Author: Matthew Baya

Time Banking epiphany of the day

Before I get to the heart of this letter let me make a few definitions and updates so people have some idea of what I’m writing about here.

Time Banking – A Time Bank is a alternative to cash, where 1 hour of my time is worth 1 hour of someone elses time. For example I can spent 5 hours making a website for someone and then spend those hours getting someone to do some carpentry in our house or housesitting/dogsitting for us when we’re travelling. You can read more about this at http://www.timebanks.org/

I’ve been a member and a ‘kitchen cabinet’ member (which means I’m one of the advisory board) of my local Time Bank, the Downeast Time Bank (http://www.downeasttimebank.org/). We’ve been trying to figure out why we haven’t gotten more members and why things seem to be rather stagnant. I know personally that I’m not comfortable asking someone I don’t know to do something so thus I really only use the Time Bank with friends that I would have probably asked favors of anyways. So what does it take to get people to use this model? It’s a neat idea but it’s not catching on.

So this morning, while driving into work this morning my geeky mind started merging my current day internet/web social networking experience with the Time Bank model and I came up with this epiphany. Time Banking needs a ‘social’ networking model implementing ‘degrees of trust’ along the lines of what is used on LinkedIn (my LinkedIn profile is at http://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbaya). For example, I want to be able to mark the people I trust/know in the Time Bank as my 1st degree contacts, and their direct contacts would be my 2nd degree. I could mark my requests or offers to only be offered to those I know/trust personally (1st Degree), or to folks they know/trust (2nd degree). I think any further degrees out than that is a bit silly, the next level out would be ‘everyone’.

Along these lines I’ve also been pushing for our Time Bank to implement some ‘neighborhoods’ where you could basically trust a group for your offers/requests, for example I could mark my offer/request so it’s only visible to anyone who is part of my church or other non-profit organization. The same 1st Degree / 2nd Degree trust could be extended there, in that I trust any organization that members of the local Unitarian Church trust etc.

The argument against this idea is it ‘fractures’ the time bank, but if people aren’t using it as is, and they would in the fractured model, then hey.. they are using it, this is a good thing imho. You either swim & grow or you stagnate. Things seem to be stagnant right now, something needs to change.

The question is, will the folks writing the timebank organization software, Community Weaver (http://community.timebanks.org), ‘get this’ idea and actually implement it? All I can do is write this and send it around, the idea will either sink or swim. Here’s hoping this idea is a swimmer, I think this is what needs to happen to get this to catch on more.

-Matt

Year end thoughts

So I’m here at home doing absolutely nothing interesting in acknowledgement of it being new years eve. In fact I’m even going to go to work tomorrow so I can bank a vacation day for later. Yes, I’m that boring.. shh.. don’t tell anyone. I figured I’d make a blog entry since online friends like Hope bug me about not blogging more, I figured I’d make a quick entry in my blog before the year was up summarizing my life as of 12/31/06. This isn’t in order, likely leaves out some important things of note and no doubt drifts off in some tangents, but hey, it’s the thought that counts right? I’m giving myself about 45 minutes to write this so it’s really gonna be a stream of consciousness dump more than anything else. Ready? Here goes: [pressing play]

Life Summary – Emily and I met 16 years ago, have been living together for 14 years, married for 11 years, been in Maine for 9 years, been home owners for 6 years, and parent’s for 3.5 years. While life with a 3.5 year old is taxing, not to mention expecting another baby next month adds more stress, life is good. I love Emily lots, we’re good friends and make each other laugh and so far Owen seems like a creative and interesting individual, so hey, it could be worse 🙂

Owen – Most of my time outside work consists of playing with our 3.5 year old Owen. I’ve been totally remiss on updating his website since last May though some of that has to do with not having an easy way to upload the photos anymore now that I updated his photo gallery to Gallery2. There’s a lot to update on there too, he’s growing and changing so much it’s too bad I dropped the ball at this time in his life. My plan is to try to write some stuff ASAP before the past 6 months get washed away with all the new stuff that’s about to happen here in the next few weeks. These days he’s REALLY into being a super hero, not sure how this all started exactly, he just started talking about superheroes one day, specifically spiderman. We’ve since used the wonders of bittorrent to acquire tons of old Spiderman, SuperFriends, original Batman TV series etc. For christmas we got him (among way too many other things) the Superhero Starter Kit which is basically a red cape in fancy packaging but it’s been a real hit. More on this in his blog some time soon but our favorite quote as of late is him looking at photos Emily is scrapbooking from when he was 3 years old and him saying ‘Was that before you knew I was a superhero?’ 🙂

Work – Still working at The Jackson Laboratory and pretty happy with my job. I basically manage the webservers & backups for Unix & PC servers/desktops as well as the NetApp and Equallogic SAN storage. This has been a mess this past year thanks to exponentially poor support from Qualstar & Veritas (now Symantec). Finally seem to be getting a handle on that but really, it amazes me how much we pay for support for this stuff and how bad that support really is. I keep thinking as I deal with tech support folks & sales people about how they function in real life.. do these people even know how to listen & think? Does attention to detail count for anything anymore? “No… no.. that’s not what I said.. stop reading your tech support script and listen to me.. no.. I won’t do this pointless test just because that’s the next step on your list, that’s not the problem.. Look, I’m not an idiot, I wouldn’t be calling for support if it was obvious… AIGH!’ Anyways, work itself is good, there are 4 of is in the SysAd office for our department and we all get along well. It’s all very casual & friendly. While I’m sure I could be making twice as much at a for profit business in Boston, for up here I really couldn’t ask for more. No plans on changing jobs anytime in the future which means I’ll have been at the lab for ten years as of next October (which means another week of vacation then, w00t!)

I do wonder occasionally if I should be trying to get a masters degree on the side somewhere online but since my Comp Sci studies are now 14 years out of date I’m a bit worried about that. Then again, I’ve met enough folks with advanced degrees that have amazingly poor attention to detail and learning skills, so I suspect I’d adapt and figure things out if I pushed myself. The other question is would I want a Comp Sci masters or should I go for something else? I do have this fondness for non-profits so perhaps an MBA or something else might be useful. Ah well, this isn’t likely to happen in the next year, it’s more just something on the backburner.

Podcasts-In the past year or so I’ve helped the community radio station I volunteer at, WERU 89.9 Blue Hill, ME, to start ‘podcasting’ all their spoken word programming. I’ve also started listening to podcasts of all sorts driving back and forth from work.

Blogs – I was getting really into reading all sorts of friends blogs up until around May when I think I just blew a fuse and had to stop. This has pissed off a few friends who assumed I was still religously reading, but they got over it. Everytime I stop by Livejournal or open my RSS reader I get sucked in for a while ‘Oh right.. she had her baby’… ‘oh that’s right, they moved’.. etc. but then get overwhelmed again and have to quit out. Nothing personal folks, I do care about y’all. I need an aggregator that can do weekly summaries in short sentances 🙂

Times up, that’s all for this entry. More some other time.