I'm leaving tomorrow for Colorado Springs, where I will spend a week at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, participating in the U.S. Fencing Association's Coaches' College. Forty or so of us will be working for our Level I Foil Coach certification. I went to this last year for Sabre Coach certification (sabre being my weapon of choice), so this year I have a better idea of what to expect. I'm really excited about it.

Interesting thing, though: forty or so of us, all learning the same techniques to become better coaches, so that we can train our fencers to beat each other. We're competitors, in a very real sense, and yet we're coming together to help each other become better coaches.

By coincidence, various members of the Notes/Domino design community are thrashing out a plan to collaborate on competitive template development. See John Head's blog for details about this. Sounds familiar? We're all competitors: we work for rival consulting firms, or for rival companies. Why would we share all our best stuff with people who might otherwise be willing to pay us for it?

Reasonable question. In both cases, I think we understand that we need to collaborate to build an environment in which we can compete effectively. It does me no good to train fencers if they have nobody to fence from other clubs. It does the sport no good if fencing is this secret, elite activity. The sport grows when there are more active clubs with knowledgeable coaches, who can collectively raise the skill level of the overall group of participants.

Likewise, if Notes/Domino designers can work together to pool their knowledge to build better applications, we can drive the market to recognize the strengths of the Notes/Domino platform, and that's good for all of us.

Anyway, I'm off.

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