Step by Step Instructions for Brainstorming your Innovation Team’s Next Project

Step by Step Instructions for Brainstorming your Innovation Team’s Next Project:  AKA S.L.A.P. Brainstorming (I just made that up.  SLAP.)

Background:
You have an innovation team that is 5-9 people, a mix of people with design, research, and development background, but all on the team because they are innovators.  You have just wrapped up on your last big project (s) or milestones, and now it’s time to brainstorm about what’s next — either some cool/exciting new feature on an existing product, or the Next Big Thing related to the team’s domain of expertise.
Who to include:

Innovators:  A mix of design, research, and development [...]

BarCamp study results are IN!

So here’s the question: if everyone can get all the information they need online with the proliferation of blogs, Wikipedia, online books, etc., why do they still go to conferences?
Based on our study results of BarCamp Seattle (only just now posted on resources.pathable.com), here’s my answer in seven words: professional friends and a feeling of community.
Cheesy, I know. You don’t tend to think friendships and sense of community really matter in a collegial, professional context, but you know what? They really do.
Here’s the longer story:
We created Pathable because, in our own experience, meeting people at conferences is hard. Sure, you [...]

Flash Mob for Obama

Flash Mob for Obama
Posted by shelly on November 08, 2008

I experienced a bona fide flash mob on Tuesday! We were hanging out in Capitol Hill at Neumo’s (bar) watching the elections on the big screen drinking beer. After Obama’s speech about 200 people poured out into the streets. It was an extremely excited crowd! Over the next couple of hours, it evolved into complete instanity with thousands of people.
I have documented here the actual text messages that led to all of my friends being there: a mix of direct messages, messages from twitter, messages from dodgeball, and messages on Swaggle [...]

Look Ma, I made a Theremin at Dorkbot Kit Night!

This Wednesday we had a “kit night” at our Dorkbot meeting. Everyone pitched in 30 bucks and you could chose to make a solar powered theremin, a tv be gone, or a little spinning robot (BEAM). Josh Kopel gave us all a lesson in using a soldering iron, and then we were off! Kit night sold out with 40 kit makers, and we used some of the money to buy and donate soldering tools to 911 Media Arts Center.
I made a theremin! And, I was amazed when it actually worked as I held it under the light. The most important [...]

Conversation on my Garage Door: From Barbarella to Obama

My garage door has become a hotbed of attention lately.
A few years ago I had a tagging problem because my house is on on such a busy street. The city was sending me threatening letters (deal with graffiti or pay heavy fine) so I painted a Barbarella image on my garage door. I thought, surely even graffiti artists won’t paint over someone else’s art…my impression is street artists do have their own ethic…

Aside from a few, small tags I could easily paint over, the garage was safe for a couple of years. Then a few weeks ago someone came in [...]

Disable deploying to your database server in Capistrano

Update: I found a better way, see below
I use Capistrano to not only manage deployment tasks, but also to do lots of data management and monitoring tasks. By default Capistrano will try to deploy your code to whatever server you have set to the :db role, and will try to run the migrations there too. I don’t want to hassle with getting our full rails environment working on the db server so this was always a hassle.
A temporary solution was to just set the :db role to the same server as the :app role and the migrations would get run [...]

My O’Reilly Research Paper Got Published

My O’Reilly Facebook Research Report Published!
Posted by shelly on March 12, 2008

Facebook Events

Facebook Events
Posted by shelly on December 11, 2007