shelly
Community Genius: Tips for Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers
I gave a talk at Seattle’s sixth Ignite: Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers. The text for the talk is below. A few folks were asking about the slides so I put them up on SlideShare here. I read a book a while ago by Scott Berkun, Myths of Innovation, where he noted that inspiration is much more social than you might expect. “Group Genius” similarly reviewed recent research highlighting when groups can perform collaborative creative feats beyond the possibility of any individual. That really got me thinking about how creativity plays out in my own life. [...]
CHI vs E-tech
I am at CHI this week, and last night I found myself in a conversation about the differences between CHI and e-tech (O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology). These two events have very different crowds, but they tend to focus on the same topics – innovative “human-computer-interaction” technologies. The comparison between CHI and E-tech has been very much on my mind, because I “grew up” so to speak in the research community represented by CHI, but have spent the last couple of years more immersed in the startup community represented by E-tech. My first exposure to differences in attitudes was someone in the [...]
Frayed Wire, July 11th
Yay! Today I sent around emails to interested parties announcing our “Frayed Wire” event this summer. I’ve been wanting to organize this event for a while, but all the stars aligned to have it this summer. It’s a one day event bringing together people at the intersection of art and technology, with the goal of inspiring, educating and building community through presentations, workshops, and discussions. We (in this case I mean Dorkbot Seattle) are collaborating with 911 Media Arts Center and Youngstown to make it happen. I think the Northwest is ready to push to the next phase of community [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
My O’Reilly Research Paper Got Published
My O’Reilly Facebook Research Report Published! Posted by shelly on March 12, 2008
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