Archives for 2011

Houseboats, Containers, Guns and Garbage: the 2011 Ribbonfarm Field Trip

July 21, 2011 By

The first annual ribbonfarm field trip to Sausalito and Muir Woods Rodeo Beach is now done. As of July 17th, I can safely report that at least a dozen or so real people read the blog. It’s not all hyper-intelligent bots planted on the Internet by aliens just to mess with me. We started the day-long field trip on the Sausalito docks, where houseboat owner, long-time reader, sponsor and tour host Sam Penrose talked about the ideas in the book How Buildings Learn, and how they applied to what we were about to see.

Here’s a summary of the book, a Video series based on it and the Sausalito portion of the series (episode 2, starts at 9:20). Sam also flagged ribbonfarm-esque themes for the tour, such as the idea of legibility and outsider/outlaw lifestyles.

So what did we see as we trooped around behind Sam and his wife Sue? A bunch of really fascinating houseboats that totally disturb your idea of what “normal” life is or should be (how about living in a home that’s built on a converted World War II landing craft? Or one that’s clearly the product of a seriously tripping 60s imagination?) What did we hear? A bunch of associated narratives, micro and grand.

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Diamonds versus Gold

July 14, 2011 By

I divide my writing into two kinds: gold versus diamonds. Sometimes I knowingly palm cubic zirconia or pyrite onto you guys, but mostly I make an honest attempt to produce diamonds or gold. On the blog, I mainly attempt to hawk rough diamonds and gold ore. Tempo was more of an attempt at creating a necklace: polished, artistically cut diamonds set in purified gold.

I find the gold/diamond distinction useful in most types of creative information work.

What do I mean here? Both are very precious materials. Both are materials that are already precious in their natural state, as rough diamonds or gold ore. Refinement  only adds limited amounts of additional value. Both are mostly useless, but do have some uses: gold in conducting electricity, diamonds for polishing other materials. But there the similarities end.

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Storytelling for Problem-Solving

July 13, 2011 By

Yesterday, I spoke about Tempo at the SoCAL Kanban/Lean Software Meetup, hosted by Pascal Pinck. It was an interesting mixed audience of about 40 odd — designers, startup types, big company types and a sprinkling of entertainment industry people and others. Since this was Los Angeles, I decided to focus on the storytelling ideas in the book.

Here are the slides and video; both have the voice track. Should be self-explanatory whether or not you’ve read the book.

SoCAL Lean Meetup Talk

View more presentations from vgururao.

Venkatesh Rao on storytelling and complexity from Pascal Pinck on Vimeo.

The End of the Parade

July 7, 2011 By

A foundational concept in twentieth century sociology is the cohort, a group of people starting  something (such as life, employment or college) at the same time. Our view of the human world is based on the idea of cohort-based groups marching (theoretically) in lock-step through life.  From grades in school to leagues of increasing skill-levels in sports to career paths within corporations, our world is full of groups navigating the world to the sound of the same drumbeat. If all the world is a stage, the larger drama is a parade of cohorts marching, dancing or straggling along drunkenly, but rarely breaking ranks.

Something very interesting is going on with cohorts today. The parade is ending.

Cohorts used to last as coherent social units all the way from high school to retirement. Now they fall apart within a few years of college. Different  patterns of organization take over very quickly. To understand what’s going on, it’s useful to think in terms of the metaphor of racing and what happens to different start-time cohorts. Last year, I ran a series of five  5k races, and observed some very entertaining sorting effects, which I captured at the time in this sketch of my anecdotal observations (and unkind judgments):

Something very similar to this is happening in the human drama. If you’ll forgive some hyperbole, the global drumbeat is faltering. Cogs and mavericks alike are struggling.  Cogs are wandering around wondering what to do with themselves. Mavericks are so used to defining their identities in terms of breaking ranks and following the beat of a different drum, that they too are struggling with a world that is not framed by a parade. Increasingly, there is nothing to rebel against.

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California Visit: July 11 – Aug 4, including a 4th Anniversary Field Trip

June 30, 2011 By

On July 4th, it will have been FOUR years since I started ribbonfarm. It’s also been about a year since I started the Be Slightly Evil email list and 3 months since I published Tempo, which I started writing nearly 3 years ago. This is also the first ribbonfarm birthday since I quit my job in February. So somehow between 2007 and now,  I transformed myself from a solid, working engineer-citizen with a real job and a writing hobby, to a blogger/writer/random unemployed person.

So there’s a lot to celebrate, and ou’re all invited to The Ribbonfarm 4th Anniversary Field Trip, on Sunday July 17 at 10:30 AM. It consists of a tour of the Sausalito Docks and houseboats followed by lunch and a hike in the nearby Muir woods (apologies to non Bay-Area people, had to pick some location and the Bay Area has the highest concentration of ribbonfarm readers).

The field trip is free and I’ll be providing lunch, but you have to grab one of the limited tickets at the eventbrite listing linked above.

Sponsor and long-time reader Sam Penrose will be hosting. When Sam offered me a personal tour of the houseboats and docks using How Buildings Learn as a lens, the idea seemed to hit on so many high-frequency ribbonfarm themes (legibility, boats and water, aging organizations, urban infrastructure…) that I figured I had to share it.  There are some links with more background information in the eventrbrite listing.

And since the Muir woods, which inspired my going-rogue Wild Thoughts, are right there, I had to tack on a hike. We’ll pick an easy trail so it won’t demand peak physical condition. I am hardly in great shape myself anyway.

We can only handle a limited number of people. I haven’t set a precise limit yet, but it’s basically “the number of people who can troop around on the docks following Sam without him having to shout to make himself heard.”

So sign up now. We do need an RSVP so we can plan lunch. Please only sign up for extra tickets if you know for sure you’ll be bringing a friend/significant other.  Email me if you need/can offer carpooling.

The field trip is one of several open events I’ll be doing during my 4 week couchsurfing trip through California. I’ll be in the Los Angeles area July 11-14 and Bay Area July 15 – Aug 4.

Details are on the new Upcoming Events page on ribbonfarm. The other scheduled open events are two Tempo themed talks in LA (July 12, hosted by sponsor Pascal Pinck) and Santa Clara (July 19 hosted by longtime reader Sean Murphy) respectively. I am also doing a Slightly Evil improv-game party in Palo Alto hosted by sponsor Jane Huang.

All these events are open, but with limited capacity. I also plan to hang around area coffee shops in San Jose, Palo Alto, Berkeley and downtown San Francisco during my weeks in the Bay Area, and I hope some of you can drop by to chat. I’ll post details as/when on the Upcoming Events page and also tweet out locations/share on the Ribbonfarm Facebook page. I’ll also have some availability for 1:1 meetings.

I am really looking forward to this.  While I’ve traveled a lot to the Bay Area and LA for work and conferences in the past, and squeezed in the occasional off-ribbonfarm meeting, I’ve never done an extended trip like this with an open calendar, purely to meet new people.

Happy 4th of July and wish me a Happy Anniversary here :)

Never Stop Marketing, Silver Spring, MD

June 29, 2011 By
Double_time

And the indefatigable Jeremy Epstein sends his copy off on its journeys :)

H.M.S. Cock-Robin, Cambridge, UK

June 29, 2011 By
Tempo_fitzwilliam

Another gamified copy doing the rounds.

The Four Kinds of Economies

June 29, 2011 By

I don’t normally do straight-up reblogs here, but the new post, Unifying the Value Universe from Greg Rader at onthespiral.com is very relevant to some themes we are starting to attack here. It divides up value exchange into four types of economics: gift, transactional, relationship and attention that can be neatly arranged in a 2×2. As with any 2×2, the identification of the axis variables to use is key, and I think the ones Greg has picked really might be the right ones: relatedness of the parties and refinement of the value-add being exchanged (in the sense of rough vs. polished). Click on and read.  He has a more detailed analysis of how this diagram works and in particular, of transactions that cross quadrant boundaries.


Semi-Annual Roundup 2011 and Highlights for New Readers

June 24, 2011 By

Since A Brief History of the Corporation has gone unexpectedly viral (it’s been featured on kottke.org, andrewsullivan, boingboing (via Cory Doctorow) and paulkedrosky.com among others) there’s been a bit of a jump in new readers, from 3000 to 3300 or so RSS subscribers (damn, I really am threatening to break out of the D-list here). So I thought I’d do a semi-annual roundup covering the posts from the last 6 months or so to give new readers a chance to do a Vegas-style buffet over the weekend. I usually only do annual roundups. Here are the 2010, 2009, 2008 and 2007 roundups. For the new readers, I’ve also included a highlights reel of selected older posts that give you a taste of what ribbonfarm is about.

So here we go.

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Kindle Edition Status, Glossary, Global Availability, Road Trip Contd.

June 24, 2011 By

Hi folks:

I’ve been busy with background stuff for the last month. I’ve mainly been evaluating different approaches to growing this site and tried a few experimental ideas that didn’t work out well enough to post.

But I finally have a sense of where I want to take this, so expect to see much more steady action on this blog from now on.

Updates on some routine stuff:

  • The book is now available in most corners of the world via the Book Depository. In the US, Canada and UK of course, it is probably easiest to get via Amazon (click here for links).
  • Yes, yes, I am working on the Kindle edition. That’s one of the back-end things that’s holding up this blog. It’s not hard, but it IS an annoying typesetting chore (I basically have to re-typeset the LaTeX source into html, a pain).
  • I am also working on a glossary which many readers have asked for. I’ll post it here when it is reasonably complete, and include it in the next edition, whenever that happens.
  • I’ll be continuing my road trip to promote the book starting approximately July 11.  I’ll be in LA for a few days, the Bay Area for a few weeks, and Portland/Seattle/Vancouver, BC for another week or so. Stay tuned for further details, which I’ll post on ribbonfarm.com

In the mean time, thanks for your support of the book, and do let me know what else you’d like to see on this site. My overall goal is to use this site to take the book to a whole new level rather than just adding marginal value. In fact, if things go according to plan and the book turns out to have enduring value for enough people, my plan is to gradually shift the center of gravity of the conversation from the book’s future editions to this site.