virtualgryphon.com

History: Between 1984 and 1998 I was writing occasional essays on technology — especially computers — and accidents. These were quick-and-dirty pieces, not the polished stuff that was suitable for publication, and circulated just among a few colleagues on the earliest versions of the internet. E-mail was primitive and the process was pretty awkward but I got a fair amount of encouragement from the half dozen recipients. An example is Scenarios for Bedside Medical Communication. There were also some fun pieces, for example Learning Theories Implicit in Medical School Lectures.

The Gang of Four: In 1994 I moved to Chicago and found, in my new position, four people who were interested in these little bits. The e-mail software was beginning to improve, making it possible to assemble sets of e-mail addresses to make distribution easier. In my mailer I collected the e-mail addresses of this internal group under a heading “The Gang of Four” (Gof4).

Fellow Travelers Society: The readers from outside my place of employment became “The Fellow Travelers Society” (FTS). The FTS was an eclectic group and we passed around comments on journal papers and current events — using email and the “reply-to-all” button to generate a primitive sort of blog.

Gof4? FTS?: There are probably only a few people who will recognize these names. “Gang of Four” was the name given to the wife of Mao Tse Tung and her three co-conspirators who were, after Mao’s death, blamed for the Chinese Cultural Revolution. After a show trial, two of these were condemned to death and the others to life imprisonment. No one was executed; all have since died. “Fellow traveler” was a term applied during the witch hunts of the early 1950’s to people believed to have Communist sympathies. Those identified as Fellow Travelers were ostracized. The FTs were not usually members of the Communist Party or even activists working towards the Party’s ends. They were attacked because of having Communist friends or family members or for acknowledging that some of the goals or positions of the communists were reasonable or desirable.

About what? Initially, the FTS and Gof4 e-mails were brief items taken from news services about accidents or technology snafus or some research result or citation that I found interesting and wanted to pass along. I would add a line or two of my own comments — often disparaging or ironic. Because the circle of people interested (or willing!) to be included in a group called The Fellow Travelers Society was small and I knew each person, the comments could be short, cryptic, and even nasty. The result was a sort of micro-listserver, with a difference: there was no privacy for FTS members; every e-mail had all the members’ e-mail addresses in the header. But these were the PS (Pre-Spam) years and no one minded. The small size of the FTS made it a pleasure to collect and send the materials. I was, after all, writing to people I knew and there was no pressure to produce; every posting was opportunistic.

The RISKS listserver was a prime source of events. Some of the Gof4/FTS pieces drew on event reports from Peter Neumann’s RISKS. Peter is at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and the many back-issues of RISKS are cataloged at a site in the U.K. You can subscribe to RISKS yourself.

The growth of the FTS: My comments became more extensive, more discursive, and more explanatory. This was partly due to the growth of the FTS. By the late 1990’s it included about 30 people, some of whom I did not know well. I didn’t intend to write essays, really. But the larger the FTS became, the more it seemed that the implications of events needed to be stated explicitly and the greater was the potential for misunderstanding. The postings were still impromtu and written quickly in response to current events or recent research.

Death of the FTS: After 2000 the FTS postings died out. There was no single reason for this. There were technical problems. I was busy and trying to start up a research lab to address issues no one in healthcare was considering. There seemed to be a chance to have a direct impact on patient safety rather than the indirect and long-term effects that the FTS materials might someday yield. And too, the work of preparing the essays was becoming more of a chore than a pleasure.

I’m baaaaaaack: I think that it is time to revive the FTS. There is no single reason for this either. Partly it is because the technology is so much better than it was. Software like WordPress is truly amazing. Website hosting is now a trivial technical matter and a minor expense and easily done using a browser. No command lines needed! Golly. It’s heaven.

It’s also time to do this because there is more stuff to write about. There are technological disasters looming, critical choices to make, opportunities to get right — or wrong. Some disasters-in-the-making are easy to see. I’ll start writing about one in the next post. This blog is a little different than the original Fellow Travelers Society of course. It’s set up around a ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ structure. It has a more persistent — notice that I wrote persistent and not permanent — quality than the e-mail version of the FTS. It’s also much less private than the e-mail version. Ah, well, that might be a problem. We’ll see. The original FTS grew out of a small sense of a community with a disparate background but common interest. If we’re lucky, perhaps the virtualgryphon blog will lead to the revitalization of that community.

Joining the Fellow Travelers Society: Feel free to enter a comment when you have something to add. I’m going to ask that you use your real name for your posts. (If you hesitate to write under your own name, well, maybe you should send me an e-mail first!) I’ll try to moderate regularly to see that new posts get in quickly. Suggestions are always welcome. Original members of the FTS are especially encouraged!

Best wishes, Gryph