This Good Idea come with a personal stamp of approval. Mini Maker Faires have been popping up all over the country, and, well, they're awesome. Initially developed by Make Magazine, Mini Maker Faires are typically locally-orgainzed events that allow anyone who, well, makes stuff, to show off what they can do. What does that have to …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: Mini Maker Faire!
This article focuses on national policy, but in the process it gives a great insight into the challenges and the unknowns of what I referred to in the book as the 1099 Economy, after the United States tax form used to report income from freelance work. And it highlights a key problem: since at the …
One of the major themes in the book revolves around the risks -- and our tendency to overlook the risks -- of the unintended consequences of the big ideas we come up with to try to make our communities better. As I've noted a bunch of times, including here and here, a huge number of …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: South Carolina’s Abandoned Building Revitalization Act
It's hard for people who work in local governments and nonprofits (or many old-line employers, for that matter) to grasp the incredible changes going on in how more and more people do their work. Don't get caught up in the gee-whiz technology mentioned in this article, but look closely at how this work is getting done …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: Work at WikiSpeed is not work like it used to be
This Good Idea is for both us as people, as professionals ... and for how we manage our communities. This article is written for educators talking about their students, but it applies to all of us who are saying, "how the hell do we survive in this tumultuous, constant-change economy?" The answer: we …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: How 21st Century Thinking Is Just Different
Sometimes the Good Ideas file throws me a surprise. Today's Good Idea is a great follow-on to the challenge to magic -bullet thinking around vacant lots that dominated yesterday's post. According to this article, Louisville, Kentucky, is trying to figure out the vacant lot question themselves -- and they're doing it in a way that both …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: Louisville’s Lots of Possibility
In this opinion piece from the Detroit Free Press, John Gallagher identifies the next challenge, and the unpleasant reality, of our current strategies for dealing with the massive numbers of vacant buildings we have in cities: The simplistic, ipso-facto hope that often rears its head: if we just clear it, "the market" will take care …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas File: You Tear Down the Blight, But then what?
OK, this is less a good idea than a good and useful analysis of why adapting any kind of transparency-based, fail-forward-fast, take risks, little bets approaches, of the type that are being advocated by new businesses and civic hackers and loudmouths like me, are so darn hard for governments of any stripe. If you cannot get …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: Politicians are from Alpha, Geeks are from Beta
This is all kinds of awesome. Young people gaining skills and confidence, communities getting the kind of personal-scale improvements that change people's everyday relationships with their communities, breaking through suspicions and helplessness to re-knit people's relationship with their community and each other... your community probably needs this. So go do it! http://www.fastcoexist.com/3023330/how-the-tiny-wpa-is-transforming-neighborhoods-with-help-from-teenage-girls
I'm not sure this is a good idea...it's probably a devil-in-the-details situation... but it's certainly an interesting idea. This opinion piece from Matt Reed at Florida Today does a nice job of outlining the picking-favorites, what-about-me spiral that incentives programs fall into if they aren't backed by a very careful, very prudent strategy for clearly targeting incentives …
Continue reading From the Good Ideas file: Why not incentivize every business?
The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived 