Writing: Blog

In June Crate.IO was chosen by the Austrian Federal Chamber of Commerce (WKO) to compete in the Born Global Champion challenge and received the reward. The Chamber of Commerce thereby officially recognizes Crate.IO for its

I have been wanting to read this as part of my research into dystopian fiction for my One day the World Ended project and I have mixed opinions on this book.

In my continued efforts to read as mazy works of dystopian fiction as possible, next on my list was Battle Royale. On a side note, are there many works of purely utopian fiction? Or would that not sell? Back to the east Asian republic. Set in the non-too-distant future, a large Asian empire now rules over an undefined area, full of social control, aggression and suppression. Once a term a class of school children are chosen to compete in a battle to the death on an abandoned island with no hope of escape and only one survivor. It's never completely clear why this happens and what the government gets out of it, but that doesn't matter too much.

I picked this book up as part of a book bundle somewhere, but escapes me with one right now. It's timing was perfect as research for the development of Chip Shop as it covers the history of video games from 1970 up to the year 2000.

This week has been a fervent flurry of activity as I prepare for <a href="/its-all-change-again" target="_blank">starting my new job next week</a>.

Quite a lot of small updates, tweaks and additions to the various Gregarious Mammal sites, here they are.

After some polishing, planning and technical tweaking the text version of my work of fiction is now online.

As part of my research in projects odtwe I have been reading some classics of utopian and dystopian fiction. Most recently I completed Jack London's The Iron Heel.

Yesterday I came up with the most phenomenal idea of how to get my writing workflow, ideas for ODTWE and tech stack in ‘perfect’ combination. Well, in theory (unsurprisingly).

I added a set of new categories and related resources to the Lean Traveller site yesterday including Communication, travel and some resources under archiving.

After visiting the Tate Modern over Christmas and seeing these two images (I've forgotten the artist):

I guess most of its stylistic inspiration comes from Kurt Vonnegut and to a lesser extent surreal dark British comedy such as Douglas Adams. It is about the end of the world, but that isn't the point, it's just a vehicle. The fact that the world is ending isn't relevant, it's merely a surreal vehicle to explore elements of the human condition. Wow, that last sentence sounded pretentious!

Now I live in a non-english speaking country, not only am I far more understanding of non-english speakers in English speaking countries, but I am also more conscious of providing content in multiple languages. The first point is something I would like to revisit in a future post, but for now lets look at a new option for providing content in different languages.

Before spending seven years in Melbourne and then moving to Germany, I lived and grew up in London. I am one of London's rarities, a real, born-and-bred, bona fide Londoner. In fact I am actually a Cockney -- and one of the last!

A valid discussion, but what will the limitations and potentials be.

Growth is always a goal in many countries, statistics appear everywhere and it's always discussed. Even small reductions in GDP are met with bitter disappointment, it's become one of the most important measures in the modern era.

Michelle Bauens, the P2P Foundation The Nutrient dense project is a global community of farmers and civic scientists who believe that putting nutrients into the soil it will improve food growth rates. These projects will often receive no funding, so they have mutualised their research and practices. This knowledge and information is shareable and escapes the commodity model. This is the production of commons, not capital.

We are looking at what these models and projects share in common and what is different between them and why.

It's refreshing to hear someone (unsurprisingly an engineer) mention that the Degrowth movement could do with more practical projects and methodologies to run alongside the theoretical discussions.

Konstantatos Haris of the Harokopio University of Athens is a member of Syriza and Political scientist in the department of Geography. He states that Geography and History are also factors as well as different political and socio-economic structures. There are commonalities amongst many Southern European countries that need to be addressed today.

Despite attending the conference, not everyone will fully understand what 'Degrowth' is, or the multitude of related terms that will be mentioned during the conference. Thankfully the first session on the schedule is ideally suited for getting your knowledge up to scratch.

I've been in Germany for a couple of months now and of course there the obvious signs you're not a local when you open your mouth.

In the past ten days I finally made the second overseas move of my life. This time from Melbourne to Leipzig.

I&rsquo;ve been attending the <a href="https://www.meetup.com/Melbourne-KMLF/events/142133462/" target="_blank">Knowledge Management Melbourne</a> sessions without still being entirely clear what a Knowledge manager actually is, but I find the topics they present interesting and relevant, so&hellip;

<span style="line-height: 1.538em;">For many, 2013 has been an intense and not always good year, but personally it&#39;s been pretty good and I&#39;m looking forward to building upon the foundations from this year into 2014. Here&#39;s some reflections and highlights for you all to enjoy/endure.

With&hellip;&nbsp;Cory Doctorow, Melbourne Writers Festival Director Lisa Dempster and Peter Williams of the Deloitte Centre for the Edge. A main presentation, followed by a panel discussion, which I haven&#39;t really covered here and got interesting just as it was ending.

First up, I find it strange how different sectors describe the same things with different names and have the same problems. It&#39;s simultaneously refreshing and depressing that small and large organisations have exactly the same problems with their projects.

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A few weeks ago I quit my job, I&rsquo;d been there for two years but it was no longer right for me anymore.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I&rsquo;m not one to rest on my laurels, so what&rsquo;s next? After a process of figuring out who I am and what I want to do, quite a lot is on the horizon, allow me to introduce you to some of the potentials&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Wrapping up my involvement in Green Renters</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">This has been something that Cate and I have been trying to do for a while and we realised it needed more focussed work than we initially thought and we&rsquo;re weighing up quite what shape this will take, if you&rsquo;re interested in knowing more about that, <a href="https://greenrenters.org/news/time-new-lease" target="_blank">read this blog post</a>.<p class="p1"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Starting a new cooperative organisation</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The shape that this will (possibly) completely take is yet to be decided, but I&rsquo;m resurrecting and changing an old tag line from my past and starting a new Community development and Technology co-operative business called &ldquo;Large Gregarious Mammal&rdquo;, if you&rsquo;re interested in that or want in, <a href="https://largegregariousmammal.com/content/introducing-large-gregarious-mammal#overlay-context=" target="_blank">see this blog post</a>.<p class="p1"><strong style="line-height: 1.538em;">Writing more</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Wether it be on the very blog or on other more established publications, I want to write more&hellip; About technology, ideas, other people&rsquo;s ideas and&hellip; My book&hellip;<p class="p1"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Lean Agile nonprofit</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I&rsquo;ve mentioned this before, but I&rsquo;m stepping up working on my timely and needed (at this time) volume (but also consultancy, blog etc&hellip;) on applying lean and agile methodology to the non profit world. <a href="https://theleanagilenonprofit.com/" target="_blank">Follow those exploits here</a>.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Tools for Changemakers</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Inspired by the reception from my sessions as part of the Chagnemakers Festival I have decided to turn it into an ongoing project, not only more such sessions, but also a website resource that will weigh up and review tools suitable for Changemakers.<br /><a href="https://toolsforchangemakers.com" target="_blank">toolsforchangemakers.com</a><p class="p1">Or I might just get a job&hellip;

<p class="p1">I feel slightly cheeky writing much about the event as I didn&rsquo;t really end up doing very much and felt somewhat humbled and embarrassed by the other attendees.<p class="p1">Anyway, to start at the beginning.<p class="p1">HealthHack 2013 was a weekend hackfest solving problems that medical researchers face. HealthHack brought together medical researchers, bioinformaticians, software developers, data analysts, data visualisers and designers. Together, they created new software tools to analyse, visualise and communicate data.<p class="p1">Organised by a great team in a very welcoming atmosphere it was a surprisingly well attended event considering the niche topic.&nbsp;Read about the weekend and the winners here - <span class="s2"><a href="https://healthhackmelb.com">healthhackmelb.com</a><p class="p1">I turned up on Friday night and enjoyed being very well fed and watered and finally got to meet <a href="https://twitter.com/FCTweedie"><span class="s2">@FCTweedie</a> in the flesh after much mutual twitter stalking.<p class="p1">I listened to the problem statements and must admit it was all a little over my head. I come from a technical background and despite having studied &lsquo;proper programming&rsquo; at University it has been a very long time since I really did any and I realise my web work is very light really. Also the technical scientific nature of the problems was a little out of my depth, I vaguely understand what things like DNA are, but when it comes to reporting, analysing and visualising them, way out of my comfort zone.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Still, I found one talk spoke to me at a level I could understand, which was about visualising the quality of academic papers on particular subjects. Working a lot within content management systems, this seemed like an ideal fit to my skills, so I joined the team. However, mixing with a bunch of far superior programmers to me, it was immediately obvious that they had far more complex (and probably more appropriate) solutions in mind and I was a little lost again&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I meandered around for a bit watching what people where up to and went to see if the organisers needed any help, they didn&rsquo;t, but were incredibly nice to me about everything and we had a very interesting chat about Hack events in general, but I think that&rsquo;s a discussion for another blog post.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Great stuff and congratulations to all involved.

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">As part of RMIT&rsquo;s sessions in Open Access week I toddled down to &ldquo;Publishing the Open Access Way: The Change in Business Thinking Towards Open Access&rdquo; and a slightly small crowd&hellip; I&rsquo;m a little behind with blog posts, so this will again, be a little bit of a collection of items with some opinions and thoughts.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The speakers and talks were<p class="p1"><b style="line-height: 1.538em;">Dr Adrian Danks - Senses of cinema</b><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A quarterly academic journal around cinema culture and commentary. To me it&rsquo;s approach seemed fairly conventional. Their open nature means not Peer reviewed. Their 4th largest&nbsp; audience is Australia, which seems to be a constant, many Australian creative organisations have to be successful overseas to make it at home. Dependent on funding bodies, how does this affect the open nature? Is it any better than an advertiser really?<p class="p1"><b style="line-height: 1.538em;">Philip Dearman - Communication, Politics &amp; Culture</b><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">An open access journal, I think the title pretty much tells you what the content is. Seems like some publications just become free because they have no other options or are forced to. Again, the journal is backed by Academia anyway, so it doesn&rsquo;t have quite the same restraints others may have.&nbsp;<p class="p1"><b style="line-height: 1.538em;">Debbie Dickinson - The conversation</b><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">&nbsp;<br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Conversation is fairly well known, again with some academic backing, but seemingly looking into wider sustainable sources of funding and life. Some of the Conversations interesting features and approaches are republishing their content,&nbsp; sharing is positively encouraged leading to strong worldwide access.<p class="p1"><a href="https://www.rmit.edu.au/library/oaw" target="_blank">www.rmit.edu.au/library/oaw</a>