My out of office automatic email reply has been on for almost three long months. Coming back last week, I felt like home again after a long trip: everything seemed so familiar, and so much different at the same time. (Almost) same faces, same corridors, more or less the same workload, but a different perspective. A curious experience, to watch webcomm’s activity from the “other side”!

I remembered the technical discussions about mac users not being able to watch some debates, while struggling to see some of the commissioners hearings from my own mac. You do get much more passionate about a problem when you encounter it “face to face” than when you think of it in a meeting room, believe me!

I also had the strange experience of meeting “my baby” after it was already born and kicking. I am talking about the hearings website, a project in which I had long been working together with Florent. I had to leave it days before the birth and I only saw the final result when it was already online, and it looked great. Wow. 

Florent doing such a huge work alone and informing me about “our project” (another wow to him) brings me to something I am also looking at with my new eyes: my colleagues. I have always appreciated the team, I am not referring to that. But my first day in the office consisted on a planned 2 hours meeting that was finally prolonged for almost 60 more minutes. Why? Because the team being so enthusiastic. Nothing new, but the amount of questions and ideas caught my just-arrived attention. Passionate discussions during a work meeting, isn’t it unusual? It was interesting to follow them almost as an outsider!

I could go on and on, but let me just use the blog this time to thank the web team again; it is such a challenge and a privilege to work with people like you. If you, reading now this post, are not part of the team … I would like to know how you see us from the outside.