatic idealist, but I tend to have sympathy for egalitarian power structures (call it either "anarchy" or perhaps something with less baggage), and my hope was to steer the leaderless department in the direction of power sharing, consensus, collaboration, and other hippie ideals that were impossible under the old regime. I was drawing partly on ideas from academia that Allison had mentioned but also on more open-source-influenced ideas from Dan. We rapidly came to a consensus that we could function effectively without a single leader, particularly if we liberalized the web-based task management system to allow all of us to act as administrators. With a little trust and transparency, the department might be able to run itself. The day had been a stressful one, and I found myself sipping my cheap single malt scotch early in our chat. Later the dialog would continue on Slack and other forums.
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