Mission / Vision Statements
I just woke up from a dream where an esteemed hacker friend or colleague of mine asked me, on a very abstract plane, if it's okay to ask others about their mission and/or vision statements. I responded that not only is it okay, but a really good thing to do.

I think the sub text of the query, somewhat back handed as it were, was one or many of: the assumption that it wakes people up to (potentially) realizing that they are straying far off their paths, if they have one, or that the query prompts existential crisis about not thinking or having thought about that kind of thing, or that prompting people to might berob the world of a few of its most successful or useful people in the present who are deeply flowing with what they do and in that sort of dormant state affecting huge productive change on the world, in the field of their expertise and passion. And in our common (tech) geekly niche, that subject may or may not be in the realm of personally important enough foci to show up on people's inner compass, should they stop to think about it.

So I'd say the concern behind the question was whether the cue might drain that world of some of its best brains, maybe into refocusing on themselves, or their families, tribes or the other things in their lives that are important to them.

As a sort of background there: our community recently lost _why the lucky stiff -- a delightfully eccentric, whimsical and productive artist, visionary, teacher and programmer, quite likely to child rearing (my guess), in a showy magician's self-disintegration trick, wiping out his persona and work alike, in, I'd say, an effort to show the world that he would not come back to anything he'd formerly been part of. Other things I think he might have foreseen and intended in that move being that our world should and would go on just fine wirhout him, that the net would mend itself, reviving the works he had done that people still cared for (books, tools, tutorials, even languages and environments, little morcels of wisdom, et cetera), that this would also effectively disband those of his works that nobody had cared enough about to recognize the loss of (also burying things his contemporaries were not ready for yet, admittedly) in a sort of pruning of the bad, leaving the good.

And finally, I'd say, as a practical hands-on demonstration of how much can be lost to the whims of individual people or organizations that sit on sole ownership or control of things you care for, if you let them, and that culture is better in a commons environment where it's resilient against that kind of threat. Do you have backups of your mail? If you lost your X, could you recover from it? If you opt in to recent "buy the limited right to personally consume, not the artifact itself" schemes like e-books like Amazon's Kindle, the many sorts of media in Apple's iTunes store (movies, TV shows, iPhone applications, audio books, music -- of which all but the last are still sold and served encumbered with digital restrictions management, so have today can be gone tomorrow outside of your own will and control), and so on.    

And being a dream, I would also say it was me asking candidly whether I should or might wake myself up to the same kind of effect. Naturally, I woke up pondering visions and missions in my life and to what extent and in what niches I'm pursuing them, or want to be, and would, in the future.

I'd say my statements, to the extent I have them, revolve around "helping you do more, learn more and be more", with qualifiers such as "at less effort", "without losing context or focus", "despite structures that formerly confined you not to" and "because you can, and want to".

I think I'll save for a future post going into them more, though. If you have any, what are yours? As you can see from mine, they needn't be crystal clear formulations like Google's "organizing the world's information".