• images — analog devices, a catalog of ACME products, delicious guacamole, the Faces of Unsolved Mysteries, thrift store hell;
• words — not mine; and
• your village — the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti Street Railway, “coworking” “town hall”, Startup Weekend, the Washtenaw County Workers’ Center.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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

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.