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The History of The Gilbert Center: 1996 - 1997
By Michael C. Gilbert, November 29th, 2006
The Gilbert Center is Ten Years Old
In keeping with some of the themes I've been developing at The Authentic Organization, I want to devote some public time to reflection and gratitude. I'm going to do that by starting a timeline here, that I will add to during the weeks between now and the tenth anniversary of Nonprofit Online News, four months from now. As this develops, if you remember things that I'm forgetting, I hope you won't hesitate to write and tell me about it.
- 1996 - November - My Father, Curtis Gilbert Died
- 1996 - December - The Gilbert Center Founded
It was ten years ago that I stood at the side of my father's artificially supported body and dwelled gently in my grief. I was too tired at that point for anything else. I had flown out two days before, after he had collapsed on the floor of his winter home from a cerebral hemorrhage, and I hadn't slept since.
One of the sweet blessings of grief is that, in the process of reconciling ourselves to loss, we sometimes see more clearly those things that were left behind by the object of our grief. Standing by my father's body brought me such a blessing. Here are some of the things that my father left behind that have influenced my work and that of The Gilbert Center, over the last ten years:
He was a kind man. This is to be distinguished from niceness, which can lead to avoidance, lousy boundaries, and passive aggressive behavior. I learned from both my father's kindness and his occasional niceness as well.
He loved good books and beautiful tools and treated them each with the same reverence. If he hadn't been a pilot, he would have been a librarian. He had an eye for elegance, particularly in technology.
Most importantly for the mission of The Gilbert Center, he loved work and chose work he loved. He took pride in vision and craft, whether he was flying a plane for Pan American, building a boat, or dusting the bookshelves. He sought always to make himself useful to those around him.
- 1997 - April - Nonprofit Online News Launched
- 1997 - December - Our First Use of XML Syndication
- 1998 - January - Email Newsletter Launched
Nonprofit Online News grew out of my own needs to stay informed and organized about the growing connections between civil society and the Internet. (The aggregator that I built for this is another story altogether.) Sharing this with a small group of people was already an ingrained habit of mine, so it was a small additional effort to put that online for others.
The people who deserve the most thanks for this are my early readers, who thought that my posts might be of broader interest. They also came down on me when, after suddenly having two orders of magnitude more readers, I briefly flirted with a more "objective" journalistic tone. They reminded me that it was my voice and point of view that they wanted.
I'm not sure that Nonprofit Online News would have happened as it did were it not for Dave Winer, Userland Software's Frontier scripting environment, and the Macintosh. Dave and I started our weblogs on the same weekend in the Spring of 1997 and I drew much inspiration from him in the months that followed. Frontier was years ahead of the other scripting environments in its built-in support for web based content management, including XML syndication. At the time, Frontier was a Mac only tool, taking advantage of the platform's rich inter-application programming framework. These are the things that made it easy to bring Nonprofit Online News to the web.
I have been trying to remember who it was, back in 1997, that suggested that I supplement the web version of Nonprofit Online News with an email newsletter. (Please step forward if it was you.) That decision led to a massive expansion of our readership and laid the groundwork for our future expertise in email communication strategies.
To Be Continued...
(Read Part 2)
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