Show up. Be present.

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Two from Roz Duffy that should be passed along; “here and now”, and “my community story”.

Show up. Be present. Probably my greatest personal struggles.

But I’m finding that breathing helps. So does getting back to somethings I had set aside for too long, like my guitar, which provides a kind of mindfulness training in and of itself. So does coding when in a flow. Or most clearly, watching my daughter dance and sing or hearing Richelle’s voice on the phone. I probably will never as attentive to the world I’m in as when I’m in the moment like that. And sometimes, far too often for my taste, I allow anxieties about the future or frets about the past to distract from even those times. But I know that is a challenge we all face, and in that challenge is everything.

First post from WordPress

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Recent happenings with Six Apart and the momentum behind WordPress convinced me to migrate paradox1x.org.

I used to migrate this blog every few months to a new platform during blogging’s early period; Userland Frontier, EditThisPage, Userland Radio, Nuke, PostNuke, GreyMatter, and eventually MovableType. I’ve had plenty of experience with Drupal, Blogger, and WordPress on other projects over the years and I’ve gone the build-it-your-self route a few times too.

I had considered some other great options for paradox1x.org; Melody, Jekyll, Hyde, PyBlosxom and going hosted with WordPress.com, or Tumblr.

In the end, this blog is primarily an outlet for my writing. And WordPress, like MovableType, just works, not exciting technologically I know, but that’s what is important for this space here.

3164 posts and 3592 comments, 21 pages later, here we are. Thank you Movable Type and Six Apart for a long run. Movable Type was never as bad a some made it, nor was it the bees knees. It got the job done and the community that was a round it was instrumental in blogging’s history. Thank you. Now on with WordPress.

Let me know about any flakiness. I am trying to determine the optimal comment toolset (Disqus is an option) so there will be some issues, I’m sure, to work out.

Nancy Scola gives the good news and bad news about participatory democracy

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A good thought provoker I’d thought I’d pass along: Personal Democracy Forum: “Talk Notes: The Invention That Is American Democracy”:

I’d argue that much of what has passed for participatory democracy in these early stages of its reinvention has been obsessed with re-engineering a system — while largely ignoring the role of real-live flesh and blood people in that system. Tools like Twitter, and Facebook, and mobile, and the good old World Wide Web are potentially incredibly powerful. But they are the how of participatory democracy; they’re not the what. The hopeful side is that the what consists of exactly what I’ve talked about social media being very good at – sharing ideas and shaping our engagements with other people. Once we figure out how to apply the same new power we have over our personal lives to our political lives, that’s when I suspect we might see democracy’s real re-invention.

I think there is a challenge there to take up and that she succinctly outlines it for everyone.

Must reading about Kensington at Philly.com

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The Inquirer recently wrapped up a series about the struggles faced in Kensington and Philadelphia’s First Congressional District – the 2nd hungriest in the nation: “Hunger in the First”:

Following this series, no doubt brought on by the horror of the Kensington strangler, was a greater spotlight cast by the papers on the neighborhood that included a great set of independent articles:

All are worth reading.

An article that introduces us to a new news effort coming *from* Kensington deserves a special shout out because it is efforts like this that point us towards the future or news and maybe the neighborhood itself: “Philadelphia duo bring Internet attention to Kensington’s woes”. That duo is Richie Antipuna and Heather Barton and their video series can be found on Blip.tv.

I just had to round up these articles and post them to one page since the subject matter was so related. Now if there was a place to discuss these stories collectively. Reddit’s Philadelphia sub-reddit perhaps? That feels wrong. The stories need an official home someplace where people from the neighborhood and outside the neighborhood can discuss them collectively. Why do I care about that? Because when people connect over subject matter that is when ideas can take shape and action can take place.

Maptivism getting easier, happening more

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Combine mapping, with participation, and a subject matter that needs attention, and you can create some powerful, useful tools. Google Maps APIs and various mashup techniques made it easy for technologists to build services that pulled together these concepts, but now hosted services like Ushahidi’s CrowdMap and SeeClickFix are opening up the possibilities to more.

NYTimes: “Phone Apps Aim to Fight Harassment”

Hollaback!

Observer: “Want to Help Dig Out Some Police Cars? Site Crowdsources Snow Cleanup in NYC”

Snowmageddon Clean-Up: New York

StreetCorner.com.au: “Police and public turn to social media & maps in the Queensland flood crisis”

EveryMap and ABC Qld Flood Crisis Map

Mercury News: “O’Brien: What Haiti tells us about the promise and limitations of digital media”

GigaOm: “How Social Networks and Mobile Tech Helped in Haiti”

Ushahidi-Haiti

CNN: “Ushahidi: How to ‘crowdmap’ a disaster”

O’Reilly Radar: Alex Howard: “The role of the Internet as a platform for collective action grows”

Related:

Ushahidi and CrowdMap

SeeClickFix (which just got some nice investment)

CrisisMappers

Crisis Commons

MobileActive.org

Hollaback!

GovFresh

We Media

Code for America

Queen and Heroism

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slacktivist: “The terror of knowing what this world is about”:

Nothing new here — nothing novel or innovative or unusual. But worth repeating, I think. In any case, it was something I needed to repeat after firing up the computer this morning to find that the artists and the saints had conspired against me, teaming up to remind me what this world is about.

Love dares you. Mm ba ba de.

Related:

Greater Good: Philip Zimbardo: “What Makes a Hero?”

Both good reads.

So what language/skill will you be learning this year?

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Rafe is going to be investing in learning JavaScript and Node.js. After some server-side JavaScript work last year with Alfresco WebScripts, I’m inclined to to continue to dig in further myself.

First up is finishing “Eloquent JavaScript”.

Related, recent reads:

Steve Yegge: “The Universal Design Pattern “

Sam Ruby: “Planetary Exploration”

JavaScript, JavaScript: “Exploring JavaScript for-in loops”

w2lessons.com: “Why You Need to Learn JavaScript”