Posted by Doug
Sat, 24 Jun 2006 23:29:33 GMT
Nathaniel Talbott just gave an excellent presentation on “Homesteading”, staking out on your own to build a business. It was a personal, intimate discourse on his feelings about starting out on your own. His metaphor was around settling “The Old West”. He closed by suggesting “barn raising.” If you have your “land” staked out and know what you need but just need help getting your building built, ask for help!
One thing RailsDay shows is just how much a small team can accomplish when focusing in a small amount of time. At some point, I may call upon my friends to come help me. In the mean time, if you need help raising your barn give me a call!
Posted in Community | 3 comments
Posted by Doug
Wed, 03 May 2006 00:01:04 GMT
A while back I posted a joke about classical learning curves. Tonight’s XP-Cinci is talking about leadership for change. Mark Windholtz put together a little presentation based of some of the stuff he’s learned from Gerald Weinberb. One of the interesting things is this little graph:
There’s something of a myth that as we learn we are constantly getting better. That’s represented as the black line. Weinberg says that the real learning curve is more like the red line: you stay mostly stagnant for a while and then you get a big bump. The interesting thing from tonight’s discussion is that just before your quantum jump in productivity/output/learning/whatever, you have a slight dip in performance.
The orange dotted line represents the status quo; when no real effort is put into improving. There’s still some type of improvement. If you’re lazy you still see some type of progress. You might think, why should I bother with the pain of change when I’m still getting better. There is pain with change. Weinberg’s graph of improvement (and I assume empirical evidence) shows that there’s this dip in improvement.
Maybe this all seems basic. It was enlightening to me. Often when trying to get people to accept change, it’s hard to understand why they can’t see the value of change. There’s a reason people resist change. Next time you’re trying to affect change, remember this graph.
Posted in Community | no comments
Posted by Doug
Thu, 06 Apr 2006 12:50:11 GMT
I had a conversation with a cousin of mine this weekend about her teenage kids using a social networking site. I think it was facebook, but it could have been myspace. She didn’t really know. She demonstrated some of the same “I don’t get it” mentality that Bill O’Reilly does in this video. (thanks for the link)
Danah Boyd is a PhD student at UC Berkeley. O’Reilly introduces her as an “anthropologist studying the Internet.” The story of the day is some 16 year old girl who was arrested for child pornography by publishing photos of herself on myspace. Bill has Danah on to explain what this stuff is all about. She really does do a pretty good job. I’m not an O’Reilly fan and almost never watch the show; however, I hope he has her on more often to explain that intarweb thing more often.
She said something really interesting about teenagers and social web sites. Bill asked her why they spend so much time on the web talking to their friends. Why not meet in person? Her response was that teenagers use many mediums to chat and hang out with their friends: phones, IM, and social networks. She said they would probably prefer to hang out in real space; but many parents don’t allow them to troll the neighborhood (my words) for fear of their safety.
It’s an interesting loop. As a parent I worry a great deal about just letting my kids ride their bikes where ever. When I was a kid, we did. The neighborhood was pretty much mine to roam. So, we keep our kids home to keep them safe. Kids wanting to hang out with kids, they turn to the Internet to socialize. But now we’re afraid (and rightly so) of the same people who may harm our kids physically harming them online.
Posted in Family, Internet, Community | 5 comments
