I am often reminded of this saying. And it certainly does apply to me. Perhaps not in everything that I do. I can be quite action oriented. I can be opportunistic in the positive sense of the word. But not in all things. The one area I have been very very reluctant to do things and to finish them of is in public writing. I have hardly published anything, and it is not for lack of ideas or materials. I have just been to darn fussy. If I was to publish anything of a scientific nature, it had to pretty new or fundamental, and yes, pretty perfect. The same goes for articles of a more opionating, political nature.
Next to wanting to have things just right, I think I have also worried about intellectual property. During the years that I had a small software engineering company, I was very strict about maintaing the IPR on the basic framework I was developing and reusing from project to project. That wasn't unreasonable, given the vast amounts of project-non-specific investment the framework required. But you wonder if any intellectual framework I might now have in mind is worth protecting at all. It's not the same game.
Clearly the disadvantage of protecting a (basic) idea, is that few people will read it. That means that few people can use or steal it. But it also means that few can comment on it, and that few can give you credit for it.
So what is it I want? Do I at all care if people would use ideas, without giving me any credit for them? Do I at all think, that I will produce anything important enough worth stealing? Well - yes and no. The 'no' is that even my best ideas are developed in response to, or in interaction with other people. I am never starting from scratch. And most ideas are never completely new. Someone somewhere will have had comparable thoughts, perhaps in another language or with the use of other terms. So I should not be so bold as to think that I will ever come up with anything so brilliant, that no one has ever thought of it. But there is a "yes" too. Use of good ideas, without reference and credit - perhaps unitentionally - does take place.
So what to do? It doesn't seem wise to just sit on ideas, and in practice it is difficult to do so if you want to function well within a social context. But what I could and should do, is write up the ideas I have, actively share them. If in doing so I produce anything at all origianl - there will be evidence of that, and I suppose that in the end I will get some credit for that.
Ah, but then there is the aspect of how ideas are made public. Making an excellent powerpoint presentation is not quite the same as publishing in some scientifically recognized journal. And writing something up on a blog for that matter, does not have much scientific value either. Perhaps in content, but not in formal recognition. So wouldn't it be nasty, if one would put up really good ideas in a blog, and then see that those very ideas are put into a scientific journal publication - without reference. Yes that would be nasty. And - I don't know what the current morals are - must one reference blogs too? Should one? Or would that be beneath the standards of the established scientific community?
In any case I have (finally) decided not to worry about this AT ALL. In this blog I will write whatever I feel is worth sharing with others. Perhaps some things should later be integrated into more formal publications - an then I will try to do so. If by chance someone beats me to that - then it is just too bad.
The advantage of this medium, is that the time between having an idea and sharing it is minimal. That also makes it possible to use blog posts in the conversations that are taking place now. Formal publications, I expect, will quickly fall out of context. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing - but on the other hand I do feel that there is great value in context-specific conversation and knowledge. But that is a topic for later on.
I suppose this little brainstrom, that I have now shared publically, is meant to push myself accross a threshold; for better or for worse.
Well then: by pushing "publish post" it will have been done.
Here goes.
