Hi All, I’m Salt and I’ve been with Snowdrift.coop since late 2015. This is a long looong overdue thread for the category. I suppose part of the delay was due to having already written a blog post of introduction in early 2016. Let me try to fill in some of the years since then…
After returning from my travels, I applied to and was accepted by a graduate program at the University of Washington Department of Communication. Shortly thereafter, I sold my car, purchased a bicycle, and rather than changing my event schedule, rode ~10,000 miles that first year, after not riding for over a decade.
In terms of Snowdrift, I have been wearing numerous hats, perhaps since “community” in our vision could be said to encompass… well everyone! The team, volunteers, board, patrons, projects, etc… Despite that, since we’ve faced so many trials and changes over these years, I’d say that I’ve done less “directing” and more “configuring”, “engineering”, or perhaps “facilitating”.
Recently, I have been applying some of my organizational communication studies to the reduction of the barriers blocking us from launch. To that end, I’m currently working on: a CommunityRule to clarify how decisions are made; an organizational chart, with descriptions for the various roles we would ideally have if “fully staffed”; gathering a skills inventory of our currently active and peripheral volunteers; and of course, still fiddling with CiviCRM to bring back our volunteer form and announcement mailing list.
Aside from that, I just defended my master’s thesis, studying under and working with Benjamin Mako Hill. For the last few years I have more officially taken over the reigns of SeaGL (the Seattle GNU/Linux conference) as Impresario. I was also elected Commodore (president) of the Washington Yacht Club, a student sailing club at the UW. Finally, I’ve continued cycling about; attending, organizing, and speaking at a wide variety of conferences, conventions, events, festivals, and faires.
I look forward to hearing from all of our community members, new and old! Please reach out here (on Discourse), there (on Matrix), and everywhere (given a loud enough ping).
–
Wm Salt Hale (he/him)
<@altsalt(.net)>
/?/ Kilted Globetrotter,
Free/Libre/Open Advocate,
and Lifelong Hacker /?/