Politics, the environment, technology, activism. And stuff.
Posted in General on Jan 30th, 2010
Do you tend to see innovations as massive paradigm-shifting change, or as the incremental achievements built on longer-term trends? Obviously, there’s some truth in both perspectives, but I think that most people have a tendency to lean one way or the other in how they interpret what’s going on in the world. If you know me, [...]
Posted in General on Jan 28th, 2010
I’ve been thinking a bunch about the challenges of making cultural transformation in the organizations I work with here at Groundwire. It’s a tough challenge. The first step, it seems, is about naming the changes we want to help folks make. Here are some rough notes that popped out as I was gathering my thoughts for [...]
Posted in General on Jan 26th, 2010
The Six Americas of Climate ChangeThe Facts of Cap and Trade
Posted in General on Jan 24th, 2010
Center for a New American Dream has a nicely done “Alternative Gift Registry” tool (currently the #4 Google result for “gift registry”!) that allows you to create gift registries that de-emphasize consumerism (used goods, donations to charity, experiences rather than stuff, etc.). This is a great example of a nonprofit advocacy group coming up with [...]
Posted in General on Jan 24th, 2010
Continuing on the theme of quick-and-dirty benchmarking of the forthcoming Plone 4 release, I decided to revisit an experiment I did about a year ago in which I looked at the memory usage on startup of Plone 3 vs. Plone 4. In December 2008, I found that Plone trunk used 36% less memory on startup [...]
Posted in General on Jan 21st, 2010
Profiting From Haiti’s CrisisThe limits of innovationNew York Times to Charge Frequent Readers of Web Site – NYTimes.comNYTimes plans a modern, flexible paywall. I actually hope it succeeds, quality journalism needs a good business model.The Seattle TalksSpeaker Chopp unfurls his tax roadmap“See you lata’” is the new “beta.” Exploring an epidemic of opting out.New [...]
If you didn’t already think that one of the most important long-term issues in our society is the twin hydra of corporate personhood and campaign finance reform, today’s Supreme Court ruling should be a shocking eye-opener for you. Make no mistake, this is serious, worrisome stuff. It’s time for all of the groups in the “progressive” [...]
Posted in General on Jan 19th, 2010
Plone 4 is about to leave its alpha testing phase and enter beta testing prior to a final release. One of the many things the Plone team has worked really hard on in this release cycle is improving Plone’s performance. Plone core developer Hanno Schlichting has blogged about this a number of times, and deserves [...]
Posted in General on Jan 19th, 2010
Back in November, Alex Steffen of Worldchanging.com delivered a bravado two-night set of talks at Seattle Town Hall, exploring a hopeful vision for a prosperous, sustainable future and the opportunity that cities like Sattle have to lead this transformation. They’re now available online, and I certainly plan to load them up on my iPod ASAP. Night One: [...]
Posted in General on Jan 15th, 2010
The future of UI will be boringOpen Source Promoted in New California PolicyLegislators to hold phone-in town hallDavid Glick: Come improve Dexterity at the Tahoe Snow Sprint
Posted in General on Jan 12th, 2010
After some soul-searching, and a prod from my dear friend and inspiration role model Sam Dorman, I’ve decided to unplug myself from “web 2.0,” “the social nets” or whatever we call the rapidly-expanding tarpit of social networking sites these days. Long story short: I’m increasingly convinced that the constant stream of tweets, status updates, Facebook wall [...]
Posted in General on Jan 12th, 2010
And the Second Greenest City Is…Voting for a Climate Neutral Future
Posted in General on Jan 12th, 2010
It occurred to me yesterday that the real challenge we[1] face is not the question of “how do we apply technology tools to organizations?” but more “how do we help organizations & people transform themselves so that they are more able to harness the power of technology?” [1] “we” = those of us standing astride the [...]
Posted in General on Jan 6th, 2010
Skinner Box? There’s an App for That – O’Reilly Radar
Posted in General on Jan 3rd, 2010
Discussing the merits of the astrolabe vs. the iPhone in a recent TED talk, Tom Wujec offered the following idea, which I paraphrase slightly: With “improved” technology, what we gain is precision and accuracy; what we lose is a sense of connection and context and wholeness.