Wanna be starting something? Tech advise for the entrepreneur.

So you're smart. You've got an idea and you want to change the world (or at least your world my making some cashish). These days, it takes more than an idea to make it happen - especially when you are competing with the Kardashians and the Republican presidential candidates (and their inverted sense of elegance and poise) for air-time.

If you are wanna be starting something but aren't sure where to start, you might find the following helpful.

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Resolve

I have a friend who, last time I checked in, logs over 93 hours a week playing the SIMS. This SIMS is a video game in which you have a virtual 'avatar' that you have to feed and make sure they go to work and socialise in a perfect harmonious rhythm determined by an algorithm designed by the toy maker. 93 hours a week. That is twice as much as most of us work.

I say that with a certain amount of disbelief but if you clocked the hours that my screen…

Urban Public Art: a manifesto

if i could whisper softly into the absolute,
after saying thanks,
i might make a wish.
tonight i would wish for understanding.
i would wish that these scripts,
sometimes held in disdain,
were understood as coming from a place of purity,
and by way of an ancient disposition.
we have been scrawling these mysteries on our walls
since before there were…

Talking Story

I have been doing some thinking about what it means to have a culture that is self aware and how that would distill down to the level of individual values and relationships between people.  I've been specifically thinking about verbal or physical communication between individuals.  

 

Storytelling

The story is a way to connect people powerfully with one another.  It can be both receptive and directive, although is mostly…

Chasing the Dragon: or how I'm curing my Lyme Disease

We are all habitat.  Microscopic condos for animals old as dirt.  We breath and eat at their mercy.

I first found out I had Lyme Disease in 2003, about 3 years after I initially became infected.  In order to find it, I had to reassemble my own history.  I haven't trusted my memory since.

I was living in Carbondale, CO and we had just declared war on Iraq.  I wasn't getting meaningful work in my field, and so I spent a lot of my time…

Holy Wars

The wars we wage against ourselves are probably the only wars that are truly holy - truly blessed. Maybe because they are the only ones in which winning is even possible. It feels like I am probably in the middle of one such war, or maybe just a particularly nasty battle. I trust that I am destined to win eventually. I feel blessed on days when I understand that there is no other outcome possible. It can be hard keeping the faith sometimes.

Which brings me to the Santa Fe…

Can Technology throw a party and save the Universe?

I went down to the city of New Orleans about a month ago in a quest to continue to explore how what I do for a living can make a difference for the world.

Don't worry, it wasn't all so serious.

New Orleans is a playground, and I definitely played with my little collection of familiar places and good heart connections.  I love New Orleans because it's the kind of city that goes un-phased seeing someone riding down the street in a bicycle and covered entirely in silver paint, but screeches to a halt, mouths universally agape, when they see me going for my run in the…

Test Blog for Kenn

Test Blog for Kenn.

A prayer for Donald Vidrine

When I was organizing for the first United States Social Forum, I sent an email out in a somewhat public forum that was very hurtful to someone who I now count as a dear dear friend and confidant.  

At the time, I was a mess.  I had spent the previous 6 months working 60 hour weeks - 20 of which were volunteer hours, and the remaining 40 my day job.  I was moving across the country for work and to assist the USSF on the ground in the few weeks that preceded it.  The email was written from my parent's house where I was sleeping on the screened-in porch on a cot…

Oil and Water

I have consumed 2 plastic water bottles this morning and it's not even 10. I say this with some degree of frustration. American's consume 60 million bottles of water a day, and so I am counting myself lucky. I am living the American Dream - I have the privilege to be wasteful.

Still, 2 bottles before 10am is not a common practice for me. I am coming to the end of my stay in New Orleans, and frankly do not trust the water here. There is a 

Managing the Deepwater that was on the Horizon.

WAS being the operative word, because here we are. Welcome.

I don't usually read the paper, but sometimes do glance at headlines - especially when I'm not at home. You can get a lot about a place through the cadence and structure of a hometown newspaper headline. In this case, I am in New Orleans, the paper is the Times Picayune, and some of the headlines juxtapose one another perfectly. Above the fold on the front page:…

The Gospel according to Manny: Chapter 1

The desert is the kind of environment that requires an adaptive strategy.

People and plants are at the mercy of the elements here, and have to endure times of feast and times of famine - both of which can be fatal. And just like in those elementary school movies featuring lizards with strange plumes coming from their heads, and snakes shedding their skins, and birds hiding inside a spiny cactus, desert dwellers, particularly those of us who were not born here, can be a motley and tragically beautiful bunch.

Our adaptive strategies, born from the necessity of an extreme…

How the Revolution will be Wired

Communication is becoming increasingly web-based as the use of database-driven social media tools and apps becomes standard for social interactions, business, networking, and project management.

While this technology is being used by many, it is in the hands of relatively few.  Larger businesses and organizations with the resources to build and maintain comprehensive custom database driven technology platforms have an edge in a market where a users attention and participation online is a benchmark for success.

Smaller organizations, with much smaller…

Facebook in Fur

Facebook broke Google's lead last week for most visits to their site. Facebook had been getting a little over 2% of all visits on the world wide web a year ago, and topped off last week with 7.07% of the market share – beating Google's lead by 4 hundredths of a percentage point. What this means is that out of the estimated 200 million websites and services on the internet, 14% of all traffic was directed at two of them last week. One of them a (diversified) search engine, and the other a social media tool.

These tools obviously fill fundamental human needs. The steep increase in the…

Should Non-technical Organizations model Agile principles? (no brainer)

Organizations are nothing without structure.

Structures give people avenues for interacting with one another, and when there is a desire to accomplish work collectively they give us tools with which to share that work. There are many ways that organization an organization can choose to structure itself ranging from the very hierarchical structure in the armed forces to collaborative consensus models.

Agile development methodologies are applied in…

Pilgrim

I'm sitting in my new living space, alone, having just found out that the project I came here with dreams of doing is not moving forward. I know that I will go through a variety of different emotions as the reality of this sets in.

My dog is outside playing with a piece of bark she found. She does best when my doors are open, and her outside world and inside worlds can merge. As I move into my reality here, I become increasingly aware the degree to which she is a…

David and Goliath: a new skin for the old drum.

This blog is about mobilizing our communities in support of (and somewhat demanding) fairness in business. We have the power collectively to leverage some power, and this week I made it my hobby to develop a mechanism by which that might happen.

Imagine that the game we are about to play is your life, and you have just put it all in an 8'x4'x7' box. In this case, the box was rented from a company called 'Door to Door' (or 'City to City'),…

Nest

Right now I am in this room. I am sitting at a desk that is a horizontal hollow-core door exactly three paint cans high. I'm looking at a room that isn't quite mine yet, and just a little in awe about this whole experiment.

There's no scientific method, so no worries. The experiment is existential and starts out with a fundamental query: what if I could just do what I want?

Of course, there's…

the Persistence of Memory

I have not forgotten that I used to live on 242 Josephine St. Apartment A. Atlanta, GA.

I used to get up every morning between 7:30 and 9:00 and take my dog on a run or a long walk. Like clockwork. Sometimes, I would pass by Christy Bradley's house. I passed by her house, and the green Godfather van with the AK-47 stenciled on the spare tire cover, whenever I decided I wanted a radial bagel.

And now I do…

The Muppet Pirates

I'm sitting in a recording studio in New Orleans listening to my friends record their 4th album: two blocks away from where I am staying with a friend in the Bywater. It floors me the extent to which my life right now is a series of pretty and benevolent accidents.

At some point I decided that, as long as I'm living, I might as well make things interesting. And even more recently decided that interesting does not always have to include a broken heart. I am…

Green Eggs and Ham: a resolution.

There are a host of us who have been accused of having a Peter Pan complex out there, and we're sensitive. The inference that we might be acting childishly, or clinging to childish things is one that some of us generally avoid. 'Why even go there?', we might ask? 'What good would it do in the end?'

So - trust me - I am not turning my back on my fellow victims of Peter Pan complex accuse, when I say that my resolution this year is to have more Green…

On Moving: again.

It's midnight in the garden of Santa Fe or Atlanta, and the vertigo of having had to decide to choose between the two cities, again, is disorienting. I've been on a series of nested Odysseys and at this point am not sure that life is made up of anything but. So much so that it's hard to distinguish when they start or end. Sometimes, in order to tell yourself a story that makes sense, you have to just choose a landmark.

In this case, I am remembering the candles that I…