Plastics

OK--let's have a show of hands here. How many of you red the title of this and immediately thought of either Dustin Hofman or The Graduate?

Congratulations. You are officially a "Boomer."

I had a meeting on Sunday with a woman I've met with before, about a year ago. We've kind of known each other peripherally for many, many years, back to when she was working in the early days of Davis Cable TV and Ned and his friend Greg made the first made-for-Davis-TV video, Ned & Greg Investigators.

Our paths crossed again when I attended Vloggercon in San Francisco in June of 2006. Shortly after, she contacted me about joining together to work on a project with the Davis Community Network. At the time she was thinking about a way to encourage people to contribute to a site that would kind of unite the town electronically.

She was going out of town and said she would contact me when she came back. She contacted me a year and a half later. Even then, our meeting was delayed because she forgot the original date. But it was worth it.

The objective has changed in the interim, but the possibilities are much more solid. She was asking me to join the Board of Directors for the Davis Community Network. They are working on a project I'm not totally clear on, but it will offer nonprofit organizations a way to use the facilities and expertise of people at DCN to publicize their organizations.

Or something like that. I know it's more complicated than that.

During our hour at good ol' Mishka's coffee (where I plugged in and logged on using their wi fi during the blackout), I learned a lot of the lingo of the networking biz.

We talked, for one thing, about the difference between the way the Boomer generation gets its entertainment and the way entertainment comes to kids of today--called "millenials," a term I had not heard before. Apparently "Millenials" are the next group up from "Gen-Xers." It's even more of an "instant gratification" generation, who can't be patient to sit through a whole television program, when they can get 5 minute YouTube videos on their iPhones while they're in the middle of doing three other things.

(It was also depressing to discover that I don't seem to have a "generation." Apparently the "Greatest Generation" ends in 1942 and Boomers start in 1947, which leaves us poor 1943-6 people as the "between the cracks generation.")

The upshot was that I agreed to come to a Board meeting the following Tuesday, last night.

What were these butterflies in my stomach as I drove to the meeting? I always get so tense when I go cold into situations with people I've never met before and worry that I won't live up to anybody's expectations, but my fears were laid to rest as soon as I walked in the door.

The meeting was held in the old room where, back in the early 1990s, I first learned how to get onto the Internet, in the days when it was all done in code.

There were about 12-15 people in attendance and some were people I hadn't seen in about 10-15 years, even though we live in the same town.

I will admit that my head was spinning by the end of the meeting. This seemed to be kind of a follow-up meeting reporting on things that had been discussed last month, so there were "codes" to learn (what's an "MOU" or an "OPC"?)

But when they started talking about the project we had discussed over coffee, building new web content in Internet 2 protocol (which I'd never heard of before Saturday, but which I kind of vaguely understand, having been using it for a long while and not aware of it), it all began to be a bit less dry and a lot more exciting.

So... Everybody seems to want me to join. It sounds like it's going to be interesting. They vote the two of us newcomers in at the next meeting, and then I'm committed for a new year term.

A new chapter begins!