Free information, followup

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As for the previous post, my information sharing has in large part been facilitated by my place of work. I work for a publicly funded institution of higher learning. Because of this, I have two biiiig things working in my favor:
  1. Academic freedom. This has been a tradition for longer than 'information wants to be free' has been a catch-phrase. While I'm on the business side rather than the academic side, some of that liberalism splashes over. Which means I can talk about what I do every day.
  2. I work for the state. In theory everything I do in any given day can be published by way of a Freedom of Information Act request, or as they're called here in Washington State a Public Records Request. Which means that even if I wanted to hide what I was doing, any inquisitive citizen could find it out anyway. So why bother hiding things?
If I were working for a firm that has significant trade secrets I'm pretty sure I couldn't blog about a lot of the break/fix stuff I've blogged about. Opinion, yes. Examples from my work life? Not so much.

I passed my 6 year blogaversary earlier last month, and if it is one thing I've learned is that people appreciate examples. It's one thing to describe how to fix a problem, and quite another (more useful) thing to provide the context in which a problem arose. It's the examples that are hard to provide when you have to protect trade secrets.

So, yes. I'm creating free information, in significant part because I work somewhere that values free information.

2 Comments

Hi Greg,Let me take the opportunity of this 6 year blogaversary to thank you very deeply for offering us your time and experience.I followed quite a big part of those 6 years, and i can confirm: we do appreciate examples, experiences, everyday's life difficulties, and so on... Every things you describe and report so lively to us.So yes, be warmly thank for all you bring us regularly.We DO love it !!!