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c h a n g e s

ones now creating the Web, and therefore were the only ones who could be sure that what the systems produced would be appropriate to a reasonable and fair society. Despite my trepidation, I was warmly received, and I felt very happy about having made the point. The conference marked the first time that the people who were changing the world with the Web had gotten together to set a direction about accountability and responsibility, and how we were actually going to use the new medium. It was an important direction to set at this juncture.

I went home feeling very pleased. Exciting though all this was, in my personal life it was dwarfed by the arrival of our second child in June. Family life continued and for a while it seemed MIT had stalled in preparations for the WWW Consortium. Then Al Vezza began calling me at home in the evening to discuss details. The conversations seemed even more odd because of the cultural disconnect. Our little prefab house was in a small French village a few miles from the border with Switzerland. The view from our front yard stretched straight across Geneva to Mont Blanc. From the backyard, where we often ate dinner, was a view of the Jura mountains, cows grazing on the few intervening fields. Given the time difference with Massachusetts, that's often where I was when Al called. I would be wearing shorts, sitting out in the sunshine. Al, who was certainly wearing a gray suit, would be seated in an air-conditioned concrete office building in Cambridge. It was sometimes hard to connect across this gulf.

One evening in early July our phone rang. It was Al, and he was serious. He wanted to know if there was a way he could fax me right then and there. He said he had just gotten the go-ahead from MIT to form the consortium. LCS was prepared to hire me as a full-time staff member. He had a letter to that effect, and wanted to know when I would start.

It was just ten days before we were due to leave on our vacation. We had not specifically planned any dates after that, since