Found Our Feet

The minutes and the updates,the reportbacks don’t quite capture it. There was something magical about the summit that we had in Austin this past weekend. We found our feet again. After a long time on the mat, it sometimes got to feeling like we were out for the count. The FNF made a big splash in 2011, and in 2012 we turned inside — sometimes at the expense of our so-called ‘mindshare’ and sometimes as the expense of adequately communicating with those of you that care enough to read this. We let e-mails go unanswered as we focused on building a foundation.

Last weekend we found a new direction. This doesn’t serve as an official announcement, and I won’t get into our plans here (you can join the mailing list if you want to know), but I will say that for the first time in a long time, all of us at the FNF are feeling genuinely sanguine. It feels like the summer of 2011 all over again: everything new, everything urgent.

It takes courage to reinvent – or to become what you were always becoming. In some ways it feels as though we’ve shifted course, and in some ways it feels as if we’ve kept the rudder steady and true since we set out almost two years ago. There are bound to be more challenges ahead, bigger challenges. There are bound to be rough spots, things that don’t go as planned, delays and disappointments. But now more than ever, it feels as if there is bound to be a movement toward the world that ought to be but isn’t, what’s just out of our grasp. We are going to get there. We are as committed as we’ve ever been — as committed as we could possibly be to the idea that the network ought to be a commons. For a while it felt as though we had run our course — but it feels now as if we’ve turned the corner, and there’s a long, open road unfolding before us. We’ve found our feet again — it’s time to walk.