Progressivism

[Left: logo of the Chaos Computer Club]

The German hacker club, Chaos Computer Club has recently been in the news for their annual end of the year Chaos Communication Congress at which well-known writer and BoingBoing editor, Cory Doctorow spoke on “the coming war on general computation.” In this post, I will introduce you to the club, their events, and other hacker organizations, events and affiliates worldwide. I will do this via a sort of travellog of the club's Chaos Communication Camp, which I had the good luck to attend this past August.

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Recently, I blogged about Drupal's plans to integrate HTML5 into its next release. However, version 8 of Drupal is at least a year away. What's a Drupal dev to do, if they want to start using HTML5 right now? There are a variety of tools and techniques. Let's look at them.

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On Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending (as a sponsor and learner) the Social Media for Nonprofits Conference in San Francisco.

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The 3rd Annual CLASSY Awards is the largest philanthropic awards ceremony in the country, recognizing outstanding philanthropic achievements by charities and individuals nationwide.

From now until June 19, America can visit www.classyawards.org to nominate in the following categories:

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Innovation often does not look like a brand new technology, but like a smart new combination of existing technologies. Solar panels have been around a long time, long enough for President Carter to famously put them on the roof of the White House and for President Reagan to infamously take them down. There’s also nothing new about crowd funding, where a group of people collectively pool their money together in order to finance a shared project.

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Bitcoin is peer-to-peer digital currency. Like Napster or Limewire, it does not rely on a central trusted issuer, but upon a network. Currently, one bitcoin is worth about $0.90 US.

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One of the lingering takeaways from the Web of Change conference was the power of story. It's the poignant stories of individuals (and our natural tendency to extrapolate) that inspire action, not the sterile statistical quantification of a problem. We should be encouraging each other to find and tell the stories that will invoke the kinds of shifts we need to see in the world.

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One of the reasons I'm excited to vote this week is the introduction of Ranked Choice Voting in my hometown of Oakland, California. I like Ranked Choice Voting because it allows voters to express their preferences in a more complete way than if they could only vote for one candidate. And when you can only vote for one candidate, then you might be reasonably worried about the dreaded spoiler effect.

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For anyone working in social change who's ever struggled with the question "Why do I bother?" this is for you, my peeps. I'm available to deliver this presentation to your meeting or conference. Just ask and we'll see if we can work something out.

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At the Web of Change conference, we discussed "In these times, what does Strategy mean?"  

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