aron

@aronshelton

Designing and navigating various contextual arrangements with an enigmatic sense of hope. #wayfinder

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Fundamentally, I think of governance as a curation process in which the real purpose is not the top decision your making and determining your course of action. The real purpose is surfacing data. The real value of governance is seeing how your community aligns on different issues.

Rehash: A Web Podcast • Non-Financial Use Cases for Tokens w/David Phelps | S3 E2

This is the first and most important test of alternative values. Can you take your own exit, and stay on the road. If the answer is no, there's no there there.

Reggie James • SAVE THE INTERNET

provocations

“Because of the interconnectedness of all minds, affirming a plausible positive vision may be about the most sophisticated action any one of us can take.” -- Willis Harman

In a long-context world, maybe the organizations that benefit from AI will not be the ones with the most powerful models, but rather the ones with the most artfully curated contexts.

You Exist In The Long Context

Context is Queen

TLDR is internet-speak for “Too long, didn’t read.” It’s one of the consequences of too much to choose from, combined with a lazy quest for convenience. It’s a checklist mindset. And all we get after we finish a checklist is a bunch of checked boxes, not real understanding.

Seth Godin • The Cliffs Notes paradox

Design as Participation

Kevin Slavin jods.mitpress.mit.edu

Democratizing Design and

Vincent Van Gogh on the accumulation of small things:

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. The trick is to focus on the first small thing. Starting small is still starting, and small beginnings often lead to extraordinary endings.”

Baratunde Thurston — How to Be a Social Creative | The On Being Project

onbeing.org

How to Citizen

How to Citizen: “To citizen” is to show up. We just assume there’s something for us to do, and we don’t always know what that is, but we have an orientation toward, “Put me in. I don’t have to lead, but I have to be a part of the thing.”

Number two: “To citizen” is to invest in relationships with yourself, with others, and with the planet around you. We have inherited a story of separation of all these things, and they’re actually all one. The quantum physicist will tell you that really in a short sentence. So that myth busted.

“To citizen” is to understand power and all the different ways we have it. Eric Lou, I call him one of our founding guests, founder of Citizen University. He says: power is just the ability to get somebody to do what you want them to do.” And we have different ways of doing that. Physical force is obvious. Money, especially in this society, is pretty obvious. Ideas, sharing them. You’re very powerful, Krista. Putting our attention on something, we give power to what we give attention to, and we can choose, within default settings and design incentives, but we have the power to choose what we give our power to with our attention.

Fourth of four of these principles is: “To citizen” is to value the collective. We do all these things out of a sense of collective self-interest, not just personal, individual self-interest. Valerie Kaur was our very first guest for How To Citizen.

When we innovate only in terms of a solutionist framework, Easterling argues in her book Medium Design , we optimize for static outcomes wedded to the status quo of product-market fit. Solutions are one-time fixes, usually implemented by someone else, which break as soon as the context they’re responding to changes (which it does, constantly).