HubDirector :: growing centers of interest

Last weekend I read Rework, the new book by 37Signals and as I tweeted: “nice although nothing new if you’ve been following stuff like Agile, Getting Real, Guy Kawasaki, Lean Startup, etc”. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading even if you indeed have been following all those things and more for it’s a very enjoyable read, it’s easy to find yourself going back and re-reading bits and pieces but most importantly it helps you reflect and what you‘ve been doing lately.

There are many things that resonate with me and among those one in particular that nicely summarises what I’ve been doing for at least the last 4 months in Sourcesense UK: “Focus on what won’t change”

If you visit our old and a little stale website (currently working on a complete refresh) you are likely to end up with something along the lines of: “ok, these guys do Open Source stuff and Agile stuff across Europe, have a number of Open Source partners all over the place and employ as many OSS committers as possible” which is cool but doesn’t really tell you much about why you should engage with us rather than someone else that “does Open Source stuff and Agile stuff”, does it?

So we started an exercise of introspection plus some pie-in-the-sky thinking to answer questions like: what don’t we want to change? what do we want to build on top of? what are we really good at? what are the gaps from here to there? how can we fill those gaps? and so forth.

We came up with the following: … if you are reading this it means you are still following my old blog, please head over to the new one to read the entire post, thanks!

I know it’s a cliché but indeed I cannot believe 1 year has already gone by! My ‘A new challenge‘ post was published on Monday 16th March 2009, the day I left ThoughtWorks and joined Sourcesense as the new UK managing director.

If you are reading this it means you are still following my old blog, please head over to the new one to read the entire post, thanks!

What or who is a Hub Director?

It’s my personal definition of anyone organizing a group, community, conference, unconference, barcamp, open space, event, meeting, or gathering revolving around one or more topics of interest. In fact I chose Hub because my idea and actual experience of a conference fits nicely with its etymology:

perhaps from hubbe, originally ‘lump’, the source of hob of a fireplace and hobnail, as in boots. A wheelwright’s word, not generally known or used until c.1828; it reached wider currency in connection with bicycles. Meaning ‘center of interest or activity or importance’first recorded 1858 in writings of Oliver W. Holmes.

I was originally leaning towards something like Hub Facilitator because facilitation is, again, more in line with my idea of the role but I wasn’t completely satisfied with it, something was missing. And then I thought about an orchestra Director and that was it