October 17th, 2008, No Comments »
Over at the Creative Review blog, there are photos of an art project for the birds:
Super Kingdom is an art installation with a difference: each of the pieces on show in King’s Wood, near Ashford in Kent, is a fully-functioning animal house. They just happen to be based on a selection of infamous dictators’ palaces…
Artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson (of London Fieldworks) are behind the series of structures. They plan to make a film of the various native and non-native creatures who take up residence in the houses, as a comment on the displacement of animal (and human) communities in the face of urban development.
My favourite is the variation on Stalin’s palace in Warsaw.
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April 8th, 2008, 1 Comment »
James (who has his own Web 2.0 community) pointed me to this terrific article by Furqan Nazeeri about building and promoting a new online community. Furqan launched ObamaCycle, a site for recycling campaign materials.
I agree with every point in the list–they all jibe with our experience. None of his ideas are earth-shattering, but they’re definitely useful:
If there is a true community around your site, then members will overlook a lot of faults. On ObamaCycle, campaign materials are “listed” in discussion forum format, but the formatting sucks and it’s hard to find stuff. Despite that a lot of people have and continue to use the site.
Of course, Furqan benefited from having an eager real-world community to connect with, but it sounds like he did lots of stuff right.
I liked it so much, I submitted it to Digg and Reddit.
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December 14th, 2007, 6 Comments »
There are lots of things to hate about the U.S. electoral system. However, the Americans do one thing right: they get real characters as candidates. I mean, the Democrats are going to choose a woman or a African-American (er, Halfrican-American?) as their presidential candidate! How cool is that? And the Republican side is full of nutty dudes like Giuliani (who kind of reminds me of Gollum) and Mormon Mitt Romney.
Canadian politics feels so staid by comparison. Hello, Frozen Nation! Which French-Canadian middle-aged white guy will we elect as Custodian in Chief this year? I’m not sure why that is, but I wish our elections had a little more attitude and a lot more diversity.
To learn about the election (and that nutty American electoral system), I’ve started listening to the Slate Political Gabfest podcast. It’s chock full of over-educated liberal elitists, but I’m nearly all those things, so I don’t mind (plus, I’ve developed a bit of a crush on Emily Bazelon).
The Slate podcast is a well-moderated round table conversation among professional writers and pundits. It covers a lot of ground, but it’s fairly compelling and continues to inform my limited knowledge of American politics.
I would, however, like to find an analogous podcast for the Republican side of the election. Ideally, it should be professional, well-moderated and the level of required knowledge should be, at best, intermediate. Similarly, I’d like to find a Canadian political podcast that meets those requirements.
Does anybody have recommendations for equivalents to the Gabfest?
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June 15th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Tim points to an essay on DevChix (’a knowledgeable and very talented group of women in the tech and programming field[s]‘) entitled Let’s All Evolve Past This: The Barriers Women Face in Tech Communities. It’s a valuable, thoughtful, exasperated and not-entirely-correct piece, but I want to focus on a tangential point it makes: the value of single-gender groups.
The author, one gloriajw, writes:
No matter the group or the reason for gathering, _all_ of the women-only, and most of the successful women-friendly groups to which I have belonged had a strong sense of community. They make a tremendous effort to communicate well, to be fair with each other, and to provide support related to the groups goals, sometimes even extending outside of the groups goals.
Over the past hundred years, it’s obviously been an essential change that women gain access to formerly male-only institutions. Sometimes it’s things like, oh, the House of Commons, and other times its more trivial but still symbolic.
I’m trying to think of recent examples where men have entered previously women-only groups (there are professions, but I’m thinking more of communities). None spring immediately to mind–maybe that’s because there aren’t any?
Old Girls’ Clubs
Obviously, women still have a schwack of battles left to fight and win before they’re going to achieve true equality. Maybe that’s impossible, given history and biology, but I hope note.
Once that happens, or at least once the pendulum’s amplitude shrinks, hopefully society will come around again to valuing single-gender groups.
Such groups are as old as agriculture (see, for example, the historically-based novel The Red Tent), and seem like a very natural part of our culture. As gloriajw points out, men and women do naturally communicate differently, and there ought to be places where they can do so naturally. I look forward to a time when there are ‘Old Girls’ Clubs’ and ‘Old Boys’ Clubs’, without the negative connotations those phrases currently suggest.
UPDATE: Lauren disagrees with me.
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