IGNITER

Pardon the profanity, but I’m tired of the bullshit.

People like to be right. Often being right means making other people wrong. This is not productive.

Saying that it is productive because you are engaging in debate… does not make it productive either.

All you are really doing is trying to win to be right. And who does that help? You. Who doesn’t it help? Everyone else.

If you want to be productive, contribute. Instead of being right, help the recipient of your righteousness try and explore their issue further. And if you find you’re not learning through the conversation then, again, stop trying to be right. If you can’t do that, shut up and do something else.

So, self-righteousness rant complete, time to get back to work.

Peace, love, and let’s fix this mess.

PS… if you ever find yourself in conversation with me and find yourself a recipient of righteousness… please, please, please call my bullshit. We’ll save ourselves a lot of time.

If mothering isn’t one of the more important things that shape our society and our future, I don’t know what is.

Somehow though I think it gets taken for granted. That couldn’t be more clear from the announcement that the leading organization that researches the topic is being forced to close. How is it that an organization like this cannot get more support?

Of course, people are making themselves heard on the interwebz. My partner Shawna started up a Facebook Group and the blogosphere and media are taking notice too.

• http://www.thestar.com/living/article/775217–mothering-research-centre-to-close
• http://thestar.blogs.com/anndouglas/2010/03/as-soon-as-word-got-out-that–the-association-for-research-on-mothering-was-going-to-close-its-doors-the–mothers-started-ta.html
• http://thestar.blogs.com/anndouglas/2010/03/interview-with-andrea-oreilly-arms-mama-speaks-frankly-about-whats-ailing-her-baby.html
• http://www.parentcentral.ca/parent/newsfeatures/article/775217–mothering-research-centre-to-close
• http://www.picklemethis.com/2010/03/03/the-association-for-research-on-mothering-and-me/
• http://www.parentopia.net/blog/2010/03/association-for-research-on-mothering.html
• http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2010/03/04/closure-of-association-for-research-on-mothering/
• http://www.phdinparenting.com/2010/03/02/a-day-in-the-life-of-marginalizing-fringe-groups-in-canada/
• http://plainsfeminist.blogspot.com/2010/03/closure-of-association-for-research-on.html

It’s an important organization that runs very lean. I can’t help but believe that this should be one that the global community can rally and save. First step, join the group.

Yes, even that helps as it’s a channel to broadcast and connect for the next actions that we can take. And yes, the numbers of participants do matter. It helps people take notice.

So please do. And please spread the word. For mothers and the future of mothering.

P.S. Thanks Mom for everything you’ve done to bring me into this world and guide me into who I am.

I am privileged. Very privileged, and too often I lose sight of that and what it means.

As a healthy and able mid-thirties, white, upper-class, educated male, I am in a position where I don’t face discrimination in any way. I can go for a run in the park at night, breeze through airport security, meet someone for the first time and have the luxury of going about life undisturbed. And this is of course because everything I use and interact with is desinged with me in mind, usually by people very much like me. Physical things like chairs, cars, devices like my blackberry. Virtual things like websites, apps, content. Structural things like laws, regulations, customs and norms.

My partner, taught me long ago to recognize and acknowledge it. That it’s something that goes back centuries and that if we really want change we need to break through it, to not perpetuate it.

As the pace of change quickens, by force and by intent, being aware of this is ever more important. It’s not enough to design a product or program to serve a target market or user, we have to think about how it perpetuates that privilege. Can it even be designed to make privilege irrelevant? And think, what if we made privilege irrelevant one day? what would that say about what we’ve created, about what our society had become?

As someone of particular privilege I carry a lot of responsibility to do that. Not because it’s my fault for having the privilege, but simply because I have it. It is because of that privilege that I have the opportunity to do what I do, and so I will use it to do what I can to make it irrelevant.

And if you are reading this I ask you to do the same. You may not be a healthy, wealthy, white male, but my bet is that if you stop a second to look, you’ll find find just how privileged you are too. And that is a good start.

Last year was a pivot for me. But while I’m entering with a new stance, my direction, my intention, remains.

To that, Ryan Coleman and I crafted this:

To have fun, live well, and make the world better by facilitating ambitious ventures.

Like last year, my focus rests on social technologies and how they are shifting our culture, disrupting and enabling the systems of our society, and changing the way in which we came together. ChangeMedium is the charitable expression of that, Shouldless is the commercial expression, and ProjectX is the ongoing work – re-inspired by the Vartana review – to develop tools and approaches to building those things.

In the fall of last year we launched ChangeMedium and our first events, explored the future of the web, and began experimenting with some approaches to facilitating ambitious ventures.

Looking back at last year, it’s clear I can’t predict what will come of the year ahead, but I am pretty sure the direction it will follow.

Thankfully it will be a journey of many. Without that, it wouldn’t be much fun.

Hopefully it will make the world better. Without that, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

Certainly it will be an adventure. Without that, it wouldn’t be much of anything.

I was just writing an update to some great partners of mine and realized I needed to include a recap of 2009 for some context on what’s next. That of course reminded me that I’d yet to post one. So here goes.

Into the Wild

2009 was a pivotal one for me – a year of transition. It was full of new adventures and an unexpected closure of an old one. 2009 started with a bunch of excitement and energy around the Social Venture Commons, VenTwits, and Thread.io. A group of us had come together and were sweating out an experiment in peer-producing some apps that we thought could help people come together and build a better world by using public micro-messaging. We had some encouraging feedback on the concepts but we missed the mark and didn’t get enough traction (users or funding). We had felt we were constantly 2 weeks ahead of ‘everyone else’ and when we took stock of what we felt we’d need to get to a viable venture, we just couldn’t do it with what we had. I had failed at guiding us through to a viable product and estimating what it would take to get us there.

At the same time, my past life in energy and finance rose up and I became engaged in designing a financing framework around what the Green Energy Act Alliance hoped would make Ontario North America’s leading jurisdiction for renewable energy (it did) and particularly community power. The Act was tabled in May which then prompted another engagement to help the CPFund plan for a transition to the new reality. That plan, if successful, stands to be a great example of social finance and turn the renewable energy finance sector on it’s head.

Closing out the summer, my social finance sojourn continued with the opportunity to co-lead a Canadian contingent to the Social Capital Markets conference. Next came the privilege of doing a review of Vartana – an ambitious project that aimed to change the way the charitable sector banked in Canada. And then things shifted.

On my birthday I learned that a company I founded was in discussions on being acquired. Those talks came to fruition in early October, and while not a big exit by many standards, for our lean life it was/is a big turning point. It meant taking a breath and taking stock. It meant getting ‘our house in order’. It meant saying thank-you to those who’ve supported me.

An adventurous chapter with an unexpected plot twist was over. Thankfully it’s part of a book that I love… one of those books I just can’t put down.

It seems that every day I find myself wanting an iPad for something. Those moments are coming not from being on the computer, but from going about my daily life, and that’s what I think is what the iPad is about.

I started out thinking it would be ideal for my kids to use their favourite learning sites and with the attached keyboard as my mom’s next computer for the basic email and browsing that she really needs it for. But I’m also now finding a bunch of other uses, like browsing for movies to rent, watching those movies while travelling, reviewing our finances on Wesabe, etc. Shawna also mentioned using it for recipes while cooking and I could see using it for logging DailyMile runs as I stretch. I could even see it being the new tool for in-meeting presentations and napkin sketches.

I could go on, but point is this. As more and more of our lives involve apps and those apps reside in the cloud, we’re going to want devices that make it enjoyable to blend them into our lives. It’s not a must have, but it’s sneaking up on me, and I expect I’ll soon be wondering how I ever lived without.

The iPhone led the way for that in the mobile realm. The iPad will do it next for the computing realm.

Tomorrow I’m presenting the deck below at the 16th Annual Environmental Sciences Symposium at University of Guelph. I’m told to expect an audience of about 200 – mostly undergrads. That’s one of my favourite scenarios. Talking about any form of entrepreneurship to people about to embark on the rest of their lives is fun.

With the devastation in Haiti right now though, I thought I’d try something different.

For tweets with this link (http://tr.im/seFTW) I’ll donate another $1 to Haiti relief efforts. For every person who starts their question to me from the audience with “Social Entrepreneurship For The Win!” I’ll donate $10. As I’ve already given, I’ll cap this at $100, but of course, every dollar counts.

My main message: Get involved. Get going. Don’t wait, just do it.

Let me know what you think… and make me give while you’re at it!

December 18th was the first ever StatusCamp. It was also another ChangeMedium experiment – bringing the context of the medium of change to the developers building its future.

The event was an excellent day with over two dozen folks including the Status.net team and Peter Deitz of SocialActions. It was an amazing event to learn about where Status.net and the OpenMicroBlogging initiative (OMB) are going.  The wiki has more details on OMB but it is due for a major new release and will be integrating PubSubHubBub, ActivityStrea.ms, Salmon, and WebFinger.  What this means is an integration of emerging protocols to put people at the centre of micro-messaging. Not only is this a positive protocol development, but it signals the collaboration of major participants in this field to create an 0pen, interoperable system – an essential aspect of the medium of change.

I also presented a new pitch (below) on why all this really matters to all of us. It prompted a good session on social uses for Status.net and sparked a number of unexpected side conversations. What I’m learning more and more is that many developers have a social streak – a bent for making the world better. Many don’t publicize it but it seems that most do. This is encouraging as I look forward to future ChangeMedium events and seems to fit with the notion of bringing research, development, and application together to build this medium better.

Following that thread, I received some great suggestions for ways to do just that including compiling social use cases for developers to hack, doing developer challenges – prizing the best apps/hacks, and focused dev days to tackle specific problems. I’m interested in all ideas like this – they give fodder for communities who want to create events that move and make this medium for all of us.

If you want to dig into the details there’s a pretty comprehensive wiki up with notes from the event (update: good summary post from Jon Philips too). Here also is the context presentation I piloted at the event.

ChangeMedium is coming to Montreal on December 18th. Following up on his participation at #cmToronto, Status.net founder Evan Prodromou has invited us to join them at their first ever StatusCamp. Status.net is the open source micro-messaging platform that can be hosted independently as a private or public platform like laconi.ca. For us at ChangeMedium public micro-messaing is at the heart of this inflection in the web and at the core of the medium for change. That perspective is what hope to bring to StatusCamp.

On December 18th the entire Status.net team will be together to host an unconference led by Jon Phillips. It’s an excellent opportunity to understand, explore, and apply this medium. In typical unconference fashion what we do is up to you. And in typical unconference fashion, what we’ll do is what we need to move forward.

In that spirit I’m putting out the call to all you folks interested in making change using the medium of change. Status.net has opened their arms and their community. Let’s show up and return the spirit. How can we advance our understanding, contribute to, and apply this medium for change?

Contribute your thoughts in the comments or on the wiki. In or near Montreal then come on out for the 18th. Just email jon@status.net, message him on Identica, or put yourself on the wiki.

Let’s help make the medium of change.

Lemonade stands are an old symbol of enterprising youth – where the best ones were the ones that made the most money. Today’s kids are still enterprising but they’re doing for a different reason – to help others out.

I’ve recently seen it first hand as I was recruited by my munchkins to create a calendar of drawings from them and their friends together in support of Kids Saving the Rainforest. It’s great to see how quickly the kids came together to make this happen. They’re learning that joy of coming together and creating something for a greater purpose. They’re learning how to get others to help out. They’re simply excited to be ‘helping’.

If you have kids I encourage you do help them do something like this too. It’s great fun to see.

And of course, they’d love it if you spread the word and supported their project. If you like the calendar, why not buy one for your wall or send one to that person you just can’t think of what to get. Or if you just want to help out, you can donate as well below.

Cheers to the lemonade of the future.