ETech Presentation
Justin Martenstein
presentation to ETech 2009 about Saturday House and it's spinoffs (Six
Hour Startup and Giraffe Labs, specifically). Any objections? Anyone
else interested in helping out / co-presenting?
Obviously, I'll be working on the presentation through the group. I
may come down and brainstorm some ideas for the proposal on this
Saturday.
Some of the themes for this year's conference seem particularly
relevant to the work we're doing.
City Tech *
Materials & Mechanics
Personalized Healthcare
Mobile & The Web
Geek Family *
Synthetic Biology
Nomadism & Shedworking *
Sustainable Life *
Life Hacking & Information Overload *
http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/08/etech-2009-cfp-living-reinvent.html
--
Justin Martenstein
justinma...@gmail.com, (425) 802-3104
http://www.meetatthepig.com
http://www.sixhourstartup.com
http://www.twitter.com/jmartenstein
anders conbere
<justinma...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> For the last two months or so, I've been thinking about submitting a
> presentation to ETech 2009 about Saturday House and it's spinoffs (Six
> Hour Startup and Giraffe Labs, specifically). Any objections? Anyone
> else interested in helping out / co-presenting?
I would be really interested in talking about the migration OUT of
cities, as workers become remote, and the role that co-working, and
community organizations like saturday house play in those changes.
~ Anders
Gregory Heller
migration is into cities, into cities where people want to live, and not
tech workers being forced to live in cities where the work is. so you
wind up having cultural centers (think austin) becoming havens for
interesting (and often geeky) people, not because there are tech jobs
there, but because there is culture there.
Never again will people have to live in urban/suburban sprawl
wastelands, rather inner city liveable communities can thrive without
having to have enormous office buildings, since the work can be distributed.
I don't hear of many people going to live out in the middle of nowhere
and telecommuting. I hear of people being able to choose the place they
want to live, and the job they want to have independent of each other,
and coworking facilities is a part of that.
--
----
Gregory Heller
http://www.GregoryHeller.com
Robert Eickmann
it was in 2006/2007 that we hit a demographic mile stone in that world
wide more people live in cities that do not.
Smaller cities like Lansing MI, and Cleveland OH are finding
themselves emptying out as people migrate into the larger cities. And
the rural small town has become a pale ghost of what it was. Farmers
are farming larger and larger tracks of land with far fewer people.
Egg and Daughter dances and other county based community events just
aren't happening outside of Amish communities, there just aren't
enough people.
And those who are successfully doing the migration from city to
country, are those knowledge workers who have built up enough wiffie
(or social capital) in the city or in their community to convert that
into $$. Otherwise your rural and poor. If your a hot shot AS/400
programmer you can successfully work from home from BFG otherwise....
For example Accenture a company that features a hugely mobile
consulting force, mandates that if your a consultant you can live
anywhere as long as your only an hour from a major airport. IBM (I
work By Myself) same story in their consulting arms.
Rob
Sarah
"You won't get pregnant if you balance an egg on your head while doing
the electric slide right afterward"
Somehow, even though people keep moving away, I don't think their
population numbers are in danger.
-Sarah
Gregory Heller
anders conbere
> it was in 2006/2007 that we hit a demographic mile stone in that world
> wide more people live in cities that do not.
I should clarify :)
for instance, I don't think of myself as living "in the city". I live
in Ballard. I absolutely agree in that I don't see people moving away
from cultural centers any time soon (at least not in large enough
populations to make a dent on those moving into them). But on the
other hand, I don't see many families saying "you know where I want to
live... in the heart of the city". Maybe Greg's right and that's more
about the way that those places are engineered for business right now,
but I think there's more to it than that.
Certainly there's lots of my own bias injected here, but I find it
much more likely that cities begin to fragment into more and more
semi-urban neighborhoods, than some kind of migration tighter and
tighter into the center. These neighborhoods offer fantastic nuclei
for communities that prior to a distributed workforce wouldn't work.
Some of these are classic things like community gardens, social
gatherings where you know your neighbors, some of them are like what
we're doing with Saturday house.
~ Anders
Robert Eickmann
You might be an urban dweller if there is a starbucks within a 1/2
hour drive of where your living.
You might be an urban dweller if to pick up a radio station other than
country music you don't have to put up an antenna taller than your
house.
You might be an urban dweller if the sight of a deer makes you
excited enough to tell strangers about it.
You might be an urban dweller if you don't know how to use your
highbeams on your car.
You are be an urban dweller if you have a garbage disposal, (heck
weekly garbage pickup).
You might be an urban dweller if the only bookstore within an hour
drive, doesn't call you when they have a book they don't remember
ordering come in. (cus your the only one who orders 'strange' books.)
You might be an urban dweller if you refer to spending the night at
someone house, in a air conditioned room with a bed, a TV and indoor
plumbing as 'camping'.
I could go like this for hours....
And egg and daughter dances... They were mostly events where your kids
might actually stand a chance of getting together and meeting another
farmer kid from across the county. Because well every one knows
everyone else and has for generations.
Gregory Heller
Way to represent "The City Of Ballard"! but even as far flung as some
seattle neighborhoods may seem, Seattle is a pretty compact (if not
dense) city.
From Ballard you can be downtown in 15 minutes on a bus. You live in
the city, even if you live in a low density neighborhood on its fringes.
My place in new york is in manhattan and the bust still takes nearly 30
minutes to get to downtown and probably 40 to mid town (granted i could
ride it in about 10 on the bike).
Coming from the east coast (nyc metro area) i would have to say people
living within 30 or so miles of the empire state building constitute
"urban dwellers" even if they are suburban. They almost all have mass
transit access to new york city and the urban centers of NJ which have
culture and jobs. That makes up 8 new york counties, and i think 3 new
jersey counties with a total of something like 11 million people.
I think in seattle you could say just about everyone living in King
county is living in the seattle metro area (plus some of the islands
that are not in king county, is bainbridge king?)
What is happening now, even just in the last few months of high gas
prices, is that people are moving inward, and inward means different
things in different metro areas, but i think what we won't see much more
of are people commuting from ex-urbs 2 hours outside of metro areas, 100
mile commutes are just not economical anymore in terms of gas, and when
you can do the same work from home as you could do from the office,
spending 2 hours or more on mass transit begins to look more and more
foolish.
Granted, we are talking mostly about "knowledge workers" and not the
folks cleaning hotels and working in other service and retail
industries. What is happening is that the inner city housing is
becoming more expensive and desireable, and in what is a pretty classic
"gentrification inversion" the well to do are displacing the working
poor in inner cities. I am told that this process took place in bell
town starting in the bid nineties. It is happening on the western slope
of capitol hill too (as crummy mid 60s construction comes down and lux
condos go up).
Pionner square is the site of many commercial to residential
conversions, lux rentals and condos. People are realizing they don't
need a 6k sqr ft mc mansions in the middle of nowhere (or even an hour
outside of the cultural center of their region).
--
Justin Martenstein
>> it was in 2006/2007 that we hit a demographic mile stone in that world
>> wide more people live in cities that do not.
Scope creep! Bascially, I'm just trying to put together a presentation
on Saturday House, and why I think it represents a new type of geek
community. I believe we're building a social "stack", where we have a
loose organization that other organizations / projects can build on
top of (e.g. Six Hour Startup and Giraffe Labs). I'll start hacking
together a proposal, and let you all take a look once I have something
more presentable.
Thanks for your input so far!
Justin
Gregory Heller
Justin Martenstein wrote:
>>> Actually the interesting societal migration is into cities. I believe
>>> it was in 2006/2007 that we hit a demographic mile stone in that world
>>> wide more people live in cities that do not.
>>>
>
> Scope creep! Bascially, I'm just trying to put together a presentation
> on Saturday House, and why I think it represents a new type of geek
> community. I believe we're building a social "stack", where we have a
> loose organization that other organizations / projects can build on
> top of (e.g. Six Hour Startup and Giraffe Labs). I'll start hacking
> together a proposal, and let you all take a look once I have something
> more presentable.
>
> Thanks for your input so far!
>
> Justin
>
>
>
--
Justin Martenstein
Gah! No! As a direct competitor to my site, www.meetatthepig.com, I
refuse to acknowlege it's existence!
=)
But, yes, in all seriousness... lots of cool new social groups forming
up. I'm most interested in the Saturday House "ecology" of events /
organizations around Seattle.