Brian Kerr

Today is the one-year anniversary of µcoworking / microcoworking. It’s a thing that happens at certain intervals. Here’s the original invitation:

Microcoworking calendar for folks in and around Ann Arbor. If you have work to do, but not a place to work, you are invited to join us whenever and wherever there is something on the calendar. You may also add time to the calendar, just make sure to be there.

Over time, this got burned down to:

You are invited to microcowork (e.g. work together, or alone but in the presence of others) at any of the times and locations on the calendar.

People have been sitting around in cafes or on benches or in other folks’ conference rooms or the like bitterly fighting off structuration and incubation and all that control addict bullshit for longer than a year. But/and before during and after that flickering timespan when “coworking” meant anything to anybody, y’all have wanted this fire in the Delta City.

But today, after a year of Wednesdays, observe. A nice thing about µcoworking, as opposed to other non-membership-based non-organizations, is that you can drift towards and away from it without distress. There’s nothing at the center besides a calendar and a cup of coffee. You come and you go.

Limited peripheral participation (read: ripeness) is all.

(tags: coffee cybernetics fire invitations microcoworking network notwork time year)

All Streets. All Roads. Always forever now. We’ll split it right down the middle, like they split God’s country. I’ll metrate, you emerge. Let’s go.

(tags: commas god maps photos roads split streets)

Ann Arbor needs a convention center like it needs a place to have a meeting. Google will kindly tell you how and when to take the bus in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. You can get a share from the Community Farm, but only if you can drive your herbivorous ass out there.

What can you do to make a difference in southeastern Michigan’s economy? You gotta say, “I’m from the Detroit region, where innovation and opportunity thrive.” If you drink this punch, you will not explode.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, it takes six thousand characters to explain how to write great copy in 160 characters.

You can’t understand what’s happening right now in America.

I wrote and rewrote and deleted this paragraph, replacing it with this trash. Some things are too true to explain in 140 or 160 or 255 or 821 characters.

(tags: 140 160 255 821 aata bus community-farm delta city food google innovation opportunity ypsilanti)

High speed controlled flow of electrons — Marshall asks if your PR person know how to make an OPML file; welcome skepticism regarding OpenID; observe that your control addict organization is a densely networked soup of socially constructed value ‘objects’. Better to stay on the outside, where there is a name and a price for each thing, object or otherwise.

Community organizing parts I II III.

Collections of movie title sequences, moving components of invisible organizations, redacted del.icio.us links, and by-the-numbers horror story plots.

New Camino browser release; gorgeous, with Hicks Camino theme. Django has built-in goop for serializing and unserializing+filtering whatever ‘objects’ — that unword again — you care to model.

(tags: ann arbor collections control addict django electrons goop high speed narrative organizing photos plots redacted sequences skepticism statuses)

Laura Fisher and Dan Klyn both wrote this morning about being marketed to on Twitter. Individual marketers are dangerous on twitter since — at the bottom of the barrel — twitter enables content-free low-friction networking; plays to their strengths.

But nobody I follow (including some marketers) uses it in that way. Twitter is broad, but it’s also deep. If there’s anything at the frozen center of this network it’s in the aggregation of drinking buddies, or collection of condolences re: the passing of a tiny animal companion, or the organization of ad-hoc coworking w/ donuts.

What are you doing with twitter? The same thing you always do, just with a little opt-in cybernetic mock telepathy / telegraphy baked in.

(tags: aggregation animal companion bottom of the barrel donuts fight 'em until we can't friction marketing networking same thing we always do telegraphy telepathy twitter)

Forgot to mention — we set up a simple web site for the Brickyard over the weekend. That’s the underground lair where I do this most of most days.

(tags: brickyard network spaces underground lair work)

So there’s this data. What are people doing with it?

@jweise made an Mapufacture map by way of his scraped feed.

One thing Mapufacture lets you do is view the map in Google Earth, with a pinpoint for each structure and spot availability behind each marker.

In a comment on my last post, Ian Jones mentioned using a Google Spreadsheet to track this data, but I haven’t seen the spreadsheet.

Seems like a good use case for EditGrid, actually.

Again, here’s the data source we’re all working from and the CSV file I’m logging the data to, updated three times an hour.

Finally, the total number of spots in each structure, buried in a bunch of asinine PDFs at the DDA:

• 4th and Washington — 282
• 4th and William — 987
• Ann and Ashley — 840
• Forest — 854
• Liberty — 573
• Maynard — 797

(tags: ann arbor civic infrastructure csv dda google maps mapufacture vertical parking)

So the Ann Arbor DDA has a dumb page listing available parking spots in the five big, vertical parking structures around downtown Ann Arbor. It’s just a dump of how many spots are free (and there are always spots free); no feeds or time series or what have you.

We fight with the civic infrastructure we have, not the civic infrastructure we want to have.

So here’s a CSV dump of the actual data, updated every 20 minutes. Please use it for whatever you like.

And here’s a short Python script if you just want the data yourself:

from urllib2 import urlopen
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(urlopen("http://a2dda.org/parking.php"))

for row in soup('tr')[1:]:
    structure, spots = row.contents
    structure = structure.contents[0]
    spots = spots.contents[0].split(’  ‘)[1]
    print structure, spots

Update 2008-04-04: See also my next post for more fun.

(tags: ann arbor civic infrastructure csv dda vertical parking)

Captioning Sucks is a new pseudopod out of of Joe Clark’s Open and Closed project. See also: Screenfont.CA. Peruse urgently.

(tags: accessible caption design media screen text visual)

Event announcement. There’s an empty page for the conference, with details having just arrived via e-mail:

Annual UMInDS Spring Conference
April 4, 2008 Pendleton Room Michigan Union

Disability and War

1:00 pm Poster Session by UM Students and Faculty

2:00 pm Panel: Disability at War

• Rick Briggs, Brain Injury Association of Michigan “Traumtic Brain Injury — The Signature Wound of the War on Terror”
• Sally Chivers, University of Trent “Disabled Veterans Soldier On: Canadians Coming Home from Afghanistan”
• Nina Berman, Documentary Photographer “Purple Hearts“

3:30 pm Coffee Break and Poster Session Continued

4:00 pm Keynote Address Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell
U Illinois Chicago/ Temple University
“The Social Romance of Reintegration: Returning Veterans Films and the Forging of U.S. Disability Collectives”

Co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature
For information contact Carrie Baker at 734 647-6251 or mcarrie@umich.edu

(tags: accessible april 4 2008 conference disability events umich uminds war)

Robert Browning’s “Paracelsus” (1835), re: co-, net-, and notworking:

I will kneel if you require me,
Impart the meagre knowledge I possess,
Explain its bounded nature, and avow
My insufficiency whate’er you will:
I give the fight up! Let there be an end,
A privacy, an obscure nook for me.
I want to be forgotten even by God!

(tags: bounded fight forgotten god knowledge nature nook obscure paracelsus privacy)

From nothing to more than nothing.
Move from zero to one.

Move.

(tags: activities animal control cybernetics machine more-than motion nothing oblique one strategies systems zefrank zero)

Try something tomorrow that you haven’t done today, temporarily and for the activity’s own sake. Don’t eat. Don’t sleep, and work on your favorite project vigorously through the night. Disable Verdana and browse the web.

Find a limit and push it gently.

(tags: cybernetics invitations self)

What I noticed from Adam Gopnik’s The Real Work in The New Yorker for March 17, 2008:

Magic is possible because magicians are smart. And what they’re smart about is mainly how dumb we are, how limited in vision, how narrow in imagination, how resourceless in conjecture, how routinized in our theories of the world, how deadened to possibility. The magician awakens us from the dogmatic slumbers of our daily life, our interactions with cards and hoops and things. He opens a door by pointing to a window.

(tags: cards conjecture cybernetics doors hoops imagination interaction magic magician observation opening perception representation routinized theories of the world things visual windows)

From Community and Privacy by Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, partying like it’s 1965:

Until one stops using popular or generalized words to describe specific objects and events, one will continue to be deceived by the associations with them and will fail to arrive at the essential functional aspect of things and places that is the planner’s actual concern in problem — analysis and design.

(tags: analysis arrival aspects concerns cybernetics design essence events failure function functional aspect objects places things words)

• Flashlight
• RecentChanges
• A night at the movies
• Sim City aka Micropolis
• A truck out on the four lane a mile or more away
• Peacemaker missiles (almost)
• Depot town railroad crossing, after a summer sunset, among friends

(tags: depot town flashlight micropolis missile testing peacemaker sim city skilled performance summer sunset wikipedia)

Site launched; go urgently.

(tags: collective cybernetics fire narratives psyops)

Go urgently and listen and listen and listen, because whatever problem you’re solving or relationship you’re negotiating or light you’re bringing into the world, it’s just an interpretation of something someone else did recently, but before you were born.

Thanks @danklyn for the recommendation(s).

(tags: ambient bang-on-a-can cybernetics design eno media music narratives nothing-is-written)