The “One week until Clore starts” brain-dump

The Fellowship starts with a two week residential ‘course’ which consists of a very exciting programme of high profile speakers, training, and personal development thinking. I’ve been told that the content is non-blog-safe for the most part but I’ll be posting some personal reactions and thoughts I expect.

However that’s not what’s worrying me. Even with trying to cut down on commitments I’m still incredibily busy and I’m not sure how I’m going to manage to take two weeks out with little or no internet/phone access.

So my approach these last few months is just to get used to not having those things around and not relying on them. It’s quite difficult, but it’s certainly made me put failsafes in place for anything serious that might need attention. And I’m feeling quite confident that it might just be possible for me to not be around for that time and for nobody to actually notice.

However - the thing I am busy on is my new web startup. The work on Odadeo is absolutely on a roll at the moment. I suddenly realised this week that we were ‘polishing’ rather than doing solid development. Tasks have now come down to the ‘can be completed in under a day’ level, which is fantastic. In fact I’d probably be confident in opening the site up as a public beta today. But I’ve decided that that would be unwise without me being around, so it will have to wait a short while.

Meanwhile, Tom, our new community manager, who takes over from Jason now that he’s finished as Graduate Apprentice, will be taking care of the site. He’s been a member of the site since early on, and is the most active user on the site so far. He’s also something of an expert on fatherhood (if all dads aren’t of course) so it’s fantastic to have him to bounce ideas off. We had a great ‘mashup’ meeting this week where we pretty much thought about any API we knew of and whether we could apply it to dads. “Oh hang on. Is that featureland?” was our catchphrase for turning down non-immediate ideas.

So with suddenly being away for two weeks as of next week I’m making sure that anything that I am involved in is going to be handled. As always I have a backlog of correspondence to go through (nothing changes, even with Dubber ’s help), but in the main I’m confident that the sky won’t fall in on anything I’m responsible for.

Pete Ashton always says ‘a blog is not a diary’ but it seems to me that that’s what my blog is becoming, and is potentially going to become even more with starting Clore. I guess a blog needs to move and change over time, and now that I have Twitter my posting rate has reduced it’s nice for me to put together more prosaic ramblings once in a while. So continued apologies if you were expecting useful insights into Clore in this post.

In short - I’m worried about the time commitment, worried about how to support my family and lifestyle whilst taking a chunk of time out for personal development, I’m even worried about huge opportunities passing me by, but I’m also very excited about what Clore is going to be.

Tonight I met up with the West Midlands group of Clore alumni, and they set my mind at rest of a few issues, but also pointed out that Clore is going to be a total shock to the system. In one year 20 of 23 people taking part just quit their jobs to concentrate solely on Clore.

I’ve already decided to stretch my time on the programme over a slightly longer period. Maybe it needs to be longer…

Basically it all comes down to what happens in a week’s time. What will I learn? What will I decide? What will I decide I want to do? And with who? And for what?

Some big questions.

But my focus right now is on Odadeo and making it a success - growing the team to build on the beta we’ve been working so hard on, completing this phase of the project to timescale (we’re about a month ahead), and most importantly securing further investment to make the thing fly. I feel a pitch coming on…

Exciting times.