sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

Emily posted this story on Facebook as soon as we woke up this morning. After trying and failing to articulate the experience myself, I've opted to cross-post her note instead, as she captured it very beautifully. Comments here will reach her.

I wish you all could have been in DC last night.

Last night was one of the most memorable of my life, and I'm having a hard time making sense of it all, but I keep coming back to this moment, silly as it may have been:

Walking towards the White House with Emily and Emily, I approached a young black woman talking on her cellphone. She had that perfect combination of features that make a person seem so warm and welcoming: a huge smile, a dance in her step, and big, steady eyes that lock onto yours for a moment longer than you expect. So when she put her hand up for a high five, I pushed it back down and instead wrapped her in a bear hug.

I'm very excited to announce the launch of my new blog. It's called "Open Culture: The Political Economy of the Commons and the Crowd," and for the next six months I'll be using it to chronicle my thesis. After that, I plan to self-publish my thesis there, and then open it up as more of a community forum with several contributing bloggers.

One of the reasons that Kiva seems to be wildly popular is that, in some way, it restores social capital (or the illusion of social capital) to the development industry. Disillusioned by the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of monolithic organizations, ranging from the World Bank to UNICEF, middle class American philanthropists seem thrilled by Kiva's application of social networking to micro-lending.

Over at 43Folders, Merlin Mann has twice been critical of the concept of multitasking.

In general, I take his perspective to heart, in the sense that what we call multitasking is often just a cluttered use of time, which creates the illusion of efficiency at the expense of... well... efficiency.

Just a quick plug to promote the publication of a new issue at gnovis, where I am entering my second year as Managing Editor.

I won't get into the political reasons, but I've been trying to take a very small personal stand and boycott the Olympics (*cough* *Free Tibet* *cough*). However, for a sports junkie like me this is extremely difficult. My main strategy has been to go MLB.com instead of ESPN.com for my daily fix. However, technology has conspired against me... but it has also saved me.

First, how technology conspired to make me watch the olympics...

Over the last year, as I've mulled over various thesis topics, I've often returned to two imprecise concepts, "commons-based approaches" and "open culture", which I am now faced with sorting through in order to focus my research. In particular, now that I'm locking into "open culture" as my central topic, I need to decide whether to incorporate "the commons" or discard it altogether.

I'm very excited to have settled on a thesis topic. It still needs to be ironed out quite a bit, and I'm not sure if I'll discuss it publicly for quite a few months, but it relates to Karl Marx, Linus Torvalds and David Korten... and it will be beautiful.

I just took a quick coffee break to read Wading in the Deep: Supporting Emergent Anarchies, a short article by Naeem Inayatullah at Ithaca College, which was given to me last week by a close friend of mine and a former student of Naeem's. Quite frankly, I was blown away... it has been at least three years since I read such a provocative piece on pedagogy in higher ed.