If you couldn't make it to the Bay Area Maker Faire, you can track the event on Twitter. [Link]
Social enterprisesSome organizations that are structured as nonprofits with social missions, or social enterprises, are run like businesses and generate sustainable revenue sources, though earnings are retained, not distributed.
“There is a lot of discussion taking place right now about a whole new organization form around social enterprise,” said James Fruchterman, president of Benetech, a social enterprise incubator based in Palo Alto. “Many of these efforts can make money; they will just never make enough to provide venture capital rates of return.”
These organizations tend to be tech-oriented, "driven in part by a set of microelectronics technology trends that have sent shock waves through many industries, from publishing to music and movies." [Link]
Live Art Blogging from SXSW Interactive 2008
I've been in a bazillion meetings with Honoria Starbuck since we first worked together in the 90s. An artist, she's always brought art media - lately watercolors - and made very striking, powerfully intuitive visual notes. This year she took her art to SXSW Interactive, and she's captured the watercolors she produced in a book available via Lulu Press. Whether you were at SXSW or not, this is a great book for your coffee table (and your more flexible brain). PDF download is free if you want to preview. Also check out Honoria's Livejournal for more art.
If you're in Austin Monday night for SXSW or otherwise, check out the Plutopia bash at Scholz Garten, 1607 San Jacinto. This most interesting of SXSW evening events is a collaborative gathering of two camps that normally don't pitch tents on the same terrain - green/sustainability advocates and techies.
Plutopia is the name of a collective including futurist, artists, technologists, and green activists that are aligned in their understanding that a sustainability economy is emerging and inevitable, and sustainability will be mediated by technology. If we're to opt out of business-as-usual and rething community organization, building, food production, etc., we'll be experimenting and finding alternatives. The Plutopia event at SXSW (where "Plutopia" was a mashup of "pluralist utopias") is an explosion of art and entertainment that has, as subtext, a creative consideration of possibilities. Bill McKibben will talk about economy, ecology, and community - the subjects of his book, Deep Economy - and The Heather Gold Show is a conversation about "opting out." The live premiere of producer Maggie Duval's Lance Van de Kamp Show is happeniing, too, featuring His Excellency Nikita Chrusov of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. There'll be installations by Austin Green Art and The Robot Group. We'll also have performances by pioneer electronic composer Carl Stone, David Demaris, London's Intimate Stranger. And there's more (check out the site). Not sure how we filled the vessel quite so full...
The Austin Chronicle has published my article about Facebook in its SXSW Interactive issue.
Are we watching a generation "slice in two," or are these sites making visible, and emphasizing, a division that already existed? Before the social Web, most of us didn't know we were part of social networks. We had friends, and we knew that our friends might know people that we don't, but most of us never thought to chart or analyze those relationships. Now we can make our networks visible and explicit and touch base with them every day through sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Are we any better off than we were before? Do we know the people in our networks any better than before? Can we manage more relationships than we did before? Looking at the darker side, will we be exploited by the operators of network platforms? Will everything we say and do actually, no foolin', become part of our "permanent record," tracked by Big Brother and his henchmen? Will the Internet become the next television, an instrument for programming consumers, pretending to be a channel for art and entertainment?Systems change
Yes to everything. Yes, we're better off; there can be tremendous value in network exchanges and far more potential for productive collaboration and resulting innovation. We probably do know most of the people in our networks better; we can connect to them casually every day, like the Internet was a massive water cooler where everybody, and I mean everybody, can hang out. Can we manage more relationships? Sure, but that's deceptive: We have the technology to manage more, but that doesn't mean we can manage all the relationships that we "add" at any qualitative level. All the social-networking platforms caution you to add as friends only people you really know well. Real value depends on quality, not quantity, of relationships.
And yes, some people will be exploited, but network platforms that exploit will lose trust, lose users, wither, and die. Yes, everything we do online is recorded somewhere and probably retrievable somehow by somebody, and the intelligence agencies are probably crunching some of your data somewhere sometime. There's never been any real expectation of complete privacy online. On the other hand, it's impractical to think that Big Brother is watching. His eyeballs and his interests are constrained by an economy of attention, if nothing else. And the Internet's already become the next television, but it has a bazillion channels, many with ads, and many of the ads that do appear are unobtrusive. Austin tech consultant and entrepreneur Venki Iyer told me, "We all just need to get used to surveillance and practice good sousveillance [watching the watchers]."
Nancy White posts about systems change practices, quoting Donella Meadows: "I don't think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms...." [Link]
The image above is one she used at the International Forum of Visual Practitioners, which seems pretty cool in itself. (So many conferences, so little time.)
The Producers
Not Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, but co-producers of the upcoming EFF-Austin-driven Plutopia party at SXSW Interactive. Plutopia is a loose collective of artists, technologists, and futurists, formerly called Futurama. We organized for an installation at Maker Faire; the SXSW party is looking more ambitious. The Plutopian producers are Maggie Duval, Randy Jewart (of Austin Green Art), and Bon Davis. More about the party as the planning evolves. It'll be a Scholz Garten, a bier garten with an opinion of life...
What happens when you promote fear and encourage citizens to report "suspicious activity"? [Link]
Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to -- a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant -- now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it's a false alarm, it's not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he's wrong, it'll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he'll be praised for "doing his job" and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we're done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted.Meetings of the minds
This story has been repeated endlessly, both in the U.S. and in other countries. Someone -- these are all real -- notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling, or a cell phone in an airplane seat.
Maggie Duval, another "wizard of connection," and I met yesterday and talked about a number of things, especially our evident alignment of intentions and practices and our interest in forms if economic development that benefit creative people who don't happen to wear suits and haven't learned the various secret handshakes. I'm sometimes too busy to think about the big picture, so it was nice to have a free-ranging high-level conversation with someone who is generous, spiritual, and highly creative in her thinking, especially after several days of putting out fires and focusing on specifics. I had incidentally just come from a triumphant Polycot Associates meeting, where we had finalized a document that captures our core thinking about the web presence management practice that we've been developing for the last two-plus months. Next step is to complete development on a new web site. More about that later.
"I'm Nobody"We need more teachers like Clay Burell... or maybe we need more citizens like Clay... [Link]
But I see now that my personal journey to get Beyond School is only now starting to crystallize. It's not about web 2.0 for me anymore (though that is a tool I'll continue using). And it's definitely not about "Classroom 2.0," since I dislike the realities of schools and classrooms as much now, as a teacher, as I did when I was a very miserable high school student.
Putting "what it is about" in positive terms is more difficult, but here are a few stabs. It's about not being "a Nobody doing anything" when my students are looking for "Somebody doing something" about what they care about. It's about inviting them to discover that they have the power to do something too. It's about being a community leader more, and a teacher less. It's about extending my relationship with these young adults beyond the nine-month term (if church youth group leaders can do it, so can teachers). It's about re-conceptualizing schools as community action centers instead of walled gardens (or day-care centers, or juvenile detention centers). It's about designing relevant experiences and projects in which any metaphors or synecdoches that, god help us, they learn, will have a purpose and meaning beyond an alphanumeric grade.
It's about trying to be World-Changing instead of World-Ignoring and World-Ignorant.
That's the best I can do right now. Does anybody out there want to talk about ways to collaborate on "real-world project-based learning" along these lines?