As Mark writes, Brainpark has been selected to the final four for Launchpad at Enterprise 2.0. As the selections were based on community voting, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who took the time to vote.
Recently we ditched cable at home and moved to a setup where we have an old PC connected to the TV. It’s been an eye opening change for the better. While I realize we’re on the ‘bleeding edge’, it points to cable providers having some massive challenges in front of them.
One example of the positive changes, I watch way more TED talks now. I highly recommend these two talks that are focused on creativity, it’s value in our society and how we foster it.
Elizabeth Gilbert talk on nurturing creativity speaks to it from the perspective of the genius, ie the successful artist. It’s an enjoyable talk with humour from someone who recently acquired, and now lives with, the title of creative genius.
Sir Ken Robinson‘s talk is about how schools kill creativity. As with Elizabeth, the talk is actually pretty funny and both could have side careers in standup. He approaches the topic from the perspective of how we educate children and instill creativity. He makes some bold statements that demand some consideration today. He points to a school system that is failing us all. Unfortunately the people that system impacts the most aren’t tall enough to even ride the water slides little on inact real change.
Enjoy, let me know what you think or other related talks we should be watching.
Genius is We, not You!
If you haven’t seen this Ted talk with Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing genius, please watch it when you have time. In a strange way, her thoughts related to genius align well with Christopher Alexander’s concept of the unselfconscious society. The idea that with the renaissance, we created a modern of notion of individual genius. Elizabeth talks about how previous generations viewed genius as something disembodied and not tied to the individual, not unlike little elves that visited to lend a creative hand. It’s about we not you!
If you know anyone looking for a great job in Guelph, Ontario, send them me way asap! Specifically we’re looking for:
As well, if you just have tips on how to get the word out there about our open positions, let me know?
A quick all-over-the-place post.
MeshU
Once again thanks for the Mesh crew for putting on Mesh and MeshU in Toronto last week. Organizing events like this can be a thankless gig at the best of times. I was lucky enough to speak at MeshU and I will make excuses in saying I had little time to prepare. If you were in my session I hope I was better than a “gaping hole in the schedule”. Something tells me I won’t need an agent anytime soon to handle the flood of requests for speaking engagements.
Awards
While it technically is tooting my own horn, I’m actually tooting the horn for the amazing crew I’m lucky enough to spend my work days with. BrainPark was recently recognized as one of the “Top 25 Canadian IT Up and Comers” by Branham.
I’m more proud of this one, however, as it speaks more to how we do things rather than what we do. We’ve been recognized as one of “WorldBlu’s Most Democratic Workplaces 2009“.
In both cases, we’re recognized amongst some great companies so congratulations to everyone at BrainPark. I’d like to tell you to take the rest of the week of but that wouldn’t be very democratic of me.
I’m fortunate to have to chance to speak at the sold out meshU tomorrow in Toronto. It will, however, be a late night prepping tonight. If you’re attending, please be patient with me and realize I’m a late sub and have had little time to prepare. Make sure to say hi at meshU or Mesh as I’ll be at both events.
Thanks again to Mark, Mathew, Mike, Rob, Stuart and the many others who toil to make these events happen each year.
I’m forever saying, to anyone who hasn’t yet tuned my voice out, that search will soon be like browsing is today. No one browses the web anymore. We all, however, spend too much time searching today, oh the avenues we have available to us. I can search in more places today than I ever thought possible.
Here’s the issue, I don’t want to search. I’m as interested in searching on my computer as I am in searching for my keys every morning or that one sock. It’s a painful means to an end I want stopped. Give me that Alfred dude batman has who’ll hand me my sock and keys just as I’m about to say “where’s my soc…oh, thanks Alfred”.
Add to this that I don’t want to put things in folders, name them creatively, tag them etc, all aimed at surrounding the objects with every conceivable piece of meta data possible in an attempt to predict the exact context in the future in which I’ll try to recall them.
So, examples of a glimpse of a better world? I present Tineye. The most publicized usage for tineye is seeing how other people are using a particular photo. That’s incredibly useful to a niche I’m not in. The usage I’m interested in relate to a more human search.
Check out how Ali used tineye. Here’s what I want. I’m walking home tonight from work. I walk by the church you may have noticed if you’ve been to Guelph. I consider how cool that church would look in various lighting and realize that tons of photos have likely been taken of this place. I pull out my camera and snap a picture. That photo is my search query. Hopefully tineye will show me loads of photos people have taken of that church, maybe even connect me with wikipedia and other information about the church.
Realize what I did NOT do. I didn’t craft the perfect search query. I didn’t tag anything. I didn’t even have to get the name of the church.
Why am I thinking about all this? Well let’s say that at brainpark, we’re hoping to do what I’ve described above with images but with your work product. Allow you to stop searching and get back to getting work done.
Last reminder, tonight is DemoCampGuelph8. Get out and join us at The Albion! Sign up to attend and introduce yourself tonight.
Some notes from a paper I’m writing here at Brainpark…
In his book Notes On The Synthesis Of Form, Christopher Alexander talks about architecture as form, context, and ensemble:
“The form is a part of the world over which we have control, and which we decide to shape while leaving the rest of the world as it is. The context is that part of the world which puts demand on this form; anything in the world that makes demands of the form is context. Fitness is a relation of mutual acceptability between these two. In a problem of design we want to satisfy the mutual demands which the two make on one another. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence.”
Applying this to knowledge management (KM), traditional KM has focused almost solely on the form, ie the resulting documents we have control over. They’ve ignored the context. As Alexander explains, it’s the context that stresses and places demands on that form. Forms don’t fail in isolation, they fail because of the demands of a context. We need a new view of KM that’s aware, and understands the concept, of context and strives for fitness between form and context.
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