How To Be A Digital Nomad: Read (And Write) The Whitepaper

Tony Curtis once explained in an interview that for his generation, there were clear guideposts for behavior in all situations. Cary Grant showed young men everywhere how to talk to women, order dinner, wear a suit. Every profession had its icon, every movement its hero.

Those days are long gone. As new professions are invented every day, those of us who seek out progressive lifestyles are forced to define our own rules, our own codes of conduct.

It’s tough. Because on the one hand, the whole point of being a digital nomad is to live without rules. No set hours. No set location. No company-mandated hardware and software and mobile device. No dress code. No commute.
And yet, as anyone knows who has tried to start their own business, write a novel, or follow the Grateful Dead for more than a couple of weeks, the lack of structure brings its own problems. You may not have to work at nine, but you still have to work. You don’t need an office, but you do need a physical space free of distractions.

It’s a situation that forces you to ask yourself a lot of questions about who you really are, and what you’re really trying to accomplish. And contemplating those questions by yourself can get lonely and frustrating.

Fortunately, to help you pave your own road to enlightenment, you now have the Digital Nomads Crowd Source Whitepaper.

What the heck is that?

It’s a whitepaper because it’s both a document and a value proposition. It is, in the words of wikipedia, an authoritative guide that addresses problems and how to solve them.

Most whitepapers (well, let’s face it, all of them up til now) are pedagogical, which is to say, they presume that the flow of knowledge is only in one direction: from the writer to the reader. An institution - publisher, university, corporation, whatever - lends a writer its power, and he or she waxes authoritative long enough for the whitepaper to be codified as one of many materials that others in the field are simply expected to reference and ultimately absorb.

Although there are a great many whitepapers in the world of technology, what they all have in common is that they’re static. A whitepaper about how to live a life outside the lines has to be malleable. Translucent. In short, open to input from the community at which it is directed.

The digital nomads whitepaper has been culled from the wisdom dispensed on whitepaper.digitalnomads.com, most of which was provided by the TechDirt community (here’s Mike Masnick’s take on the whitepaper). But we hope that it will grow beyond its beginnings, and expand into something that has been truly vetted, discussed, and revised by the same community that it purports to teach.

What do you think?

pictured: Tron and Lara, in a pre-effect production still. The first digital nomads?

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Comments (1)

by David H. Deans, Digital Lifescapes / November 9, 2008

There’s a lot of potential to grow and evolve this body of commentary — turn it into an extended list of “new rules” regarding the meaning of a workspace, and perhaps turn it into a book on the topic.

As an example, The Cluetrain Manifesto describes how conversing on the Web applies “new rules” to the topic of marketing communications. Anyway, it’s just a thought, as I read the white paper commentary thus far.