Wow. I just saw that my last posting to this blog was September 3, 2006. And then silence.

Silence always means something. In my case, it’s meant that I have been reflecting, reenergizing, reconfiguring.

When I was at the East Africa Telecentre Leaders Forum in October, I had a bit of a identity crisis. I realized that our amazing partners at Ugabytes could run a kick ass telecentre networking event all on their own (and they did). On one level, this was amazing. This is what we want telecentre networks to do. On another, it left me wondering: what am I supposed to be doing if not running gigs like this (which is what I’ve been doing for the last 18 months)?

Of course, the answer is: tons. My job — and the job of my team — is the help folks like Ugabytes become engines of telecentre networking. And they have. Many of them. That’s success.

But this kind of success doesn’t mean it’s time to rest. Rather, it’s a message to move on to new kinds of conneciton making: working with newer telecentre networks; threading networks together; finding altogether new players to excite about the telecentre movement (hi, Intel!).

So, that’s what I have been doing in the silence for the past three months. Re-inventing my job a bit, focusing not just on nurturing networks but also on weaving the broader web (what Rich Fuchs calls ‘shoelacing). Of course, I’ve been doing this all along. But it now seems like my core purpose. It’s what I need to focus all my efforts on.

Next week’s Africa Telecentre Leaders will be a great opportunity to publicly try this full time shoelacer hat on for  size. As you might imagine, I’ll be blogging about it. So, stay tuned.