“

People talk about posts “going viral.” I won’t use those words, because they imply a really broad adoption. I am thinking of ideas being passed around on a much more personal level. I call this a “portable” idea, one that is easily passed from one person to the next to support a point they already believe in.

If you write an angry rant about sexism in the workplace, it may never leave the bubble. But a thoughtful piece may plant some ideas at the edge of the bubble that will escape. A twenty-something male programmer may not need to be personally convinced of your argument, he may already embrace it.

But if your argument is persuasive and portable, he may be emboldened to speak up the next time he overhears someone else being sexist. He may quote your words or idea. He’s using your portable idea to spread change outside of the bubble.

So, the answer to Ted’s concern is also a call to action. Don’t be afraid to preach to the choir. Don’t be discouraged by the thought that your ideas are only going to be read by people who already agree with them. Be optimistic that people at the edges of your bubbles will also read them. And from time to time, if your idea is sufficiently portable, it will escape the bubble and you will have done your part to change the world

” Portable Ideas - raganwald’s posterous

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What happened to BarCamp? For a few years at the end of the last decade, BarCamp-themed events were happening all over the world — first in big cities with like San Francisco and New York, later in smaller cities like Montreal, and even later in hamlets and villages across the globe.

But now, there are very few. Looking at the Upcoming Camps section on barcamp.org, you can see only a handful of events in North America and Europe “upcoming” — all of them actually a year or more old. There are a few pockets of vibrant activity in Asia and Africa, but for the most part it seems like the movement is played out.

…

It got hard. When we had our first BarCampMontreal, it was ~20 people. We had a few hundred people by the time we had BarCampMontreal3. It’s simply a harder and more daunting organizational process to deal with hundreds of people.

…

It got crowded. The first BarCamps were about participation, even if lo-fi; later ones had a quality of spectacle — separate creators and spectators of the event. I think that gets old quickly; not enough car chases and love stories at a BarCamp to keep spectators interested, and too tiring for actual participants to keep tap-dancing to entertain the crowd.

…

Sometimes, maybe, recognizing that something happened, and that it was important, is better than trying to pretend that it’s still happening when it’s clearly not. That might be the case with BarCamp.

” On BarCamp « Evan Prodromou

“Weaker tech communities have much more fragmentation in tools usage, much higher use of tools that are proprietary or highly segregated from a larger network, and tools that don’t do a good job of showing you the other people in your community and what they are up to.
Tools matter. Online visibility into communities is predictive of the offline community. Use tools that illuminate the community and you will grow it. I encourage community organizers in smaller markets to really think about pushing adoption of a small set of appropriate tools to gain critical mass of adoption on a limited set of distribution engines, weather that be a mailing list, a fancy social network or something you build yourself.. Having 100 or 200 people using a common tool is much more powerful than groups of 30-40 using 3-6 different tools each.”

Building Startup Communities in Emerging Markets: Promiscuity, the Hive Mind and Conference Calls in Bathroom Stalls

“Cultural homophily makes it easier to communicate but decreases the novelty (and possibly value) of the message.” /me

“Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.” Lessons Learned: The Hacker Way

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Living with people who differ—racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically—is the most urgent challenge facing civil society today. We tend socially to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves, and modern politics encourages the politics of the tribe rather than of the city. In this thought-provoking book, Richard Sennett discusses why this has happened and what might be done about it.

Sennett contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss rather than debate. In Together he explores how people can cooperate online, on street corners, in schools, at work, and in local politics. He traces the evolution of cooperative rituals from medieval times to today, and in situations as diverse as slave communities, socialist groups in Paris, and workers on Wall Street. Divided into three parts, the book addresses the nature of cooperation, why it has become weak, and how it could be strengthened. The author warns that we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper, yet he reassures us that we can do this, for the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature.

” Together - Sennett, Richard - Yale University Press

“We believe that creativity is a combinatorial force — it happens when existing pieces of knowledge, ideas, memories and inspiration coalesce into incredible new formations. And in order to make a concept (or product, or idea, or argument) fully congeal in your head, you have to first understand all the little pieces that surround it — pieces across art, design, music, science, technology, philosophy, cultural history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology. Pieces that build your mental pool of resources, which you then combine into original concepts that are stronger, smarter, richer, deeper and more impactful — the foundation of creativity.” Mission | Brain Pickings

“The Cult of Done Manifesto There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
There is no editing stage.
Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
Once you’re done you can throw it away.
Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
Destruction is a variant of done.
If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
Done is the engine of more.” Bre Pettis | I Make Things - Bre Pettis Blog - The Cult of Done Manifesto

“

As I said before, focus requires flow. Flow requires the omission of aspects of reality that are boring or stressful.

But it is obvious the Universe is often boring and stressful.

The genius creates his own mental universe with all the boring and stressful bits removed. In other words, with most of the Universe removed. Part of the True Art of Genius (TAG) is to know what to remove.

HINT: the boring, stressful parts.

You can automate the removal of some boring, stressful parts of life via TODO lists, software, the division of labour, and so on, if you are that way inclined. Or set up systems to follow that will avoid stressful, boring things. Or you can defer boring, stressful things to others. At other times you just ignore the boring, stressful aspects of the Universe.

The genius, inhabiting this TAG-induced mental universe then proceeds to flow and create all sorts of things.

” Splunderousnoog - Non Specific Genius Complex