So I started blogging again, but looks like that will be on http://prabhasp.com
This site should receive every post, but the main action isn’t here.
Screenshots from 2010. 1. CrisisFilter, a now abandoned all-volunteer project for minimalist stream-tagging 2. an interesting photo tagging app from The Extraordinaries who I think are now http://sparked.com which “helps companies tap customer and employee expertise” 3. PFIF, an astonishingly simple idea which inspired me far out of proportion to its humble layout. Thanks Ping. 4. Swift River, an aggregator we started in 2008 and has been rebuilt at least 4 times, but not succeeded yet. In 2009 I was very confident that we could create small teams that would be able to make meaningful contributions to data. I think has only really started in earnest about 2011, after we learned so much from the Haitian experience. 5. Google Spreadsheets, the workhorse of online collaboration, which has been so essential and yet ignored. Where the hell are humanitarian google spreadsheet plugins? We need to go to the people, people. 6. One of the many Mission 4636 Uis. 7. OSM page showing the underlying tag structure, which, considering OSM’s success as a distributed team, is very significant observation I think. 8. Visualization from the Haitian Ushahidi deployment in 2010 showing the rapid evolution of the category schema, which I think is essential to understand how such projects succeed or fail. Without a grounding in a higher taxonomic order the data is useless. 9. Some icons I made based on some classic iconography principles of Gerd Arntz. I think these are useful to help facilitate discussions of the taxonomy.
A catalogue of some experiments trying to put semantic meaning into streams of data in the disaster context, by the ever astute @unthinkingly.
This Saturday, Join us for a Map-A-Thon for Nepal.
International Open Data Day’s mapping Kathmandu snuck up on many of us in New York, so we are…
Monsoon Collective, a retrospective
July 2012: what an incredible month! I say this for myself, and hopefully ten others, who got…
Links to celebrate March: Beauty and Innovation
- Kathmandu is being “Kolor”ed! Kathmandu’s coolest kids, at the Sattya Media Arts and Collective,…
Getting started with R
I have found myself encouraging, coaxing, and eventually coaching many colleagues and friends into…
Moving to wordpress
The art of the finish.
About two years ago, I came across a slideshare presentation which highlighted two words that I have been thinking about quite a bit since—START and FINISH. Starting is the important threshold between ideas (almost useless) and implementation (all the gold). And finishing—well, that is the art of shipping. Turning implementation into usage. Putting it out there in the world.
I haven’t ever had an issue with starting. Finishing is harder; when I saw that presentation, I wrote “FINISH” in big letters and put it behind my desk. I continue to use that word to push myself. A look back at what I have finished every once in a while is often just what I need to keep going.
Software and Community
In software, finishing has meant code that is good enough that I can tell folks about it without caveat. I am fortunate enough to have pulled this off with a few small projects in the last half year, like formhub’s hexbin feature, cascading selects, and formhub.R. Others haven’t made it there; yatayat being the primary example. Code exists, but something is incomplete about it. Something makes me hesitate before yelling about it out the rooftops.
But then, I come to my non-software projects, in some ways the more important ones, and how I work towards completing them. There, finish is more nebulous, harder to define. Take the Monsoon Collective. In a way, it is finished, the first year version completed successfully. But the value here is of community, of the long haul. How will that ever finish? How does one articulate the success of community building.
Thoughts to chew on.
Join me, for a labor of love (and if you can't, help me advertise)
I would like your help in soliciting applicants for a labor of love, the Monsoon workshop.
I have spoken to at least one of you about the idea of the Monsoon collective, and in fact, your encouragement has contributed existentially to the collective’s first activity, the Monsoon workshop. The workshop is happening this summer, 4 days a week, in July, in Jawlakhel, Kathmandu. The idea is to create a space and place (in the metaphorical and the physical sense) where a peer-led group experiments with technology that touches society. Thats really the heart of it—a group of people using technology as medium (the paint) and society / Kathmandu as canvas—and we think it will be an amazing experience for anyone who joins along; I certainly can’t wait.
If any of you are in Kathmandu, I would love to have you join us. If you are not, however, please forward to friends that are creative, friends that are positive, friends that would be up an eager to *do*, artists, engineers, hackers, map-nerds, data-nerds, the non-nerds who find technology important in today’s life, and most of all, will be in Kathmandu in July (&c.). The application is short, sweet and online (http://monsooncollective.org/join-us/) and the deadline is June 22nd, although the earlier someone applies, the more likely we’ll be able to take them in. Our ideal candidate is someone who can join with us on the whole journey, but someone who can join for bits and pieces will be welcomed as space can accomodate.
Thanks for your support! I would be ecstatic to see one of your faces in the workshop, and still quite excited to see one of your friends’ faces there.
—
Prabhas Pokharel
http://monsooncollective.org
Prabhas Pokharel
http://monsooncollective.org
Create more value than you capture.
—
— Tim O’Reilly
1, my introduction to this: Ethan Zuckerman writing about Tim O’Reilly’s talk at the media lab
2, diving further in: O’Reilly himself, talking at TEDxBradford.
