These are notes from an earlier draft of the welcome page for anonymous users, and contain ideas that might be developed for some other purpose.

 In my experience, the goals are fundamentally hard. There are lots of basic elements - good communications, effective accountability, low bureacracy, and effective protocols, for example - but these things are far more difficult than it sounds (which is why it so rarely happens). However, when such an environment can be achieved, great things can happen!

In this site, I am concurrently developing, explaining, and demonstrating a number of concepts through combinations of rich 'content' and a robust set of collaboration and project management capabilities and tools that I've tailored and integrated into the site from a variety of sources. I believe that by observing and using these tools and ideas in action, and weaving together many different concepts with both static and dynamic site features, I can help others to begin to understand their power and leverage.

I have set ambitious goals for myself for this effort, given that this is my 'second job', and that this is mainly a 'labor of love'. I'm not doing it to build a huge internet presence through this effort, get rich from ad revenue, or sell my services. Instead, I've found personal satisfaction in applying effective ideas during my career, and learned that such ideas are often difficult to communicate 'in the abstract', rather than through demonstrations, and have learned that putting such demonstrations together require more contemplation and preparation than my work setting and assignments typically allow. As a result, this is my sandbox for playing with technology, ideas, and information.

Since this is just something I do when I have free time, the resulting ideas, features, and concepts on this site will often be represented as a mixture of elements in various stages of evolution - some experimentatal, some in final stages of development, and still others in mature, deployable state. I've searched for, evaluated, and chosen an underlying 'platform' that provides features, a successful track record, and development community that give me confidence that I'll have a rich and evolving environment to learn from, adapt, and leverage over time.

In my grandest vision, these concepts could ultimately be further supported through a variety of deployment aids, including ready-to-use example processes, browsable and searchable information assets, and real-world case studies that would further substantiate the power of the ideas which are offered, and potentially allow a new community to assemble and help build and enhance them. That vision may never be achieved, but gives me energy and passion, which fuels this pursuit. As my efforts to achieve these goals are discretionary, uncompensated, and must fit within my family and professional obligations, progress will naturally be inconsistent.

While many of these ideas originated in the software and systems development communities that I've grown up in, I believe that they offer leverage to a much broader class of situations when carefully tailored for the unique circumstances of those new environments. While many different organizations already offer their own competing flavors of 'best practices' offerings today (each claiming to provide similar capabilities in the above context) this site, and my own thinking, explores the possibilities of taking a different approach by:

• providing a neutral, 'open-source' repository of practices, tools, and related assets which draw from the multitude of frameworks and approaches that are already in existence
• establishing mechanisms for providing an 'honest broker' for debating pros and cons of these various methods
• helping my customers and peers understand and navigate through the implementation pitfalls and quagmire that the universe of best practices can quickly become, from the perspective of my own background and experience
• provide important supplemental strategies that draw from key successes in industry, and that are not explicitly invoked in existing frameworks
• providing opportunities for cooperative implementation of these new concepts and features

In today's competitive environment, techniques must by their nature thrive in an environment of uncertainty and potential for change. It is not practical in today's world to wait until such uncertainty is reduced, or until plans are elaborated in grand detail. As a result, the features, ideas, and content which are being provided on this web site are made available concurrently with their elaboration, to demonstrate how such knowledge can be created and deployed incrementally, collaboratively, and efficiently. Simply put, it is a work in progress, as all worthwhile journeys, relationships, and superb products truly are. Please register and join me on this quest, as access to content beyond the 'teasers' on this front page is restricted to registered members!