Old School, Part 1: Phone Between 9 and 5 To Confirm Your Listing In Our Directory

You heard that right. It's a directory you're not going to find me in even if I AM a flabbergasted member of the community. Or, if I'm still listed in that "printed book with CD" due to some quirky associations of my past life, my listing is going to be way-outdated.

As you can imagine, I didn't I order a copy either. I don't keep paper books anymore.

I get that we're all at different points on the communications spectrum.

This is especially true of groups with vast differences in age, education level, financial resources and geography, like extended families. Some people *only* can confirm their listing in a network directory by phone. (The East Coast office hours is a touch myopic, given that this particular network is global.)

However, in the age of the web, why should we all have to operate at the low end of the communication scale? Where's the integration of old and new that we ALL need to get and stay connected?

That same organization has been hobbled by a legacy online community system that was surpassed by Facebook (or even Ning) years ago. Instead of scrapping the broken solution -- or even better, suing for breach of contract since the provider failed to deliver a system that connected us -- and instituting something that actually worked (and heck, is free!) this global community has missed the rise of social networking on the web.

Bottom line:

Senseless loyalty to old-school practices and old-school vendors is a seriously bad leadership decision that cuts us off from our valued networks.

Your Tribe Is The New Segregation: Integration May Not Be An Improvement

All this talk about finding your tribe. It’s so rewarding to connect to people with similar world views. True peers. As we seek our global niche, we’re integrating across all sorts of out-moded boundaries. You could also say we’re segregating along the lines of our true selves.

Perusing a Berkeley Grade School Photos group at Facebook, I marvel at the sea of white faces in the hill school districts in the '40s to early '60s -- all those boys in their khaki Cub Scout regalia, an aggressive club requirement on picture day.  Although the town's schools were segregated simply by neighborhood, socioeconomic class lines also cut along race so Berkeley voluntarily desegregated itself, one of the first mid-sized American cities to do so. The integration program is reflected in a sudden appearance of multiracial group portraits.

Around the same time, the local government voted to rename its schools, exchanging African American civil rights leaders for the nation's founding fathers. In a major gilding of the lily, Lincoln became Malcolm X.

At 9, I was bussed to the flatlands to an institution still bearing the name of a gentle Yankee poet. Its yard littered in glass, a burned out car lodged in a stairwell on a Monday morning. A hardcore new learning environment, and new peers!

Perhaps my parents skewed the fuller lesson in ethnic and socioeconomic diversity by signing me up for the academically competitive Asian Cluster classes, which confined me to rooms where Japanese, Filipino and Chinese students gathered. Integration has its casualties too.

What casualties of integration -- or segregation -- litter the path to finding your tribe?