Just came back from the energizing brainstorming session around creating a Maker/Hacker space in Savannah. Another great event organized by Jake and his team of the Creative Coast. Thanks.

The energy in the room was high and the wish list got longer and longer.

The audience was diverse from teenagers to retirees with sparkle in their eyes eager to tinker and try out new things.

The 30K question is, will there be enough people that understand the benefit and shell out the monthly fee to make if thrive and be self-funding?

I am convinced it will be, if we ensure the following:

• Let’s create a strong community around it. I suggest we have a public facing integrated coffee shop to hang out and have the chance encounters and deeper conversations about ideas and their implementation. The coffee shop could also showcases/sells the products of the space.
• A downtown location is important, so people as well as SCAD students don’t have to go out of their way to participate and it would also enable the casual walk ins of interested parties.
• Diverse set of tools that offer not only metal and wood work, but also sewing machines and a kitchen to tinker with food.

A couple of trends will ensure the success of this space in the long run:

• The growing tinkerer/maker movement greatly supported by Make Magazine and the amazing Maker Fairs that are springing up in many cities. We should have a Mini Maker Fair in Savannah too.
• Miniaturization of the equipment needed to create almost everything. With that making them affordable.
• Jobs. The time for corporations to built large factories to employ thousands of people are over at least in the US. See today’s NYT post: How America lost the iJobs. You have to find and create your own niche. A maker space will enable you to do that fast prototyping to find it.
• With Kickstarter we have now a platform that enables you to get funding to pay for mass production and kick start your sale which further lowers the barrier for entry.

One group that could greatly benefit from such a space are high school kids. They will learn so much about how to get from an idea to a finished prototype that they may not even need to go to college. After tinkering for a couple of years in a Maker Space they would be prime candidates for Peter Thiel’s 100K fund that payes high school kids to develop their ideas instead of going to college.

Membership in a Maker space would be high on my christmas present list if I were a teenager and smart parents will line up to give them that opportunity as it is the key for future prosperity.

Join Metacurrency's Nourishing Flows retreat Jan 19-26 in Germany

What motivates me to run Future Salons is the hope to find parameters for a future that works for all.

This is something that our current socio-economic system, free market capitalism, is clearly not delivering. US poverty rate went up from 11.3% in 2000 to 15.1% in 2010.

Any criticism of our current system in many circles automatically puts a person in the Communist camp. Look it was tried in the Soviet Union and it didn’t work. 

Yes, Soviet style Communism didn’t work; but when that system came crashing down capitalism didn’t win, it just survived.

Francis Fukuyama even wrote a book declaring The End of History as parliamentary democracy and capitalism were the only dominant systems going forward. It was plain hubris and a lens on our collective failure to imagine alternatives.

A system that accepts that 10%+ of its population live in poverty, even in one of the richest nations of the world, is not acceptable.

The financial crisis of 2008 is further proof that the current system is not working for us, the 99% majority. Is it broken beyond repair?

In search of alternatives, I found Arthur Brock and the folks at The MetaCurrency Project. They not only envision a new model of wealth but are actively working on developing and implementing it.

I caught up with them in New York at their NextNet Collabathon. Art really opened up my eyes for how limited our view on money truly is. So I sat down with him and we taped the following interview which is an introduction to the big picture of Wealth a Living Systems Model.

Enjoy!

Video notes:

• 1:12 Current systems of sharing values are  inadequate to accurately measure value
• 1:25 Current economy is based on scarcity and optimized to continue scarcity which is not sustainable with wrong feedback mechanisms that don’t allow to make better decisions
• 2:30 Better meaning and root for Currency is current-see: Seeing the flow of value. Symbol systems that we create so we can mange currents of value, the flow of value.
• 3:20 Money as small corner of overall value flow.
• 3:35 Speculative tradable wealth even smaler part of value, like a cancer needs to be cut out. [One suggestion not in the video: Tobin tax?]
• 5:05 Artificial scarcity of current system
• 7:01 Explanation of different levels of living system wealth
• 7:30 To be alive you need a view on all of these levels. All levels need to be
• 9:30 Level 1 parts of the system, can be divided.
• 10:30 Properties
• <11:00 food gets delivered ;-) Smellavition unfortunately not invented yet>
• 11:30 Level 2: Properties of the system like blood type.
• 13:10 Level 3: Performance of a system. Ability to run a miracle mile.
• 13:30 Scarcely not applicable for Level 2 and 3
• 15:00 We treat everything as fungible
• 16:00 Performance systems: Miracle Mile
• 17:00 Level 4: Relationship system. Example: Organic
• 18:02 Level 5: Evolutionary Capacity. Example: Pace maker. Adapt and change the system behavior. Feedback loop.
• 19:55 Evolutionary Capacity is correlated to the systems capacity to information handling capability.
• 21:54 Meta Currency as underlying system platform to create many competing currencies with the survival of the fittest.
• 24:00 Goal of Meta Currency project is to make it as easy to recognize value as easily as formalizing a new sentence.
• 28:00 How far are we in developing that platform?
  Prototype is ready.
• More details: http://metacurrency.org http://newcurrencyfrontiers.com http://artbrock.com/ where you can find the below graphic
• 29:00 College degree is a reputation currency. Every credential is a currency.
• 30:30 Data Flowspace Brainstorming Workspace

Will quotes Eric Hoffer:

In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Even worse, our kids go to school that trains them for a world that is already expired. Reforms may not be enough, it is about radical change.

Here is my idea of radical school change:

How about we let the kids tackle real world problems? 

Let’s call the it Solving Real World Problems School the SRWP School. First week of every school year at SRWP School is the time the class agrees on what problem to tackle. The rest of the weeks are spend solving that problem and document possible solutions as well as dead ends. On the way the students also track and document their progress and outcome.

Problems can be local, even just school related, or something in the city, county, state, nation, worldwide, … Bonus points given to students that are able to engage people beyond the classroom in solving their chosen problem.

End of the year is a big presentation day, where all teams share their results in front of all students, parents, faculty and if possible the receiver of the solution.

The students are graded on how well their solution solves the problem they selected to tackle at the beginning of the school year.

Extra focus is put on how well they documented and shared their solution, so that others who would like to solve a similar problem can easily learn from their progress. A wiki anyone?

Special bonus points for the spectacular failure. The students reached for the stars, put enormous effort in but missed the goal in the end, but learned amazing stuff on the way.

The role of Teachers would change. Standing in the front teaching would be the exception.  Being a coach that helps the students find the right size problem to solve as well as help them to develop the skills needed to solve it. That kind of role can be much more fullfilling.

How early can you start using such a system? You can do that kind of teaching even with students that can’t read or write yet. It would motivate them to read to be able to find their own solution without the help of the teacher/coach. — Or so I think.

You would hone the following skills in high demand in the world we are living: Working in groups, getting up to speed in a new subject, project management, presentation skills, how to negotiate, creativity, brainstorming, hitting a deadline, … All skills in high demand in this new world.

I didn’t hate school, I struggled a lot as my dyslexia made me suffer during language classes, but looking back I would say that I was a mostly passive consumer in the classroom.

A SRWP School would have made a world of difference. I am envious of that Mark Finnern living in a parallel Universe that took full advantage of the opportunities a SRWP School offered him.

We have the physical building for such a school, the school our children go to. They may not be perfectly equipped for such a way of learning, but that could be solved as some of the challenges that the classes are tackling.  We have the bright kids that would like to solve real world problems. We absolutely have enough world problems that need new creative ideas to solve them.

If we really want it, we could start this next school year.

P.S. Thanks Gali Kling-Schneider for encouraging me to blog more on finnern.com when we met in Madrid this month.

Just learned from Joseph Mornin that Lawrence Lessig will be speaking this week at several venues in the Bay Area. He’ll talk about his new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It, and he’ll sign copies after each talk.

Here’s the schedule:

• Monday 10/24 · Santa Clara · 6:30 PM · Details
• Tuesday 10/25 · San Francisco · 7:30 PM · Details
• Wednesday 10/16 · Berkeley · 7:30 PM · Details

You may be able to get him in Berkeley today.

In a list of my top candidates to present at a Future Salon he would be in the top 5 and it almost happened earlier this year when the limit on campaign financing by corporations was eliminated by the supreme court. We were planning to do a Future Salon around that theme of corporate personhood, but his travel plans changed so it never happened.

The bummer is, that none of the above talks are webcasted, even though it would be really interesting to hear what Lawrence has to say about the Occupy Wall Street movement.

A couple of searches later, here is what he has to say:

Digging a bit deeper another clip of Lawrence Lessig addressing Occupy Wall Street, where you can also hear the human megaphone in action:

Lawrence is also a PowerPoint Ninja and doesn’t disappoint this time around. Check out a recording of his Lost Republic Book Tour talk:

Great background to our current crisis. Check it out.

He also got asked the following:

Do you Know which party of the 2 wants to perpetuat the influence of money in campains.

+ followask a ?

I don’t know more about Buddy Roemer, but isn’t it frustrating that the one candidate that is trying to take money out of politics is deemed unable to win. I like his URL http://freetolead.com If he wins with small donations, he would be free from corporate interests to lead real change.

I love libraries. They are great resources and gathering places for local communities. Savannah Public Library was the first one on the East Coast to have an electronic check out system, and they have now just added two new libraries, as in physical buildings, in the last years.

One of the most telling statistics from Kruse was that they were expecting the readership in the main library to go down by 50% once they opened the two new branches. But it turns out the new sites mostly attract new readers; and the main library readership decreased only by 20%, and some of this loss can be attributed to SCAD expansion taking away some of their parking spots.

The pressing question is — given the double whammy of budget cuts and e-readers — how will the library of the future stay relevant?

The educated fans of the public library that vote and influence city politics are the first ones to get e-readers and are thus less connected to their local library as they don’t frequent them anymore. What can we do about that?

My first suggestion was to add a tools library which consists of items such as saws, drills and lawn movers. Like you check out books, you can check out tools on a need basis. Kruse said that the libraries at the county-level are working on something like this. Love that.

My primary suggestion was to focus on the community aspect by giving local people access to space to get together, share ideas, and create. We were told they are doing that, however, they don’t have the resources to accommodate all the requests. Therefore they don’t want to lock down the spaces for one group every week at the same time. They want other groups to have a say in how to split up scarce resources. Good, but not ideal.

Then it dawned on me, that they could retool some of the space, that will get freed up by the library moving to digital media. My favorite place to be can be created: a local Maker/Hackerspace for people that want to tinker and be together with other folks that like to tinker too.

Wikipedia defines Hackerspaces as

“a location where people with common interests, usually in computers,technology, science, or digital or electronic art can meet, socialise and/orcollaborate. Hackerspaces can be viewed as open community labs incorporating elements of machine shops, workshops and/or studios where hackers can come together to share resources and knowledge to build and make things.”

It would be ground-breaking and in-line with MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld’s thinking on what he calls “FabLabs” or fabrication laboratories, places that have the tools to create almost anything. Check out the recording of his Future Salon presentation from 2005: Personal Fabrication Future Salon. This is more relevant than ever especially for libraries looking to stay relevant.

As “hacker” has often a negative connotation, I prefer “Makerspace.”

These library-enabled Makerspaces would also be the nucleus of a revitalization of our local economy and community, the nucleus forming the center of a resilient future.

Needless to say it was an enlightening Refresh Savannah evening.

To my great surprise and happiness I learned from Douglas Rushkoff’s Connect Conference blog today that Lauren Britton Smedley is currently implementing this idea:

1st Fabrication Lab in a public library

One project I’m anticipating hearing more about is being spearheaded by Lauren Britton Smedley, who’s working with Syracuse University and the Fayetteville Free Library to create the first Fabrication Lab in a public library.

Rushkoff shares another interesting library idea:

LibraryFarm

The other project, LibraryFarm, is a collective farm on ½ acre of public land run on the model of a public library. Anyone can “check out” a plot of land for no cost, plant what you want, and do what you want with your harvest. The idea is to promote “food literacy” and discover the knowledge and empowerment that comes with learning how to grow food. This project is being led by Meg Backus and Thomas Gokey, who taught the “Innovation in Public Libraries” grad seminar at Syracuse University that also led to the above fabrication lab project.

That these pioneers have rolled up their sleeves and are demonstrating novel ideas for the 21st century library is something I envision for for our collective future: not just a room full of dusty books, but a continuous learning center that utilizes technology and information to help communities thrive and businesses grow!

I truly hope that the administrators for the Savannah Public Library takes a serious look at these ideas and try them out. As is typical among we “Makers,” I would be happy to help out with this.

This is one of the few moments, where I would love to be back in the Bay Area to be part of the session. I would ask him one question:

When is he going to adopt the TEDx model, and allow external content?

TED used to be this super exclusive conference where once a year for a horrendous amount of money people would share ideas worth sharing over a couple of days. Well the main TED conference is still that, but brilliant idea number one is that they share the recording of all their presentations. Sal Kahn is doing the same, he is where TED was 5 years ago.

TED organizers second amazing idea was, to take a step back and realize, we have a winning formula: Short presentations with no or few slides telling an inspiring story, ideally derived from their own experience.

Now let’s offer that framework to everyone who wants to bring the TED spirit to their local community. There are a few rules, to nudge folks into the framework. They call it TEDx so you know that this is an aspiring TED event, but not the original. For me TEDx is better than the mother ship, because they are local. You get to know the local talent and you bump into each other at other local events or at the farmer’s market. Very powerful.

Now Kahn Academy is also very powerful and has a winning formular/framework: Simple board, off voice and one topic covered per video.

Sal is amazingly prolific in creating these, but at the moment there is only one Sal, he is the bottleneck. For the academy to really explode, Sal should take a page from TEDx, set the framework, call it KAHNx Academy, create a couple of lessons on how to create a topic including exercises and let others try their hand.

First most of the submitted Topics will be lousy, but a simple voting/flagging system will be able to separate the good and burry the bad.

A community will develop that will help not only with the development and ratings, but also improve the process. Sal could review the ones that the community deemed excellent and give them his stamp of approval. You can review many more videos than create.

In the Contribute section of the Kahn Academy’s web site, he asks for help to translate topics, but not for the creation of one.

At least not yet, as I am convinced that this will come. If not by him, then someone else will fill that gap.

Palo Alto colleagues if you are going to his session at SAP Labs, please ask him:  When he will start to accept topics created by others?

@johnrobb, @pixelbase (Michael) and @GregChase had a little Twitter exchange about this theme too.

GregChase @johnrobb @finnern Teach them to buy and sell derivitives of futures of fish they might catch if they built their own pond - #TheAmericanWay 6 hours ago

The American Way? Unfortunately the American way of people with money who are calling the shots.

Our way out of this will be via Resilient Communities, Meta Currencies, Transition Town Movements …  In a comment to the Live Inc movie someone suggested Time Banking. Interesting idea that needs further exploring. This is the new frontier to help create a society that works for all.

Cracked an egg that I thought was hard boiled. It wasn’t. So I quickly poached it in the microwave.

It is really easy: To quickly make a poached egg in the microwave oven, you crack the egg into a small bowl that stands in a larger bowl that has some water in it.

Put the two bowls into the microwave and depending on your preference and the strength of your oven wave it for 1-2 minutes.

In my case I did 1 minute and then additional 30 seconds. Pepper and salt to taste. Yummy!

Check out the final picture. Not that you can see a big difference with a glass bowl on a white porcelain bowl, there is not a lot of contrast to the white egg.

Picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern.

P.S. I mostly posted this because I wasn’t sure whether posting from Flickr directly to this workpress blog still works. It does, like a charm. Oh and I hope you make one of these eggs too.

I’m the national training director at Obama for America. My job is to develop the programs and resources our staff and volunteers use to teach others how to grow this campaign in their communities.

I’m writing because you or someone you know might want to be among a group of people who will play the leading role in our grassroots strategy this fall. They’re called our fall fellows.

…

Apply to be a fall fellow right now — or pass this message along to someone else you think would be great:

http://my.barackobama.com/Fall-Fellows

Fall fellow? More like fall in 2012 fellow. Well, no. Actually: Hell No! One of my biggest frustration with the Obama presidency is not, that he kept Bush’s financial advisors, ensuring that Wall Street is continuing to call the shots, or that the folks responsible for the financial breakdown have not been prosecuted, or that we are still in Afganistan, or that he still hasn’t closed  Guantanamo, or that he didn’t even had the backbone to stop or at least put up a good fight regarding the extension of Bush’s tax breaks for the rich. (For a great overview of the continuation of the failed politics from Bush to Obama check http://www.obamatheconservative.com/)

All the above are baffling me, but the most frustrating off all is, that he abandoned Obama Nation the minute we got him elected. With his charisma he was able to mobilize the masses around the hope for change and we were ready to fight for real change. It could have been the 5th branch of power. Obama could have written to the Obama Nation in an email: I hear you loud and clear: Ending the war on drugs is top priority for you. Please work with your Congress representatives to get such a bill introduced and passed and I will sign it. Here is the link for you to coordinate your efforts.

All we get is a twitter Obama town hall stunt now that he is starting to realize, that he needs to get his base mobilized for his reelection.

Sara I don’t envy you and your task to develop programs to grow this campaign in the communities. Where are the tangible results from the amazing groundswell from 4 years ago?

Quoting Bush the younger: There’s an old saying … fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me – you can’t get fooled again.

My conclusion: If the guy on the white horse riding into Washington with the words “Change” plastered on his shield and a backing army of volunteers behind him doesn’t get the job done, or more accurately turns out to be a Bush in sheep/black skin, then that system is broken.

Time to look somewhere else to create a more just world with opportunities for all and Lawrence Lessig’s Fix Congress First is the best organization to do that. This is where we should spend our precious resources. Not convinced? Spend the 2.5 minutes for this amazing video:

Scootering around in the outskirts of Savannah’s historic district Nina and I stumbled upon these 6 guys playing bicycle polo. Just loved it and stayed for a while to watch them.

The sticks are mostly created out of old ski polls with a PVC pipe screwed to the end of it.

Some of the bikes have plastic in their wheels to not let shots through and to protect their spokes.

You are allowed to lean on your stick in front of the goal, but not put your foot down.

They were using all kinds of bicycles, some with gears, some single speed. What surprised me was, that non of them had a fixed gear bike, as it is a huge advantage to be able to drive backwards. Especially in the goal.

I loved it, because it is just some folks coming together to play, no super expensive gear our tricot needed to take part. You hack a stick together and the bike you are driving around with just works.

Totally reminded me of the pick up roller hockey games we used to play.

Apparently they play every Sunday and try to get together once during the week too.

Nina now wants to get a pink hockey stick and can’t wait to get her bike that is still somewhere in transition.
Picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern.