Extending past Progress conversation with NotebookLM on potential for a NetworkEnlightenment.... (2025-06-14) Collaborative Groups Of Thinkers That Instigated Significant Technological And Political Changes (more)

Tim Bray links to the latest anti-MsPowerPoint discussions, triggered by Edward Tufte, summarized by WiredMag, and talks about his own attempts to talk-outside-the-bullet. (more)

Ben Horowitz suggests how to scale your Start Up. In this post, I will discuss the basics of scaling an organization. In doing so, I will lay out the fundamentals, but not go as far as writing a how-to guide. Hopefully, this will give you the context to apply the myriad of scaling techniques in the management literature appropriately. I will save for later posts more advanced topics....At the point when adding people into the company feels like more work than the work that you can offload to the new employees, the defensive lineman has run around you and you probably need to start giving ground grudgingly. The first scale technique to implement is specialization... (more)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkolb/ http://www.jasonkolb.com/ (more)

Evelyn Rodriguez on business Metaphors. She says Ricardo Semler debunks the need for a top-down Mission statement within a corporation. In the Seven Day Weekend, Ricardo Semler says that the mission statement is a carryover from the military and mainly intended for "public relations" and debunks the need for a top-down mission statement within a corporation. Semco itself does not have a mission statement. "The mission and credo terminology is borrowed from the military, and the deficiencies in the military analogy illustrate why grassroots, deed-driven values are preferable and successful." (more)

bottom-up, organic/emergent

creating a fake GrassRoots movement (more)

A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a U.S. Tech Mogul. The Times unraveled a financial network that stretches from Chicago to Shanghai and uses American nonprofits to push Chinese talking points worldwide. (more)

book-to-be from Eric Markowitz https://www.eric-markowitz.com What can the world’s oldest companies—and nature’s most resilient lifeforms—teach us about longevity? Over the next 12 months, I’ll travel the globe—from Central American rainforests to centuries-old businesses in Europe and Asia—on a quest to answer one question: what allows a rare few systems to outlast? (more)

Chris Barber: career & startup advice for the GenAI era... AI makes some things cheap and easy. But not everything. The things that it doesn’t make cheap and easy but that are still demanded by customers then become the bottlenecks, and are generally more valuable. (more)

Chicago dev, building Hearken (more)

Charles James Kirk (October 14, 1993 – September 10, 2025) was an American right-wing political activist, author, and media personality. He co-founded the conservative organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012 and was its executive director. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of Turning Point Action and a member of the Council for National Policy. The Washington Post described him as "one of the most prominent voices on the right" in his later years.[3] Kirk was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs of Arlington Heights and Prospect Heights, Illinois. In high school, Kirk actively engaged in politics, supporting Mark Kirk (no relation) and his U.S. Senate campaign, as well as campaigning against a price increase in his school's cafeteria. He briefly attended Harper College before dropping out to pursue political activism full-time. On September 10, 2025, while on stage at Utah Valley University for a TPUSA event known as "The American Comeback Tour",[149] Kirk was shot fatally in the neck. The shooting took place around noon as the event began. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kirk (more)

The Republic of Letters (Respublica literaria) is the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the Americas. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment, or philosophes as they were called in France. The Republic of Letters emerged in the 17th century as a self-proclaimed community of scholars and literary figures that stretched across national boundaries but respected differences in language and culture.[1] These communities that transcended national boundaries formed the basis of a metaphysical Republic... The first known occurrence of the term in its Latin form (Respublica literaria) is in a letter by Francesco Barbaro to Poggio Bracciolini dated July 6, 1417;[3] it was used increasingly in the 16th and 17th, so that by the end of that century it featured in the titles of several important journals... There are some historians who disagree and some have gone so far as to say that its origin dates back to Plato's Republic.[5] Part of the difficulty in determining its origin is that, unlike an academy or literary society, it existed only in the minds of its members. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Letters (more)

Jeff Morris listing software cults (he just invested in Roam). What should really qualify, given the contentious nature of geeks? His list: (more)

Simon Wardley: Why the fuss about serverless? It’s how back in Canonical Ltd in 2008, we knew we had to focus on the emerging DevOps world and to make sure everyone (or as many as possible) that were building in that space were working on Ubuntu. We exploited this change for our own benefits. As one CIO recently told me, one day everyone was talking about RedHat and the next it was all Cloud plus Ubuntu. That didn’t happen by accident. (more)

Ubuntu (originally /ʊˈbuːntʊ/ uu-boon-tuu, according to the company website /ʊˈbʊntuː/ uu-buun-too)[10][11][12][13][14] is a Debian-based LinuxOS operating system and distribution, with Unity as its default desktop environment for personal computers including smartphones in later versions. Ubuntu also runs network servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system) Driven by Canonical Ltd.

anti-trust writer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Stoller (more)

A book about a book. (more)

When I don't feel like Reading an entire book, so I just read a bunch of articles/reviews about it. (more)

In this website, we explain the meaning of and relationship between the Commons and peer-to-peer (P2P) frameworks, and detail how a growing movement for a Commons transition is poised to reinvigorate labor, politics, production, and carework from both interpersonal and environmental perspectives. But to bring about such a transition we first need a clear understanding of our present social and cultural value systems, and how P2P and the Commons could transcend these to co-create a more egalitarian and environmentally conscious planetary culture. We use the phrase Commons Transition to describe a series of ongoing actions that reflect the needs and creative input of civil society. What are the components of such a transition, and how do they turn into concrete actions?