Brugge Blog

I think the librarians at our local branch have been infected by the idea from TheFunTheory.com: that if you inject some fun into a drab but useful task you can alter the behavior of a community. Get more people to take the subway by turning the stairs into a piano keyboard, or make a park waste basket into a seemingly bottomless pit. Watch the videos, they’re fun.

Checking out books from the library is not particularly odious, but it isn’t as fun as actually finding the books, and it is rather tedious. Well, those crazy librarians over at the Sequoya Branch of the Madison Public Library must have watched those videos, because someone came up with a brilliant idea. The Sequoya Branch just got a brand new home, and included in it are self-checkout stations. They certainly do reduce the lines for getting out, but they’re not, well, fun. Their design, however, is internationalized enough that you can plug in different instruction language and pictures. Good modern software thinking, making it easier to be able to include Spanish or Hmong instructions, for instance.

So why not…Piratese? Sure enough, on Talk Like A Pirate Day, you could check out with pirate instructions, with things like “Argh!” instead of the usual Cancel button for instance. They either decided that went over well or just kept giggling and could stop themselves, because they’ve kept going. Of just the ones I’ve noticed (and I’ve probably missed a few):

• Silent Ninja, where “Please scan your card” becomes “Quick, while the staff isn’t looking, get the red light to scan your card!”, and “Please wait, do not move item” becomes “If you move the item now, you risk detection by the guards.”
• Zombie, where every other instruction is “WOIDFkidjwoefDijfe” or “Brainnnnsssssss”
• and (my personal favorite) Guided Meditation. It is enough to make me want to go there and check something, anything out.

  “Cancel/Clear/Go” buttons

  become “Deny/Cleanse/Progress”

  “Touch the on-screen numbers below to enter our PIN”

  becomes “Your PIN is your destiny”

  “Please wait while we retrieve your records”

  becomes “Just be”

  “Cancel/Next”

  becomes “Dwell in the negative/The future is now”

  “Don’t move the item”

  becomes “This is the item you were born for”

  “Scanning, please wait”

  becomes “You are floating on a gentle sea”

Ahhhh.

Some authors grow on you. Others resonate with a clang right away. Michael Perry turns out to be of the second variety for me, hooking me hard with Population: 485.

I got it from the library just hoping it would be a reasonable book to read while traveling, but a page or two in to it I could tell it was going to be different. Maybe I was just in the right mood for it, but I would be reading along through a story of a firefighting episode and come to a passage that drew me up, and I would think “whoa, how did he just do that?”

Rough hands are a comfort. Like jeans and old boots. I love to attend poetry readings, to skulk in the dark, skimming words from the smoke. (Riffing on a line by Jim Harrison, I find smoke-free poetry readings the moral equivalent of chamomile near beer.) The right little conglomeration of words makes my heart pop open like a tulip, and no matter the venue or talent, you’re almost always going to get the gift of a good line in there somewhere.

The setting of the book is a small town in northwest Wisconsin, where he grew up and has returned to, but that’s just the canvas for his reflections on life and community. His paint brushes are stories from work on the volunteer fire department as an EMT and firefighter, with the people being the subjects in the frame. For instance, he takes on the relationship he has with his brothers, each of them very different from him, and who also are on the firefighting squad.

I read volumes on the Civil War when I was a child, and was always morbidly fascinated with the idea of brother fighting brother. I could never understand how such a thing could be. Today I do. I would kill–I am not speaking figuratively–for my brothers, but I also know that if the course of civilization boiled down to a few salient points, we would be irretrievably opposed. Such a likelihood is highly fanciful, but the thought is still unsettling. There is a certain paradoxical rage weltering in us that explodes when it is nudged too closely by love. These are threads of love and hate traceable to Cain and Abel.

Fire cuts through all that. Down in the basement of that house, we are on the same side, my brother and I. Doing something we both love, fighting something we both fear, covering for each other. Fire is heat and light, able to cut through the murky complications reserved for souls born of the same womb.

I found myself wanting to dog ear pages as I come across little breath-catchers like this, only to find that I would mark more pages than not. Instead I decided to just lean back into the writing and enjoy the ride. And I did, clear through to the last page.

Part of his appeal to me is his self-effacing honesty in the face of loving a splintered, cantakerous, unpredictable and lovely world. He finds gobs of things interesting, and has been trying to feel around for a place where all parts of his passion are fed.

I admit there are times vanity gets the better of me and I entertain visions of myself as the Bohemian Farmboy. The Arty Redneck. I imagine myself bridging two cultures. Truth is, I’m am a dilettante in either camp. I own a rusty old pickup truck, but it’s not running right now, and I don’t know how to fix it. I can run a welder, but lay a keloid bead…. I have read great works of literature, but recall only the grossest details. I can no more diagram a sentence than rewire an alternator.

In particular, he’s circling around the idea of “community” throughout the book, what we expect it to be and what it turns out to be.

Individual freedom is essential to the human spirit, and a theoretical individualism makes for cool Nike (or Army, for that matter!) commercials, but sometimes you have to team up. To fight a fire, for instance. I love–the word is not too strong–the idea of neighbors coming together to put out fires, and I am thrilled to be a part of that effort when I am called. It feels good. It feels right. It feels like I belong. Sometimes you find yourself looking for little commonalities. Go Packers.

What you hope for, I think, is to reconcile the dichotomies and negotiate a position of comfort. This is mostly a passive process. Which is not to infer limp acquiescence. In a town founded by a successful author who set up his own sawmill but didn’t write his own book, I make a living writing, but some of my credibility is maintained by the fact that my helmet is hanging on the wall over at the fire hall right now, and while no one on the department has any idea what goes on at these poetry readings, or what I could possibly get from watching an eighty-nine-year-old man dancing Ulysses and the Sirens in a headdress and gold lame g-string, they do know that when there is smoke in the sky, I will pull hose and roll.

It’s a story that draws out the beauty of overlooked parts of life, not to tell you how you should try to live, but to remind us of that everyday wonder so that perhaps we won’t miss it the next time we catch a flash of it in our own lives.

I think most people have a pretty good image of what “craftsmanship” connotes: skill, care, attention to detail, and beautiful results, usually from someone like a cabinet maker or a violin maker. But it’s encouraging to see the same ideas being used to try setting a similar path for professional development in programming. The idea of software craftsmanship has been around for a while (Pete McBreen wrote a book on it in 2002), but it seems to be taking root and growing in the last year from some of the serious Agile movement fellows.

I’m not sure if it’s exactly an outgrowth of the agile ideas, but it seems to spring from a similar aesthetic: that there is tremendous personal and product value in caring deeply about the work you do, and that growing in skill as a software developer is more than just keeping up with the latest language and tools.

The 8th Light folks have a good post on the characteristics of craftsmanship, and make a point that I see few others acknowledging: that for programmers, the code is not just writing, but is thought of, worked with, and talked about as a very tangible thing.

Code is a physical thing. Though technically code is nothing more than some states stored on a fast spinning magnetic disk, it is just as physical as a lump of clay. Consider the language used when talking about code. It is touched, shaped, moved, broken, cut, pasted, fiddled with, tweaked, and played with. It is the physicality of code that enables the feedback between the hand and the eye. It is touched and a change is observed.

It’s this feature that makes beautiful code seem more like a statue than a story to me; it doesn’t evoke so much a mental image or feeling like words of a master author, but more of a sense of right proportion and balance that you get from something you can touch and feel and see.

Of course it doesn’t really matter just why a well crafted piece of software is seen as such. And it’s not even important whether “software craftsmanship” becomes a global movement in that name or not. What’s really valuable is that people are continuing to explore what it can mean to truly care about the software they create and its effect on the world around them.

A great blog, plain and simple: Social Entrepreneurship at Change.org. I found it earlier this year, but hadn’t read it in a a couple of months, and found that even with close to 200 posts to catch up on, I was reading, and being awed or inspired by almost every single one.

The blogger, Nathaniel Whittemore, has a wonderful way of explaining, synthesizing or amplifying the hugely varied work being carried out in the social enterprise world. Or just giving insightful takes on the events of the day. Take a look, for example, at his take on the Kiva controversy (how they presented their process with how it actually worked) or the Peace Prize for Obama.

Enough writing, back to reading.

Here’s something I like to see: new alternatives to answer the question “what can I do with my money?” that are getting more and more progressive. For about the last 20 years, it seems like the main answer was “make the most money you can in whatever stocks and bonds have the highest return” and the alternate choice was “make decent money in stocks and bonds from organizations that have a conscience” (socially responsible investing). That’s not a bad option, but the variety showing up in just the last five years is amazing:

• go to Kiva and invest in a small business that otherwise never would have had a chance
• go to Vittana and provide a student loan that gives access to education that wasn’t there before
• go to MicroPlace and find some other unmet need that connects with you
• choose a course of impact investing to support business values you feel are important

What is heartening is how an alternative mindset, when articulated well and carried out with passion, can tap into a huge human need: to open the door to chances that can change lives.

Okay, so that’s a high-minded sentiment that’s pretty vague, and could be said about lots of efforts to bridge the cultural and economic gaps in our world, but apply it to investing and it gives people choices they hadn’t thought of before. For instance, we don’t necessarily invest in mutual funds and stocks because they reflect our values, we do it because that’s what’s been offered.

Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, tells a compelling story of the rise of Grameen and the microfinance model in “Banker to the Poor”. His struggle was just this, to change the entrenched way that people, bankers and lenders, view “finance”.

Because of the way in which the orthodoxy of economics has given shape to the existing world, all the investment money now is locked up in only one category of investment: investment for making personal profit. This has happened because people have not been offered any choice. There is only one type of competition: competition to amass more personal wealth. The moment we open the door to making a social impact through investments, investors will start putting their investment dollars through this door as well. Initially, some investors will divert only a part, and maybe a small part, of their invesment money to social enterprises. But if social entrepreneurs show concrete impact, then this flow will become larger and larger. Soon, a new type of investor will begin appearing on the scene–those who will put all or almost all their investment money into social investments.

This also points out how the change in finance is just another thread in the blanket of “social enterprises” being built today. His business model is not one of a charity, but of a business with a social cause rather than a traditional profit focused business. This is the world of the social entrepreneur.

I profoundly believe, as Grameen’s experience over twenty years has shown, that personal gain is not the only possible fuel for free enterprise. Social goals can replace greed as a powerful motivational force. Social-consciousness-driven enterprises can be formidable competitors for the greed-based enterprises. I believe that if we play our cards right, social-consciousness-driven enterprises can do very well in the marketplace.

The other thing I’ve found curious is that these new financial models, while just coming in to the mainstream now, have their seeds much further back. Yunus started in the 1970s. Socially responsible investing took root in the 1980s. I found a book at the library this summer, “Economics as If the Earth Really Mattered,” by Susan Meeker-Lowry, published in 1988, which saw a potential for what is growing today. There were certainly opportunities like we have today back then, but you had to work a lot harder to find them. A few quotes here from the introduction.

I began to see how we can use money as a tool to make things happen. Money can be an extension of ourselves, and what we do with it can be a very personal expression of who we are and what we believe in.

This all takes time and patience, and it is often hard to see that we are making a difference. It is tempting to sit around analyzing theories and waiting for the one idea that will save us or what we love. But as long as we wait for the definitive solution, nothing will change, or rather, we will have to no say in the changes. We must remember we are part of our world, that the changes we see are created by people like us.

When the wind blows, it is easy to see its effect on the leaves and branches of trees. Not so obvious is the trees’ effect on the wind. They lessen its force, creating a space in which other plants can root and thrive. It is a subtle power, but a dramatic one.

Kind of a zen-like view of investing, but hey, why not? It’s your choice, not theirs.

A wonderful story came by last week, the kind that catches you immediately with a simple and clear wisdom that it shares. It’s an old story, but one I hadn’t heard before. And it was told during the children’s message time at our church, but it caught many more than just the children.

It’s a story attributed to Native American tradition.

One evening a grandfather was teaching his young grandson about the internal battle that each person faces.
“There are two wolves struggling inside each of us,” the old man said.
“One wolf is vengefulness, anger, resentment, self‐pity, fear . . .
“The other wolf is compassion, faithfulness, hope, truth, love . . .”
The grandson sat, thinking, then asked: “Which wolf wins, Grandfather?”
His grandfather replied, “The one you feed.”

It turns out that this wisdom was graciously shared with President Obama on inauguration day as well, by Rev. Sharon Watkins. While she is urging him to remember this when acting on a large stage, it’s a reminder to all of us, in ourselves and in our communities every day: feed the good wolf.

It was a year ago last November that I got the chance to step in to a different kind of working world, and I’ve got to say it’s been a life changer. Benetech, where I’m working on the new generation of Bookshare.org, is out to change the world, but in places that very few other high-tech startups consider as “markets.” The focus of Benetech ventures is places you would see the traditional non-profits: environmental stewardship, human rights, literacy. The difference here is that Benetech is finding ways to blend in technology as a leverage bar to give the same power and advantage to social causes that’s given to your usual business problems. It’s really just a broadening of the imagination of what problems can be worked on with technology, as Tim O’Reilly would say.

The founder and head of Benetech, Jim Fruchterman, is a tireless and eloquent champion of this world view. His Beneblog is what first pulled me in when I started reading it about two years ago. He chronicles a vibrant and energetic world of social entrepreneurs who are drawing the vast array of technical tools we have into forms that make amazing differences in the lives of people, not just through Benetech but through new organizations around the world.

Some examples of the waters that Benetech is swimming in:

• Giving convservation organizations tools to better work with the land they help protect.
• Helping Guatemala sift through a mountain of National Police records to better face their most recent history.
• Working with the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission to catalog and analyze the human rights history during their recent war.
• Taking on the challenge of how to make technology available to people who need it, in whatever social, physical or economic condition they find themselves in. Lofty? Yes. Important? Certainly. Possible? Don’t count them out.

That’s just a slice of a world where others are just as imaginative and ambitious:

• Literacy and visual impairment work on the scale of India
• Bringing books to rural areas in China by backpacking “voluntourists.”
• Using cell phones to provide basic banking services to the underserved in Africa.
• Sharing ideas, lessons and inspiration to other social entrepreneurs at gatherings like the World Economic Forum and through groups like the Social Enterprise Alliance, to keep the energy going. And then celebrating champions with the San Jose Tech Museum Tech Awards.

The wonderful part is that viewed from the inside of the movement, within the day-to-day work of building the new Bookshare.org, it is just as exciting. Working with top-notch engineers, quality tools, and an entire team focused on something that everyone feels is worth being passionate about, you can’t call those kinds of days drudge work.

In four presidential and vice-presidential debates, you could say they were as telling in what was not said as in what was.

There was plenty of talk of energy and drilling, but little about the environment or global warming.

There was plenty of talk of anger and fear, but little about compassion.

There was plenty of talk of the rich and the middle class, but not a mention of the poor and the hungry.

There was plenty of talk of war, but none of peace.

When will we talk about these?

A Google search may have found it for me, but it would have taken longer and more weeding, partly because I didn’t know what to call it: “what does the electoral college landscape look like?” is what I was thinking. Because as surprisingly close as the popular vote polls seemed to show it to be, I wondered what that looked like where it really counted, in the votes that decide who wins. And then I saw a blogger who had the same question and found the answer: FiveThirtyEight.com. There are other sites out there doing this as well, but the combination of presentation, analysis, and depth of numbers at FiveThirtyEight beats any of the others. If you don’t want the details, the graphics at the top tell you what you need. As you go down the page, things get progressively more detailed, until you’re down to the raw numbers, state by state, with source references and calculations.

You could spend all day there, or just a few minutes. That’s information design done right.

The nominees are set, so Bill Moyers can’t be president this time around, but it seems like he should be put in the running for vice president, or cabinet position or some place where he can have the influence he deserves. Or perhaps he should just be left alone to do what he does best: stand up to the blowhards and show what is good. That’s what he did last weekend during the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis when Bill O’Reilly’s man tried to badger him (there’s a full segment and a slightly shorter piece from Keith Olbermann’s show that shows clips of O’Reilly’s spin on it.) He didn’t acquiesce, or ignore, or shout, he talked to the Fox person with dignity and respect and a forceful truth. And as Olbermann said, he had “the special ingredient of being 100% morally and factually correct.”

For a fuller picture of his vision, and his challenge to us all, watch his keynote address. As he reminds us, “you are not alone.”