So here are the two pillars of the model, as I see it emerging: You build your business based on sharing scarce resources in a time when your customers have less money, and you dedicate your business to serve a movement where sharing comes easily.

Then you build your revenue model to reduce financial and environmental costs for your customers (individual and collectively) while increasing your margins as a provider. The more you focus on your mission, the truer you are to your community’s mission, and the higher your margins. That’s the model that makes sense to me these days.

This is the Dreamfish model.  We add a little more to it; by helping people share while they work, we help them be more effective and more happy as they work, as well.

That’s the question Franke James answers for herself, in her dinner with a stranger blog post.

It’s a great story, and if you haven’t seen Franke’s blog, her graphic blog posts are worth it just for the visual presentation.

Spartanicus, in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets:

“Welcome to usenet, post a url here and you may find that we will discuss
the problems with it. If that includes what you were asking about,
consider yourself lucky.

We don’t raise these issues to put you down, but to draw your attention
to real problems.”

Mark Pilgrim,

Why we won’t help you if you haven’t validated your HTML.

Eric Raymond,

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

Adina Levin,

The Raymond Rule, coining a term for making sure to exhaust all resources on your own before asking for help; we’ve had some interesting discussions on the sociology of this, related to geek/non-geek and gender.

On words-l, we’ve got an opposite tradition, encapsulated by the acronym “IMFTATL” (It’s More Fun To Ask The List). Asking questions, even obvious ones, and getting interesting answers and comments is a good social bonding there.

via Ciro Cattuto, who did a cool network visualization of GustavoG’s tags.

While writing up some of interests on my personal page there, I counted all the Flickr and del.icio.us tags I use, thinking that would represent something about what I care about, and came up with ~1,900 tags! That’s a lot. :-)

Next post: rankism, or, why sorting tags (or most anything else) by most used is probably not most useful.

It’s not so much that corporations control education or medicine.

American education and American medicine were systemized at the same time, and very purposefully, by the same people, as industrial capitalism was. Certain sets of principles and beliefs were chosen to codify and expand, and any competing systems were deliberately wiped out.

American education and American medicine aren’t controlled by industrial capitalism, they are industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism controlled the way these public issues were systemized, setting up the ground rules, creating the playing field, and deciding how we keep score. We keep score in two ways: public good (as measured by folks hired by capitalists) and profit, how much money the capitalists make.

I don’t say this as a value judgement, just as a statement of historical fact. If we understand better how we got here, maybe we can influence the future more effectively to make things better for everyone.

There is a lot of good that comes from the industrial heritage, along with some bad things.

Good things:

• systemized and standardized
• universally available (to more or less practical limits)
• proven effective by measurement and goal-oriented improvement

Bad things:

• reductionist instead of holistic
• mechanist instead of humanist
• monoculture – measurement is good for averages, but not individuals or outlying groups
• goal-orientation is sensitive to who chooses the goals

So, I see good news from this look back. The systems we’ve got now are huge and deeply integrated into our system of capitalism, but, they were not instituted thousands of years ago and baked into our DNA. They’re not immutable natural laws. They were catalyzed only a hundred years ago, by a few people spending lots of John D. Rockefeller et al.’s money.

Those folks had a lot of leverage then because they were on the cusp of a system change into industrial capitalism, but I think we’re in the middle of the same sort of sea change as the world saw with the Industrial Revolution. If you know your purpose, it’s a good time to act.

Additional reading material:

The Underground History of American Education, by John Taylor Gatto

Also see the history tour on the same site.

Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America, by E. Richard Brown

Rockefeller Medicine Men at Amazon

Full text of Rockefeller Medicine Men at the Soil And Health Library

Scanned images of Rockefeller Medicine Men at Dr. Rath Health Foundation

Mr. Gates’s Summer Vacation, by Charles S. Bryan, MD

Focuses on Frederick T.Gates role in creating American medicine, check out the chart labelled “Gates’s 10 Basal Facts about Medicine”

The Drug Story, by Hans Ruesch

About the Rockefeller drug empire. I can’t vouch for this publisher, but the story is worth checking out.

It’s always fun to see a random cross-section of your fellow citizens. We seem like a nice bunch, and everybody’s being calm and polite.

About half of us are reading something, and the other half are just sitting here bored. A couple people are working, either on cell phones or laptops. There are a few computer stations set up with Windows and a web browser, and there’s wifi for the laptop folks. I’ve got an older laptop with a wimpy battery, so like the woman next to me, I’m sitting on the floor near the computer stations, where our power cords can reach the outlet strips.

I’ve got VNC over ssh going to my home computer to check email and the company IRC, a couple Socialtext workspaces up, and I’m on IM as needed with my co-workers. It’s nice to be connected with my folks, even if I’m a little too distracted to get much work done.

The room needs some more power strips (or I need a newer laptop with longer battery life!), but having wifi here is really nice. :-)