07/08/97 RMIUG Meeting Minutes - Freeing Speech Inside Corporations

Dan Murray began the meeting at 7:00 and thanked Email Publishing (http://www.emailpub.com) for sponsoring the meeting. Following the RMIUG tradition he queried the audience and found that 1/2 the audience work for companies that have intranets.

Dan opened the floor for announcements. Mike Rabb announced that the Colorado ISDN Interest Group meets the 2nd Wednesday of every month. For more information, see http://www.ciig.org. Oxford and Associates has several job openings, including an Internet Developer, Java Programmer, and Web Developer. Contact michael_simard@oxfordcorp.com or call (303) 584-9706 for more information.

Dan then introduced Christopher "RageBoy" Locke (clocke@panix.com), VP of Business Development at Displaytech. Chris went on to give an entertaining rambling that focused on Freeing Speech Inside Corporations.

Chris spoke about the following topics:

• Too Many small Internet companies are trying to push themselves as big and corporate, and not doing what they do best: Be hip and move as fast as hell.
• CIOs didn't make intranets, excited people did. Eventually the suits caught on, and now intranet development has been slowed terribly by politics.
• Corporations are keeping the people with the most knowledge from making the right decisions. We need to push the power down to where the knowledge really resides and not punish people for being creative and innovative. If the Fortune 500 doesn't put the "little people" in more control, their business will be taken away by the 1000's of small operations that can move lightning fast.

Chris was interviewed for the just released book called "Intranets: What's the Bottom Line". Some quotes from the Interview:

On the Organization...

I'm reminded of an excellent cover story on intranets that Business Week ran a while back -- this was just around the time the buzzwords were emerging into general parlance. Several CIOs were quoted as saying they had so many thousand web pages behind the firewalls. And they were kind of crowing about it. But my take was that this content didn't get created top-down by the IS organization. Instead, these pages sprang up overnight like a crop of magic mushrooms on a rich motherlode of corporate horseshit.

On Gonzo Business Management...

Randy: You've mentioned several cases where things are radically other than they appear, almost as if a new kind of logic is emerging, or needs to.

Chris: Yeah, I call it gonzo business management -- paradox become paradigm. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto, and we might as well get used to it. The opportunity here is to keep your day job but at the same time to indulge your human creativity and self expression. Companies that try to prevent this sort of thing within their firewalls -- as many do -- need to have their collective heads examined.

Relevant URLs:

http://www.displaytech.com
http://www.panix.com/~clocke/EGR
http://www.panix.com/~clocke/EGR/intranets.html

We'd like to thank Email Publishing Inc. for sponsoring this meeting. Email Publishing (http://www.emailpub.com), of Boulder, CO, provides email subscription management and email fulfillment services for businesses and publishers. The company also sells E-Broadcaster, a desktop list manager for Windows 95 and NT. Email Publishing Inc. was founded in 1996 by experienced Internet software entrepreneurs. For additional information, contact Email Publishing at web site www.emailpub.com or call (303) 440-7550.

RMIUG appreciates the ongoing support from XOR Network Engineering for administration of RMIUG's electronic discussion lists & WWW site and Think New Ideas (formerly Internet One) of Boulder for sponsoring refreshments.

The meeting concluded at 9:00 p.m.

Respectfully submitted by Bryan Buus.

Tentative schedule of upcoming RMIUG topics:

Sept: Local Web Content -- City-centered Web sites coming to a metropolitan area near you (ie, Denver)

Nov: Financing (VC, IPO, private funding, etc.) for Internet companies in Colorado

(To suggest a topic, send your idea to rmiug-comm@rmiug.org)