Published Date 6/20/12 4:45 PM

if you walk into a private owned walled garden, tend the ground and grow the bounty, and they close the gates. You have to pay to eat the produce. The moral – do not walk in to the walled gardens in the digital world, the are huge trakes of free land on the open web, inhabit it and grow your own utopia. Failbook has failed you, why are you asking them to open the gate agen? RUN!!! RUN!!!!

Published Date 6/15/12 1:16 PM

The myths and traditions of Rainbow are what a gathering is. The people come to gather and “enact” these myths and traditions, but they are generally neglected. To put an arbitrary scale on this – the national rainbows are generally only 10-20% of rainbow power, were the European is 40-60% rainbow power.

Rainbow gatherings have a very strong, largely invisible core of myths and traditions these are designed to overcome and transcend the “stupid individualism” of the Babylon world, and in as far as they are remembered and enacted they do this very well. The issue is that it is a virtuous circle, if the is the power there to start with then it is generally successful in transforming a bunch of strangers and misfits into a coherent whole. If the power is not there to start with them then incoherents tends to grow and dominate.

Published Date 6/14/12 8:28 AM

The digital tsunami has passed, the washed away sea front of the old media world is being re-built with the usual fast food joints and global burger bars media outlets. Leaving little space left on the fringes for the new media world that hasn’t made the shift into the new mainstream. Traditional media is re-creating itself, contemporary media is withering. Lifestyle, Inaction scwobaling and NGO dispoling failed to fill the space left by the digitization wave. The old media is back, with the renewed vigor of the full digital power, be frightened, be very frightened.

Published Date 6/9/12 8:33 AM

The are meany tools for organizing on the web, few are widely used, most are a flash (a churning) of fashion. Fashionable web evangelist’s will tell you to use that tool or this tool for a job. And each tool is designed to for fill one job.

BUT the most widely used tool on the web is the wiki, and the wiki is not a tool for a particular job rather it is a culture, a society a way of working that solves a “social problem”. The resion all the other tools are just churned over is that they are a product of the dominant mind set, they have a culture but it is not the same culture as the wiki or the web. We constantly mistake the issue as one of tools rather than one of culture. Change your culture not your tool, overcome the churning and actually get something done. Don’t be a fashionable dead head please.

Try a wiki today.

Published Date 6/9/12 8:03 AM

Simferopol’, Crimea, Ukraine.

The hostel I was going to stay in near the railway station was not open. so I had an idea, public transport is very cheap around 20p for a tram or bus ride so looking at my offline map I found a forest near a reservoir close to the edge of town. Got the bus there then walked into the forest till I found a nice space hidden away and pitched my tent for a lovely quirt night sleep. Nicer than a hostel, as the isn’t all the other people making noise and snoring to keep you awake.

In the morning  after breakfast next to the water I just get the tram back to the station. But this plan isn’t as perfect as it seams as on the way back I get a different bus which takes me to the wrong part of town then cant find anyone who speaks some English to find the right bus to the station. For buses and trams its good to have a phone with GPS and an offline map to make shore you aren’t going in the completely wrong direction.

Published Date 5/18/12 5:29 PM

The Rainbow shopping mission (DRAFT)

The gatherings are fascinating places to see very different views of human organising, social institutions and working/broken alternatives to traditional society.

I found that when on a shopping mission you should go with your own crew, to go with an existing crew is a recipe for frustration. The same when in the kitchen, when focalising, an open call for volunteers will make the work twice as hard, better to go the soft organic root of pulling in passing people you have a relationship with as each will come with a task in your mind, a self sense of direction, then few will driftaway. This will “grow” a crew who are motivated and focused.

Hard organising is both bureaucratic and open. Soft organising is closed and nurturing. This is why this first is seen as a natural fit for liberal society and the second held in suspicion. But the second is the one for humane liberation, the hard brings the ones who already have power to the surface and submerged the untouch talent. “Soft organising” makes space for the powerful to step back and surfaces the little sprouting talents, and thus taps into the potential of the majority. From “soft structures” many new flexible hard structures can grow. From hard organising, generally a few brittle structures will temporarily hold a place before dissolving back into the dominant mediocrity.

In intentional communities hard organising is a model with failure built in, this can be fixed to an extent by using soft organising to create hard structures. We can learn a lot from working “disorganisations” such as the rainbow gathering.

Published Date 4/13/12 5:24 PM

It was a good to share skills and ideas with the different groups last night. We introduced a range of programmers and developers to Liferay, and started what is almost certainly the first community bug-fix of a Liferay site in London.

The next London Liferay User meetup will be in June, as next month the Liferay/Zaizi sponsored meetup group has an event on May 2nd. Please join the group if you haven’t already and come along. http://www.meetup.com/official-london-liferay-meetup-group

The project of the Liferay site we were fixing last night, Spring of Code, will be in full development mode at its next meeting on 24th April: presentations, pitches, Q&A, pizza and drinks. So have a look at current projects if you want to know what’s up or get ready to pitch your idea to the group at the next event! http://springofcode.org/projects

Published Date 4/9/12 9:44 PM

Queen Party

21st April (Dalston, London)

Everybody comes as a queen, any queen will do.

Bring rich wine and fine dining.

Gold, swans, hats, handbags, microphones, tight trousers and wig, a tetra.

The royal verity show – performers free, everyone else 20 million $$$$.

RSVP as the queen (any queen will do) for the address.