Not quite a corporate spokesperson

@jowyang Intel has a formal SMP (social media practioner) program that have gone through training and be blessed to blog & tweet. Sounds like corp spokesperson.

I've been through the training and am so "blessed". However, I'm hardly qualified to be a corporate spokesperson. The training was mostly a few common sense items and reinforcing the "code of conduct", where we should not disparage our competition or leak insider information or make claims that can't be shown from public materials. We were also taught to publicly and clearly identify ourselves as Intel employees and the biases that brings. But, that's about it.

We aren't even picked from the marketing, management, or sales arms, although a couple of us (not me) have that background. I'm just an engineer, with some delusions of grandeur.

To be perfectly candid (that's the training kicking in) I do have a nice 2nd title as "Director of Embedded University Programs", because I volunteered to run the annual conference when my previous boss left and had to divy up certain jobs, and I liked introducing all the speakers at our annual conference. However, the title is essentially honorary (it doesn't reflect my day job) and I don't control the budget, although I do get to be the chairperson of the committee that reviews the annual grant program that one of my bosses (2 or 3 levels up) funds.

But back to the point, how did they pick us? They had a brown bag lunch one day talking about this program they were piloting, and asking for volunteers. I've always liked expressing my opinion publicly--my big call to fame is that I posted alot to the comp.compilers newsgroup over the years (and I parleyed that into writing a column for ACM's Sigplan Notices for a year or so--for which I could call myself an editor).

And, what do I write about, nothing particularly Intel related. I'm interested in compilers, regular expressions, automata theory, and because of my day job at Intel, network security. However, because I'm a little cog in a very big wheel, what I know about Intel would be very uninteresting. I do hope that my contribution makes it into a chip someday, but even if and when it does, I work in a niche group solving a niche problem. And, when I do comment on things that are work related, I will be very careful, because the Intel corporate culture which the training reinforces is to not show any bias or favoritism toward any of our partners or clients.

And, BTW, what do I think about network security, since that's my day job at Intel, that the biggest problem is and always will be social engineering, and although I'm working on a technical solution that will help against viruses and things, it won't touch that problem, because we don't know a technical solution to it (and there probably isn't one, at least not before our computers are smarter than we are).

Still, if Intel was training us to be corporate spokespeople then either their training was very subtle or I slept through more of the 30 minute web-based training than I want to admit. ;-) Intel does have spokepeople who can comment on legal and business items, but the new round of us tweeters aren't it. We're just kids given some fun toys and told not to make fools of the company.