“There are three major areas her talk – titled “Hackademia” – focuses on. She’s interested in how hackers, makers and students, especially undergrad students, can work as innovators. She’s starting to identify patterns within non-expert communities that allow hackers and makers to innovate. And she’s interested in how we “make more of this ‘stuff’” – as society and as educators, how to we scaffold and maximize these contributions?

The key to understanding hacking and making, she suggests, is imagination: looking at people as creative problem-solvers. While there’s lots of research on how corporate and university researchers solve problems, there’s less research on how people without credentials solve problems. She’s specifically interested in rulebreakers, people who either break the rules of the academy or laws to innovate. Rulebreaking, she argues, is a type of power play: it’s a way ot fighting against the cultural and economic power of “being technical”, finding ways to be technical outside of an existing ruleset.

The people Beth studies are functional, rather than accredited engineers. She confesses, “I don’t really care about formal STEM (science, tech, education and math) education – okay, I care a little. But there are lots of studies on getting people to work in those fields. Instead, I’m trying to get people to be STEM literate and facile.”

…

Beth’s insights in this field come from studying creativity around technology in the developing world, as well as US hackerspaces, makerspaces, hacker cons, and makerfaires. Extrapolating from both types of sites, she observes three characteristics:

• The importance of actual space in bringing communities together

• Systems of apprenticeship or scaffolded learning, including workshops that show people what they need to know to join a community

• Contests and other systems for building reputations, like the “black badges” issued to winners of capture the flag contests at Defcon, or the badges people win on instructables.com

She’s interested in the possible overlaps between university research, industry labs and independent researchers. Her goal is not to map the actual Venn diagram of the space, but to understand how independent researchers work in this space. She believes that independent researchers are particularly important for building disruptive technology. Academics have a disincentive to build highly disruptive systems — they’re hard to get academic funding for, and hard for PhD students to pitch dissertations around. It’s hard to disrupt in the corporate community, especially when disruptive tech is cheaper, as those sorts of innovations tend not to fit within existing sales structures. Independent researchers may be immune to these restrictions and especially capable of pushing forward disruptive innovations.

I greatly enjoyed the use of the map for visualizing (sorry about the “zeds”)information and concepts. I agree that one can always argue about the fine points of the map, and that this effort was about generating responses along a common framework, which is facilitated by the clear mapping and uncluttered design.

Hope all is well in Montreal. Do you ever come to DC? Love to hear from you.

Robert B.

Part of Steve Job’s genius as a futurist was founded in his intrinsic love for history—behavior—and just how we got here? In this rare interview, listen to how he describes the inventive and innovative nature of man; and just exactly when and why it kicked into hyper-drive. Steve Jobs: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/interview-steve-jobs.html

Next? Jacob Sayles with Office Nomads is certainly a leader in the Coworking Movement. And? At the Coworking Europe Conference 2010 he asked the audience in Belgium, “…so how many of you think YOU invented COWORKING?” A multitude of hands plunged into the air. I rest my case.
So? I do see how much work went into your mind-map, nonetheless, an org or workflow chart does not necessarily connote, qualify or deserve the label: “innovation grounds” per se.

The following might serve you better. These historically are people-centric models, which have brought about change.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_community
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative
You are also invited to read an article, which I co-authored on innovation, incubation and coworking at: LINK: http://www.deskmag.com/en/has-coworking-replaced-the-incubator-175

Thanks for reading!

The Cult of Done Manifesto

There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.

Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

There is no editing stage.

Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.

Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

Once you’re done you can throw it away.

Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

Destruction is a variant of done.

If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

Done is the engine of more.

“Projects succeed, projects fail. The successes are reported on, the failures are filed away. Or, in the case of most ICT 4 Development or Mobile 4 Development projects, pushed under the proverbial rug. Well, its time to bring out the failures, with a sense of humor, and with an honest look at ourselves. Hence was born: FAILFaire.”

I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO DO THIS FOR SO LONG! Yes. I am screaming. Happy screaming though.

thanks christine <3

“We increasingly pay for the experience of using things-in the form of subscriptions, memberships, leases, and retainers-rather than for the things themselves.” (Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access)

“Design, and especially Product Design, in the Age of Access means above all Product Stewardship, a concept developed as a Design for Sustainability effort with the aim of involving all the stakeholders of the life cycle of a product. With this approach, we ask all the stakeholders to take shared responsibility for the impacts to human health and the natural environment that result from the manufacturing, use, and end-of-life management of products.”

“But sharing is different from having access to something. Sharing implies owning something first and then sharing it with others. Access can mean that a company or community own something rather than an individual, but that individuals can use it. It’s still sharing, but it doesn’t feel like you are using other people’s stuff.” (Andy Polaine, Access, not ownership, is the route to better products)

Great reading, folks. Worth a half-hour or so of your day.