Venessa Miemis: Agile CultureCon 2012 – Call for Speakers! Let’s Hack Culture!

Culture
Venessa Miemis

A few days ago I posted about CultureCon (Philly 9/12 and Boston 9/14), an upcoming event hosted by Agile Boston that’s focused on culture analysis, design and implementation in the workplace. The objective of the conference is to “bring to more popular awareness how culture is the gating factor in satisfaction, productivity and learning at work.”

The premise is that agile and self-management principles are essentially a culture hack – meaning that if a group of people decide they're willing to align around a set of values, principles, practices and processes, they can upgrade themselves to a high-functioning learning organization that continually adapts and upgrades itself. Next I could say some kind of sentence about how “in today's fast-paced world, we can't afford NOT to” …. etc etc. You get it.

I’m personally really eager to level up in this domain, and plan to attend both the Philadelphia and Boston open space unconferences.

If enough friends and enthusiasts in our global tribe join in, we can rent a party bus that connects us from location to location! How fun! I’ve never done that before, and the excitement I get from imagining a roadtrip filled with discussions about culture hacking and social evolution just shows what a nerd I am. 😉

Anyway —

The Call for Speakers page has just gone up.

Some sample topics of what they’re looking for include:

Continue reading “Venessa Miemis: Agile CultureCon 2012 – Call for Speakers! Let’s Hack Culture!”

The Potential and Promise of Open-Source Judaism

Culture
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The Potential and Promise of Open-Source Judaism

One community's pioneering effort to make its materials of worship more widely available and remixable.

Alan Jacobs – Alan Jacobs is the Clyde S. Kilby Professor of English at Wheaton College. He blogs at ayjay.tumblr.com.

The Atlantic, 12 June 2012

New technologies are naturally and generally controversial, but perhaps nowhere more so than in religious communities. For many religious leaders (and their followers), recent digital technologies are corrosive solvents of community life: the old ways are surely best. For others, new technologies offer opportunities to extend the reach of religious bodies, to draw more people into the fold.

One might think that a highly traditional religion like Judaism — whose core practices are so ancient and burnished by custom — would be inclined to techno-suspicion. But Aharon Varady doesn't see it that way: for him, digital technologies can come to the aid of traditional practices. Varady is a man of wide-ranging gifts who, among other things, runs the Open Siddur Project. A siddur is a Jewish prayer book containing the daily prayers, and the Open Siddur Project is working to create the first comprehensive database of Jewish liturgy and liturgy-related work — and to provide an online platform for anyone to craft their own siddur. In this way Varady hopes “to liberate the creative content of Jewish spiritual practice as a commonly held resource for adoption, adaptation, and redistribution by individuals and groups.” For him, openness is key to the success of the project.

The Open Siddur Project strikes me as a deeply thoughtful, innovative way of trying to make new technologies and modern religious life reinforce each other, instead of being inimical or at cross-purposes. So I proposed that Aharon answer a few questions about the ideas behind his work, and he readily agreed. Here's our conversation.

You describe Open Siddur as a project in “open-source religion.” What do you mean by that?

Read full interview.

 

Event: : 12 Sep Philadelphia 14 Sep Boston CultureCon 2012!

Culture
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Building the Future of Work and Culture: Announcing CultureCon 2012!

I’ve been a solo artist working independently for several years now, occasionally teaming up with others around events or short-term media projects. Lately though, I’ve become less interested in just doing one-off collaborations. For one, it gets lonely, and secondly, I’m unable to take on the scale of projects I want to work on all by myself.

I want to be part of a tribe — a creative community of like-minds with whom I can learn, grow, and deliver awesome value to the world, together.

This tribe has a certain kind of culture, based in clearly defined shared values that we not only agree upon conceptually, but live and demonstrate through our way of being.

Here are a few characteristics of this tribal culture:

* we respect ourselves and each other – expressing gratitude and appreciation for the unique gifts and talents everyone brings to the table

* we’re all leaders – positively influencing each other’s thoughts, words, and actions, and offering support and feedback in service of each other’s growth and development

Continue reading “Event: : 12 Sep Philadelphia 14 Sep Boston CultureCon 2012!”

Howard Rheingold: Collaborative Information Filters

Culture, Knowledge
Howard Rheingodl

Learning Collaborative Information Filters (PDF)

Automating filtering via machine learning is an up-and-coming research category for infotention — Howard ” “Predicting items a user would like on the basis of other users’ ratings for these items has become a well-established strategy adopted by many recommendation services on the Internet. Although this can be seen as a classification problem, algorithms proposed thus far do not draw on results from the machine learning literature. We propose a representation for collaborative filtering tasks that allows the application of virtually any machine learning algorithm. We identify the shortcomings of current collaborative filtering techniques and propose the use of learning algorithms paired with feature extraction techniques that specifically address the limitations of previous approaches.”

2012 Reality Sandwich: The Battle for the Soul of the Republic

Articles & Chapters, Culture

The Battle for the Soul of the Republic

Reality Sandwich, 10 April 2012

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The National Security Agency (NSA) mega-data center, combined with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) special relationship with Google, and the federalization of local police using Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funds to pay for monitoring both the locations and the conversations of anyone they wish — without a warrant –suggest that the government of the United States of America (USA)-from local to national-is no longer in friendly hands.

As a professional intelligence officer and a retired Marine Corps officer, I am deeply offended, personally threatened, and patriotically alarmed.  Evil has triumphed across the United States of America.  Every single institution — from academies to civil society to commerce to the government and law enforcement at all levels, the media, the out of control military-industrial complex, and the bottom-feeding non-governmental and non-profit organizations that suck at the federal government tits gorged with printed money — has failed to respect the Constitution.  There is neither intelligence nor integrity at the highest levels of all of our institutions.

2012 is a year of confrontation and convergence.  On the confrontation side, we have a federal government that dismisses the Constitution across all three branches — a Court that believes corporations are citizens and strip-searches for parking tickets are “okay”; a Congress that abdicates its Article 1 responsibilities, instead serving as foot-soldiers to the corrupt two-party tyranny that excludes the majority from the ballot and the vote; and an Executive that borrows a trillion a year in our name, wastes two trillion a year, and has claimed the right to kill US citizens without due process, and to lie to the Courts when it deems it necessary for “national security.”

Continue reading “2012 Reality Sandwich: The Battle for the Soul of the Republic”