Writing

A few years ago at work I proposed an idea to the senior management of my department to put out a department newsletter. The notion developed out of a company survey that revealed, among other things, that for a communications company we did a very poor job of communicating with our own employees. From my own experience I realized that there were people who sat only a few feet from my cubicle whose names I didn't know and I had no clue what they did.

From that was born a internal publication called Ping! In computer jargon ping is a way for computers to establish communication with each other. We published about 9 issues but the effort fizzled last January because the small group that had formed to produce it couldn't generate enough content and we were not being given any time to work on it.

This year, as part of our company's diversity initiatives (which are now called diversity and inclusion), we convinced our management to allow writing for this publication to be counted as meeting a diversity goal. Today we had an organizational meeting and we lined up a whopping 14 articles for the next issue to be published in June. I may not be embarking on a writing career but I'm at least keeping my hand in something close to it.