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Matt Webb at Reboot - Macroscopes and 100 Hours

I always find Matt Webb's talks inspiring. Matt, as many of you will know, is one of the two eponymous founders of Schultz and Webb design studio, and he wrote Mind Hacks for O'Reilly along with Tom Stafford.

Matt recently spoke at Reboot in Denmark. Within his talk he discussed the notion of a macroscope:

I’d say this focusing is an important component of what, another designer, John Thackara calls a macroscope.

A macroscope? Thackara says,

“A macroscope is something that helps us see what the aggregation of many small actions looks like when added together.”

Scientists have microscopes. Astronomers and peeping toms have telescopes. Designers, in order to see the very big, in order to see culture, which is much bigger than any one of us personally, have macroscopes.

The way I think of a macroscope is as something that shows you where you are, and where you are within something much bigger—simultaneously, so you can comprehend something much vaster than you suddenly in a human way, at a human scale, in the heart.

That was the interesting bit. The inspiring bit came at the end:

So I say our decisions about culture at large, about the question of how to spend our 100 million hours, I say these are rooted in personal ability to wield the tools of production. And as we said, 100 hours practice would get you a really long way.

Here’s my challenge. Right now, put aside 100 hours over this summer. Do it right now, in your head. Put that time aside. 100 hours. 8 hours a week for the next 12 weeks. One hour a day, or one working day a week. It’s one summer out of your entire life, it’s nothing. Okay, you’ve got that 100 hours?

Now for the next two days, go to talks and start conversations with people you don’t know, and choose what to spend your 100 hours on.

I guarantee that everyone in this room can produce something or has some special skill, and maybe they’re not even aware of it.

Ask them what theirs is, find out, because you’ll get ideas about what to learn yourself, and decide what to spend your 100 hours on. Do that for me.

Because when you contribute, when you participate in culture, when you’re no longer solving problems, but inventing culture itself, that is when life starts getting interesting.

Via Russell Davies

David Heinemeier Hansson - Ruby on Rails, Startups, Culture

O'Reilly Media have a channel on YouTube featuring interviews with key technologists. Here's David Heinemeier Hansson in Wicker Park in Chicago:

Upcoming European Conferences this Fall

Kris Buytaert writes:

The next couple of weeks, months, promise to be really busy if you are interested in European Open Source conferences ...

First up is FrOSCon - a two day conference on Free Software and Open Source, taking place for the third time on August, 23rd/24th 2008 at the Fachhochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Sankt Augustin near the cities of Bonn and Cologne. The conference revolves around a rich schedule of talks, highlighting current topics in Free Software and Open Source. Moreover, developers will be offered a large Free Software / Open Source space, allowing them to organize their own meetings or even their own lineup of events.

Then it's time for DrupalCon Szeged - with Keynotes from Rasmus and Dries, this event in Hungary  promises to be yet another interesting Drupal Conference. DrupalCon is the twice-yearly gathering of Drupalers to learn about, discuss and advance Drupal, and to network with other Drupal community members. By tradition, Drupalcon is in North America in the first half of the year and in Europe in the second.

If you are interested in monitoring systems then you'll surely be interested in the NetWays Nagios Conference taking place in Nuremberg  on 11th and 12th September, with Ethan Galstad, the creator of Nagios himself, giving a keynote.

Up next is the OpenExpo in Zurich with speakers like Harald Welte, Bruce Perens, Tristant Nitot, and others. The place to be is the Eulachhallen in Winterthur on 24th and 25th September.

The week later the crowd heads to Copenhagen for the Open Source Days. This is a 2-day community-driven open source conference. It's your opportunity to meet, share, experience and learn from open source gurus as well as the common geek. It's a great chance to gain inspiration, but also to reflect and evaluate how open source might improve your business and technical side of your life.

The OpenSource Days conference runs on October 3rd and 4th at the IT University of Copenhagen.

One week later LinuxConf.eu heads back to Germany in the form of the 15th LinuxKongress from 7th to 10th October at the University of Hamburg.

No schedule yet there, but as LinuxKongress is still one of the 3 most important Linux Conferences worldwide, it promises to be interesting.

The end of October means it's time for T-DOSE again. T-DOSE is a free and yearly event held in The Netherlands to promote use and development of Open Source Software. During this event Open Source projects, developers and visitors can exchange ideas and knowledge. This year's event will be held on 25 thand 26th October 2008 at the Fontys University of Applied Science in Eindhoven.

We are almost at the end of our list with the NLUUG  Autumn Conference which will be held November 6th 2008 in De Reehorst in Ede, the Netherlands. With the market for mobile applications being predicted to be several times as large as the market for traditional computer this year's topic is Mobility.

Concurrently held on the 6th and 7th the Embedded Linux Conference Europe  will be held in the same location, organized by the CE Linux Forum.

Last on our list is the UKUUG's Linux 2008 Conference held on Friday 7th (tutorials), Saturday 8th & Sunday 9th November Conference at the The Manchester Conference Centre.

YAPC::Europe 2008 - Copenhagen, 13th/15th August 2008

Josette Garcia writes:

YAPC::Europe 2008 will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 13-15 August 2008.

The venue will be the modern buildings of the Copenhagen Business School, right in the heart of the Frederiksberg area of Copenhagen.

The theme of the conference will be "Beautiful Perl".

Among the beautiful perlmongers you will meet Dave Cross Perl Template Toolkit and brian de foy Mastering Perl.

"YAPC" stands for "Yet Another Perl Conference" and is a series of low-cost, grassroot conferences organized by local Perl user groups.

See you there!

'Free as in Free Beer' Beer

While Minibar has always supplied a limited but appreciated quantity of Free as in Costless Beer, on 27th July there will be a supply of Open Source beer, free-as-in-free-beer beer! The St Austell Brewery in Cornwall have put into production a beer recipe concocted by the Danish arts collective Superflex and attendees at Minibar at The Old Truman Brewery can give the tipple a try:

FREE BEER (version 3.2)
FREE BEER (version 3.2) from St Austell Brewery is based on classic brewing traditions, but with added guarana for a natural energy boost. Our version shares its malt and hop blend with other versions, but is uniquely brewed with Cornish spring water from our own well, and uses premium locally grown Maris Otter barley. The added guarana gives that final special flourish to this version.

The recipe and branding of FREE BEER is published under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-shareAlike2.5). This gives permission for anyone to use the recipe or create a derivative to brew their own FREE BEER and to use the design and branding.

Scandanavian Newspapers Redesigned

City of Sound (have I mentioned that I love that site!) has a link to a post on Newspaper Designer which discusses the redesign of two prominent Scandanavian newspapers, Denmark's Politiken and Norway's Adresseavisen. Both papers have rethought their appearance in light of the challenges laid down by the internet, creating an the aesthetic influenced by the web and addressing the change in the readers' relationship to information.

On Politiken: "Denmark’s respected daily broadsheet recently introduced a Palmer Watson redesign - but also reinvented the way it handles and presents news. It has abandoned its traditional news reporting format and replaced it with a two-tier system which is intended to combine the qualities of an online newsfeed and a news magazine.
The aim is to give readers the best of both worlds. The “overview” area of the pages provides a functional, comprehensive news service, produced and presented in a compact, efficient way to keep it as up to date as deadlines allow."

On Adresseavisen: "Norway’s oldest newspaper, has made a hugely successful transition to tabloid.
The compact revolution swept into Norway earlier this autumn. Adresseavisen, based in Trondheim, was one of four regional broadsheets to convert to tabloid on the same day: the others were Bergens Tidende, Stavanger Aftenblad and Faedrelandsvennen in Kristiansand."

Palmer Watson, the Scottish design company who worked with both newspaper's to bring about these rethinks, give a thorough be-driefing of their work on their site.