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. [...]
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 [...]
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: 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, [...]
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 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 [...]