Warp and Weft
I like certain holes in my jeans: the ones where brighter threads have snapped, revealing the thick white warp. Likewise, underlying weave of connections between generations often only becomes clear in hindsight. Not generations of birth, but generations of ideas. On my 30th birthday in a few months, there are two retrospectives I’d like to...
You Should Join Hacks for Democracy, Sept 15-16
Last year, I spent approximately 23,040 minutes on Amtrak, commuting from my home in Philadelphia to my office in New York. The result of all those train rides are (1) a conviction that Philadelphia’s civic technology community is growing, inventing, and collaborating in the right ways and (2) a million frequent traveler miles. On September...
Stereotype
In preparation for a workshop last month, I spent an entire evening squinting at Meetup profile photos, trying to match them up with my best guess at the ethnicity of a given first and last name. I was organizing a workshop where signups came in two parts, and some people had given an outdated or...
Chartsnthings: Behind the Curtains of NYTimes Visualizations
Catching a glimpse over someone’s shoulder as they work is one of my favorite ways to learn. It can be new keyboard-shortcut-fu for Adobe Illustrator, a more graceful way of wrestling a stuck bicycle pedal from the crankarm, or standing by while a friend reinvents an entire speech. In that vein, Chartsnthings is a blog of how New...
This Twitterology Jawn
Short of Margaret Mead in Samoa, research turns first to the most easily available or accessible data. See: fruit flies and genetics, United Nations transcriptions and machine translation, Wikipedia and online collaborative behavior. Linguists studying modern colloquial language are increasingly turning to the very public, very current Twitter. Lexicalist is a tool based on this...
Book Mix #1: The Place
According to public health researchers, the typical crack binge lasts 3.7 days. Come to think of it, that’s approximately the length of my author obsession after finishing a particularly good read. The addiction used to manifest itself in calling up a tower of books at the local library. Now it’s landing on a Wikipedia page...
Diana Lind on Opportunities for Sustainability
Urban advocate, writer, and Next American City editor Diana Lind spoke with us today about “Disrupting the Status Quo: Opportunities for Sustainability”. She gave us a clear 3-part framework in which to think about the major challenges to urban sustainability, and illustrated them with vivid examples, comparisons, and stories. Below are my visual notes, and above is a map...
Day 1: Fellowship
Last week held the first day of Code for America’s 2012 fellowship. We are more diverse in personal and professional backgrounds (illustrator, designer, developer, urban planner, lawyer-hacker, former freelancers, community organizer, entrepreneur, wilderness youth counselor, Googler, Apple-er, Esri-er, puma trainer), yet more focused in mission, than I could have imagined. Spending the year with these people...
Day 0
A little reading before the first day. Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice by Daniel Lathrop and Lauren Ruma.
Books in Sydney
Last month I had the chance to visit Sydney. The trip was short and focused: for five days I was immersed in the projects we’d been scheming up back in the States. The Harbor City’s bats and laid-back-ness reminded me of Austin, and its glam interiors and water views of Miami. My coworkers boasted a...
Farewell Google
This is the propeller hat that everyone received on their first day. We had to wear them to a company-wide happy hour that Friday and introduce ourselves. A couple of months ago, I sent this email: Hi everyone, I’m writing to let you know that I am leaving Google at the end of November. The...
Elsewhere