WHAT WOULD YOU TAKE Part 2

True Confessions: I had a serious computer dating relationship with Larry Downes, the Larry Downes of Killer Apps* fame. Larry and I met every Saturday morning at my office for months while he refined a donor management program to meet all my organization’s needs, was Kathy Miller friendly and easy to modify (at least for Larry). I was a technological virgin before I met him.

When thinking about what to retrieve in a natural disaster, I wondered what Larry would take personally and what he would advise professionally. “The really valuable items in my old childhood stamp and adult comic book collections are in a safe deposit box.” The important things in his house are Buster (his puppy), certain art and his estate planning documents. He adds “but the originals of those are kept by the lawyers anyway. I can happily live without anything else.” Note he didn’t mention taking any technology!

Larry is a fellow at the Center for Internet and Society (CIS), a public interest technology law and policy program at Stanford Law School and a part of the Law, Science and Technology Program at Stanford Law School. In the face of a disaster, he says “As Katrina demonstrated, most companies don’t plan at all. Increasingly, though, there is a move toward what is called “cloud computing” where large companies (and eventually medium and small ones, and consumers as well) keep their data and programs offsite to begin with, and run everything via the Internet and service providers who spread the information all around the world on large banks of computers. That solves some security and disaster-planning problems, and raises new ones. Apparently it also saves a lot of money, and space, and carbon emissions.”

Do not be unprotected. If you haven’t done so already, have a talk with the IT people at your organization about this today.

And visit Larry at his blog: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/larry-downes

* Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance, Harvard Business School Press (1998)