The Tristate area Refactorings meetup group is holding its monthly meetup in New York, on Wednesday (the 12th) at Pete’s Tavern at 6:30 PM. The group has been active online and offline for about six months now, thanks to the efforts of Jay Hinton and Adam Hogan, and I am looking forward to finally meeting a few people I’ve only interacted with online so far.

If you can make it, it would be great to see you there. Email me or RSVP on Facebook if you plan to attend. If you do, you’ll also be able to join the associated Facebook group (as with the Bay Area chapter, the group limits membership to people who have met other group members offline).

Venue: Pete’s Tavern, 129 E 18th Street, New York, NY 10003
Time: 6:30 PM

For the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with shorter forms of writing, ranging from one-line aphorisms to shorter 100-200 word vignettes. I find I enjoy the challenge of producing interesting prose at these lengths. My writing seems to exhibit a barbell curve of comfort. The nightmare zone for me is between 500 to 1500 words. Curiously enough, that’s the length that dominates both old and new media. I can do less than that or more than that easily, but staying within that range feels like squeezing blood from a rock.

Anyway, for the last two weeks, on Sunday evenings, I’ve been doing a rather silly “aphorism on demand” thing on Facebook where people throw topics at me and I come with aphorisms on the fly. I thought I’d share the output. Thanks to my Facebook buddies for playing. I might keep doing this on a semi-regular basis, so if you are interested in watching the live show, follow me on Facebook.

Here are the results of the first two shows. I am omitting topics and names of people who proposed them. If you tweet any of these, cc @ribbonfarm

[Read more…]

Greg is a 2013 blogging resident, visiting us from his home blog over at On the Spiral. His residency will explore the theme “Individuality and Decision-Making” over several posts.

I think I have finally sorted out my uneasiness with the so-called deliberate practice hypothesis.  Most Tempo readers will be familiar with deliberate practice (here, here, here & here) so I will just offer a quick refresher.  The idea is that abilities that what we commonly perceive as talent are actually the result of painstakingly focused training.  Anders Ericsson, whose research has provided much of the grist for the mill, summarizes deliberate practice as:

activities designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance.

I am not the only person to express mixed feelings about the concept.  Others have noted that deliberate practice addresses the known better than the unknown, i.e. it applies to domains requiring mastery better than those requiring creativity.

But what is the alternative?  Without an alternative, criticism carries the scent of sour grapes.

The advocates of deliberate practice generally juxtapose it with either a) belief in the value of innate talent or b) more mundane varieties of accrued experience.  Their claim is that practice counts for more than natural talent, and in order to reach the highest levels of mastery that practice must take a specific form.

My objection to this framing, I realize now, is that deliberate practice is presented as the methodology that is active and therefore earned, while innate talent and non-deliberate(?) practice are portrayed as passive and unearned.  Though never explicitly stated, the normative implications are only thinly veiled in much of the non-academic cheerleading on the subject.   

I think it is a mistake to believe that learning must be deliberate in order to be active or earned.  There is an another alternative that is equally active and equally intentional but not deliberate.  That alternative is immersion.  I mean immersion in the same way it is applied to learning a foreign language…the practice of actively placing yourself in an unfamiliar environment and exposing yourself to novel stimuli. [Read more…]

Busy week so I thought I’d do a roundup and let you guys catch up a bit with a roundup. The year has had a rocky but solid (heh!) start, with some pretty strange posts. Not counting a couple of meta posts, we have had 15 posts in the first third of the year, 9 by me, and 6 by residents.

1. The Economics of Social Status (Kevin)
2. So I Shall be Written, So I Shall be Performed (Mike)
3. A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality
4. The Locust Economy
5. The Wave of Unknowing (Drew)
6. Social Dark Matter: On Seeing and Being Seen
7. The Dead-Curious Cat and the Joyless Immortal
8. Honesty and the Human Body (Kevin)
9. Binoculars versus Cameras
10. Solidarity and Recursion (Mike)
11. Adventures in Amateur Talking-Headery
12. Machine Cities and Ghost Cities (Drew)
13. Stone-Soup for the Capitalist’s Soul
14. Eternal Hypochondria of the Expanding Mind
15. Schumpeter’s Demon

The call for sponsorships a couple of weeks ago has so far brought in $1850 this year from 17 sponsors, which I think beats the total for the same time last year. Thank you, and feel free to chip in to support the site as and when you’re able.

The popular hit of the lot was probably the Locust Economy piece. So in this first third of 2013, the Iron Blogger was not beaten by resident challengers.

I seem to be on a weird sort of immortality/eternity kick (three posts with one of those words right in the title) mixed with some experimentation with story-telling in parable form.  Every time I think I am settling down to develop some meaty theme, something distracts me and I go down a new bunny trail. It’s going to be a year of weirdness.

Here’s the complete 2012 roundup, from where you can backtrack to ribbonfarm prehistory and posts in cuneiform if you are so inclined.

Another year, another set of lessons big and small, pleasant and harsh. It’s time for the third annual call for sponsorships and backstage-peek day. If you read the 2012 and 2011 posts, you know the drill.  First, we’ll talk money, then we’ll go backstage to talk philosophy, do a little retrospective and look out at the year ahead. Things are now getting complicated enough that I need a little table of contents. If this goes on, next year I might need video. Here’s the agenda. Skip what doesn’t interest you.

1. Grow Branches and Roots
2. The Bristlecone Pine Business Model
3. Refactor Camp 2013
4. Refactorings Meetups and Online Groups
5. Ribbonfarm Consulting Exits Stealth Mode
6. The Gig Economy and Ribbonfarm
7. Be Slightly Evil and Gervais Principle series finales
8. Buy Me a Coffee retired, Crowdfunded Features in the works
9. Resident Blogger Tryouts
10. Now Reading

Money first. In 2012, 29 sponsors together contributed $3750 to support this site, a 66% increase over 2011 ($2250 from 25 sponsors). For 2013, four early birds have already contributed $300.  If you were considering sponsoring this year, consider this your cue and go ahead. The money is starting to make a serious difference.

Now for the philosophy. Every year, I add a single line to my evolving business philosophy. In 2011, my first problogger year, the line was go where the wild thoughts are. In 2012, it was go deep, young man. 

For 2013, the line is grow branches and roots.  What do I mean by that?

[Read more…]

Greg is a 2013 blogging resident, visiting us from his home blog over at On the Spiral. His residency will explore the theme “Individuality and Decision-Making” over several posts.

A couple weekends ago, during a break in the scheduled programming at Refactor Camp, I was walking around with Kartik Agaram and as we passed by a concession stand he off-handedly remarked: “I know things are going well when I can walk by something like that without experiencing any temptation.”  This was one of those statements that easily eludes our cognitive filters, but it becomes rather perplexing when you begin to tease it apart.

Why should temptation be easier to resist when things are going well?

What does it even mean for “things” to go well?

There are easy answers like – when we are preoccupied with more engaging tasks, temptations are perceived as relatively less appealing.  However, the easy answers are easily contradicted.  Sometimes when things are going well we are so preoccupied that we find ourselves guzzling coffee and eating take-out every night.  Apparently things need to be going well in a particular way in order for temptation to diminish. [Read more…]

Tomorrow is the National Day of Unplugging, a concept that extends the Jewish idea of Sabbath into a more general, secular idea. I wrote a post about it on ribbonfarm. Check out the site, and consider observing the NDU.

Here’s the blurb from the Sabbath Manifesto site, which appears to be promoting the idea. A very Tempo-ish idea of figuring out how to slow down.

Way back when, God said, “On the seventh day thou shalt rest.”  The meaning behind it was simple: Take a break. Call a timeout. Find some balance. Recharge.

Somewhere along the line, however, this mantra for living faded from modern consciousness. The idea of unplugging every seventh day now feels tragically close to impossible. Who has time to take time off? We need eight days a week to get tasks accomplished, not six.

The Sabbath Manifesto was developed in the same spirit as the Slow Movement, slow food, slow living, by a small group of artists, writers, filmmakers and media professionals who, while not particularly religious, felt a collective need to fight back against our increasingly fast-paced way of living. The idea is to take time off, deadlines and paperwork be damned.

In the Manifesto, we’ve adapted our ancestors’ rituals by carving out one day per week to unwind, unplug, relax, reflect, get outdoors, and get with loved ones. The ten principles are to be observed one day per week, from sunset to sunset. We invite you to practice, challenge and/or help shape what we’re creating.

Good idea. Now go unplug.

On the weekend of March 2 and 3, we will be organizing the second annual Refactor Camp. The theme for Refactor Camp 2013: Jailbreaking the Bay Area. The event will be held at the San Francisco zoo, same as last year.

Regular tickets are $75 and sponsoring attendee tickets are $150.  The ticket includes lunch on both days, and is organized on a no-profit-no-loss basis. As with last year, the goal is to do a small and intimate event, where the intent of the talks is to catalyze small group conversations. We’ve kept the event size the same (40 odd attendees), but extended the event to two days instead of one, based on feedback from last year’s attendees, many of whom will be attending again this year.

Approximately 28 of the 40 odd available spots are already taken by early invitees, so if you are in the area (or are able to drive/fly in) and would like one of the remaining dozen spots, grab ’em while they’re still available. You can register via the link above.  The link also has details on the theme and a detailed agenda.

This year, the event will have a slightly broader footprint, since a handful of people are flying in from other parts of the country (including me of course, from Seattle).

As with last year, we’ll have a field session at the zoo itself, and another on the beach across the street.

Last year, after the inaugural Refactor Camp, we started a Facebook group for the attendees that has since grown into an active online/offline community with monthly meetups.  If you’re interested in the group, this is the easiest opportunity for you to join, since the membership rule is that you must meet at least two current members in the real world.

The Theme

If you’ve been following my writing over the last year, you probably know that I’ve developed a growing personal interest in urbanism, particularly the problem of revitalizing aging cities through retrofitting of clever technology. From Uber to Airbnb, this sort of thing is already happening, and what interests me is whether such technological developments can be connected up to ideas like superlinear corporations, civic entrepreneurship and so forth.

I think of these possibilities as “jailbreaking” old cities with a lot of locked-up potential. San Francisco is a particularly good example to think about in detail, but I am hoping the insights that emerge from our discussions will be applicable more broadly.

We’ve got a really stimulating mix of talks that will touch on everything from real estate markets and ride-share models to school reform and the charter city project in Honduras. One of the highlights is a simulation exercise on Saturday afternoon,  devoted to figuring out how to build a post-apocalyptic survivalist community, complete with zombie defenses.

New York Area Readers Meetup on January 30

Finally, if you’re in the New York area, and are interested in meeting other readers in the area, message me. A few volunteers have started an online/offline meetup group in the area, and are hoping to get enough critical mass going to do something like Refactor Camp on the East Coast. The first meeting will be on January 30.  I won’t be able to attend, but hopefully I’ll be able to make it to one of the future meetups.

I definitely hope we can pull off an East Coast Refactor Camp sometime, perhaps as early as this fall. Though I’ve now moved to the West Coast, I think I am fundamentally not a one-coast guy, so it would be nice to develop roots for ribbonfarm in the New York area.

I was a reluctant convert to the idea of doing events related to ribbonfarm, but after over two years of experimentation with formats ranging from 1:1 coffees with people, to small meetups to a larger event like Refactor Camp, I’ve really started to enjoy this aspect of writing a blog. Let’s see how long we can keep this going. I even bought the refactorcamp.org domain, so I’ve made at least a $10 commitment to keep this going.

LIFT, Geneva Next Week

Finally, I’ll be in Geneva to speak at the LIFT conference next week. If you’re planning to attend, do find me and say hello. I’ll  have some time for coffee etc. too, on Feb 6-8, in case you are interested in meeting up outside the conference.

This will be my third speaking gig outside the United States, so I think I can now call myself an “internationally known speaker” now. Woohoo, the climb up the talking-head greasy pole continues.

I’ve been writing ribbonfarm as a solo act for over five years now. Blogging can get to be a pretty lonely activity, so I figured I could use some company for a change. I didn’t quite like any of the existing models of collaboration in blogging, so I invented my own: the blogging residency. Think of it as something of a cross between a sabbatical and a writer-in-residence program.

We’ll start our little experiment with Mike Travers of Omniorthogonal, Kevin Simler of Melting Asphalt and Drew Austin of Kneeling Bus, all of whom contributed guest posts last year. For me at least, their posts were like breaths of fresh air in this increasingly insular little refactoring shop, which has gotten a little too full of my own in-a-rut ideas over the years.

Each of them will be contributing between 4 to 6 posts here through the year. Check out the Blogging Residencies page to learn more about the “refactored perception” themes they plan to explore.  Thanks to your ongoing support since I began accepting sponsorships, I can afford to actually pay these guys small honorariums for their contributions. So there is hope yet for the future of publishing.

To kick things off, I asked all three of them to articulate their understanding of “refactoring,” the umbrella theme here at ribbonfarm. So here you go (and for once, I can grab the popcorn and let somebody else defend their ideas).

[Read more…]