I had the honor of sitting in on Bonnie the Brave's master's thesis presentation yesterday at the UW School of Marine Affairs. Bonnie the Brave is Bonnie Loshbaugh who has interned at People For Puget Sound and who single-handedly established and grew our social media network, blogging every Friday and taking our Facebook 'likes' to over 2500 and Twitter followers to nearly a thousand, all over the last year.

Marc Miller, Ann Bostrom and I were advisers to her thesis, "Using Environmental Social Marketing to Address Polluted Stormwater Runoff in Puget Sound." Bonnie detailed the state of the Sound's pollution problems, examined social marketing as a tool for behavior change, and examined the Puget Sound Partnership's 'Puget Sound Starts Here' Campaign as a case study. Bonnie did a great job.

I recalled sitting and listening to my daughter in the early '90s give a presentation on digital libraries while she was an undergraduate at Columbia and having the same feelings when sitting and listening to Bonnie: The future will be OK with kids like this. When my daughter said she was going to become a lawyer, I said the world didn't need any more lawyers. She replied that the world needed more good lawyers-- and I agreed.

In Bonnie's internship interview, I asked her what she wanted to do when she finished her studies. She said she wanted my job. Yes, I agree. And the future is going to be OK.