Gail Taylor told me an excellent story last Saturday that reminded me of an incident at the Internet Identity Workshop this past December. I was doing something that I am deeply opposed to — participating in a face-to-face conference without being fully present. Basically, I was sitting in the middle of the space doing work [...]
One of the sessions I sat in on at last week’s Nonprofit Software Development Summit was, “Hierarchy on the Fly: Making Collaborative Projects Work Without Predefined Structures.” Amanda Hickman and Mark Libkuman, the leaders of the session, discussed some specific cases, and we also had a good discussion about general issues. (LWG) The discussion [...]
Back when Chris Dent and I started Blue Oxen Associates, we often referred to something called the The Blue Oxen Way. It was something that we both understood and recognized, but that we never actually articulated. Over the years, I tried to rectify this, and I generated pages and pages of notes (including three years [...]
I spent this past Saturday in Sebastopol “tutoring” Gail Taylor, Todd Johnston, and Tiffany Von Emmel on online Collaborative Tools. I lured Matthew O’Connor into helping by boasting of Gail, Todd, and Tiffany’s deep thinking about and practice of collaboration. (LVC) One of our exercises was to walk through all of our respective digital [...]
How do you improve the productivity of software developers? Software engineering guru, Martin Fowler, has a surprising answer: Give them bigger screens. (LV4) Thinking like this fascinates me. In Super Size Me, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock suggests that the way to improve U.S. schools is to eliminate junk food from cafeterias, and cites studies correlating [...]
I spent two days this past week at Aspiration‘s Nonprofit Software Development Summit. I’ve organized several events with Allen Gunn (Gunner), so it was fun to take off the organizer hat and just be a participant. I had no agenda going into the conference, which was also quite pleasant. I attended because I love the [...]
One of the reasons I joined the board of the Leadership Learning Community (LLC) is that leadership and collaboration are closely related. But what exactly is the nature of this relationship? That is a question I’ve dutifully ignored for the past four years. Thankfully, the good folks at the LLC have unwittingly encouraged me to [...]
In the second half of 2006, I took a hard look at my list of projects and opportunities. I decided that I needed to be brutally honest about what I wanted to accomplish with Blue Oxen Associates, and that ultimately, I wanted two things: (LTL) To have a wider impact (LTM) To give [...]
From Kellan Elliott-McCrea: Check out the iRAN Project, a Flickr collection of photos that show another side to life in Iran. (LT5) I’m a child of immigrants, and like all children of immigrants, I have a deep, almost biological understanding of what it’s like to live in a world with multiple worldviews. On the [...]
On the first day of WikiSym in Denmark last August, I spotted Alex Schroeder before the workshop began and went over to say hello. Pleasantries naturally evolved into a discussion about Purple Numbers. (Yes, I’ve got problems.) Alex suggested that unique node identifiers were more trouble than they were worth, because in practice, nodes that [...]
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