Sunday, January 29
0
Tulips
Sunday, January 290
Tulips
Golden Gate North
Golden Gate Shadow
…when we come to it
They made up their mind, and they started packing…
Ape, Man, Machine
Today I’m returning to Orlando after my first week on the road talking to co-working, hacker and maker spaces in California about +) GWOBorg.
My co-pilots on this journey are Willow Bl00 (codename: Bl00) and Shannon O’Donnell (codename: RaRa). I first met Bl00 in Seattle only a few weeks ago where she gave a presentation on Transhumanism at Gnomedex10. I had never even heard the term “transhumanism” before, lest be schooled on it by a 26-year-old, motorcycle-riding cyberpunk organic chat client sporting a blue mohawk. My presentation on +) GWOBorg immediately followed Bl00′s and within mere minutes after I was done speaking, we didn’t realize it yet, but we had already begun the planning stages of this tour.
RaRa had just embarked on a 6-month journey that was starting in Bali. For the last three years, RaRa has been backpacking around the world and documenting her experiences through her travel blog, A Little Adrift. Before she left for that journey, RaRa helped me make The Karaoke King and served on the crew as our Production Coordinator. Anyone who has ever worked on a film crew knows that the Production Coordinator is possibly one of the most demanding and unsung positions on the crew…high pressure and little glory. RaRa did it with a smile.
Bl00 is the director of maker space in Seattle called Jigsaw Renaissance. While visiting their space in Seattle, I realized that the best way to get the message out about +) GWOBorg was to actually go out and visit co-working, hacker and maker spaces across the United States. I realized that I don’t know enough about these communities and I wanted to learn more. And so I asked Bl00 if she would serve a tour guide of sorts, and introduce me to her world.
Her only concern: “Can we ride motorcycles?” she asked.
Of course!!!
RaRa took a bit more convincing. She had *just* arrived in Bali for an intended 6-month minimum stay. The weekend before she left, she was housesitting for me in Orlando (I was in Seattle at Gnomedex hosting a 24-hour Open Governent Hackathon and meeting Bl00), but I didn’t have enough pieces parts in place for me to convince her to *not* get on that flight. By the time Bl00 and I had a draft of a plan in place, RaRa was already apartment hunting in India. She was literally walking out the door to make a deposit on a 6-month lease when a mutual friend caught her on the phone and convinced her to pause and listen to the possibility of coming back to help me launch +) GWOBorg.
She agreed, and the three of us first met in Los Angeles last week to visit our first space, Crash Space LA. After that, we drove up the coast to visit three more spaces in San Francisco: Mission Social, NoiseBridge and NextSpace.
It’s amazing to meet these groups of geeks who have banded together in this new form of co-working that goes against the traditional corporate model of how things get done. Each space has its own character, enhanced by its unique members, physical location and goals. Everyone we’ve met so far has been amazingly positive, so much so that we’re going to be visiting many more of them.
After a few days of rest back in Orlando, we’re next headed to the midwest to visit spaces in Detroit, Chicago, Louisville and St. Louis. After that we hit Atlanta, New York, DC, Boston, Portland…
We’ll keep visiting spaces as long as we continue getting invites. If you run or are a member of a co-working, hacker or makers space (or would like to start one), contact Bl00 and we’ll see if we can add you to the tour.
And, of course, all of this is leading up to our MEGA Hackathon on the 24 hours leading up to 10.10.10. You can win some prizes, and your space can win prizes too. Check out the 101010 +) GWOBorg Hackathon announcement.
+) Diggz
I was a guest on Chris Matthieu’s Rubyology podcast today. We talked about the upcoming AdhearsionConf 2010 in San Francisco August 14-15 2010. (among other things)…
You can jump to the Rubyology site or listen below:
Last August I wrote a post called “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Health Insurance Reform“. When the post hit my Facebook page it ignited quite a discussion…one that ultimately led me to de-friending an old friend on Facebook, and in real life as well.
During this process, the friend in question offered to give me $50 to pay for Health Insurance. While I don’t believe he intended the offer in malice, to me it showed a genuine lack of respect for me as an individual, and a fundamental chasm between the way he and like-minded others looked at their fellow humans.
It wasn’t until I saw this video of a recent Tea Party protest where one angry protester throws dollars at a man with Parkinson’s that I realized the reason why I reacted so negatively to his offer. My friend, regardless of intent, made me feel like the guy with Parkinson’s, sitting silently on the ground while insults and dollars are thrown at him, essentially telling him, “We’re healthy and rich, you’re sick and poor, now go fuck off!” If you haven’t seen the video, here it is:
We live in a world of our own making. How we treat our neighbors, family, friends…even when we disagree is the greatest measure of our humanity.
Before the de-friending occurred, somewhere amidst a $50 Paypal transfer and my outright shock of the depth of his self-entitled rant, he forwarded me a Glenn Beck video and asked me to watch it. Having never actually watched Glenn Beck’s show, I acquiesced. This turned out to be a bad descision.
Thinking that somehow Glenn Beck would convince me that Health Care Reform in this country would lead to Nazism in America was possibly THE WORST argument he could have presented. Here’s the ACTUAL VIDEO he sent me asking me my “honest opinion.”
I honestly didn’t know what to say. Trying to follow Glenn Beck’s line of reasoning or finding accuracy in his logic is like trying build a house of cards with a retarded kid who just keeps screaming “UNO! UNO! UNO!”
So yesterday, after my epiphany about the Tea Party Parkinson’s video, when I saw this brilliant rant about Glenn Beck by Jon Stewart, it all tied together for me:
This is how I lost a friend in the Health Care Reform debate: Compassion.
You see, you can’t quantify compassion. You can’t solve compassion with an equation or by throwing dollars at people any more than you can draw conclusions by drawing circles on a blackboard. When someone is sick, you shouldn’t have to ask if they can afford to live.
It shouldn’t even be a factor.
It’s not my job or my mission to convince my ex-friend otherwise. It just made me sad that he doesn’t see just how wrong he is. Or how he made me feel. Or how he chooses to treat his fellow man. He lacks the fundamental human capacity for compassion. And I choose to not to live in his compassionless world.
If we live in a world of our own design…of our own making…I want mine to be a compassionate world. A happy world. A world where someone with Parkinson’s or Asthma or Cancer doesn’t have to be mocked or condescended to because they are sick, or worry about whether or not their insurance provider will cover this particular trip to the emergency room. That’s MY American dream.
Unfortunately there are some friendships that have been sacrificed along the way. I’ll gladly trade those for logic and reason and compassion any day.
Now I’m going to go outside and enjoy the rest of this beautiful spring day. You should too!
“I’ll just tell you this, if this passes and it’s five years from now and all that stuff gets implemented — I am leaving the country. I’ll go to Costa Rica.”
Nice one Rush. Costa Rica…with its Universal Health Care…supposedly one of the most comprehensive in Central America.
He’s such a boob. Why do you listen to him people, why?
Think Progress » Limbaugh vows to flee the country if health care passes..
