"Owen had neglected to notice that expectations also change through circumstance. As our communal conditions advance, we all tend to want to become the prophet, not merely the congregation. Once the problem of survival is solved, it’s no longer enough not to be starving or abused or overworked – we want personal satisfaction and self-direction. So, yes: some of the great names in business – the Lowell mills, Hershey’s, Cadbury’s, Lever Brothers, Google – applied dilute Owenism to great effect, but success makes employees become more individualist and ask for more of their reward in cash, while hard times make shareholders less generous, pointing out that plenty of people would take the job without the crêche, lecture series, or company brass band. Shifting expectation drives the carousel for another turn; we remain ambivalent about work, this thing we do through most of our waking lives, because we still don’t know what it is for."

Worth hearing, as a counterpoint to the stupid bullshit that's more often promulgated by business development and investors.

"If our biggest foundations could break the habit of cautiously supporting tiny, specific aspects of an organization’s activities and begin ensuring sufficient capitalization and providing multi-year general operating support, we’d go a long way towards fixing at least 2 of the problems I identified at the beginning of this post. (The good news is that I’m starting to see a few moves in this direction, but that’s a subject for another post…)"

"Are you paying attention, Pinky?"

"So again, the foundation can help the collaboratives process what is happening - in real time as they "rapid prototype" - and make sense of what is happening. Does what they are doing feel like its going in the right direction? What have they been surprised about? What did they notice? What do they need to learn about? Who can they learn that from? For this kind of learning to lead to breakthroughs, the foundation as network guardian will need to make sure the reflection process includes participants and observers as well as the organizational staff. "

"But alas, it does not. In fact and here is the crucial point, tenure doesn’t enable academic freedom, there is no such thing as academic freedom, what tenure does is farm the decision of academic freedom out to other bodies. A majority of institutions make tenure decisions based on publishing record, in other words forces outside the institution which are making market decisions based on what can be profitably sold as an intellectual commodity (usually in book form) are deciding what academics can and cannot say."

"XP argues that for emergent design to work, you need to keep the code as simple as possible – no unnecessary complexity – and to refactor as you learn. It is also important, XP says, to program in pairs and to frequently switch who sits with whom, so that everyone on the team has spent time with each part of the system. Then everyone must be present in all meetings and work in an office space that encourages communication."

"Elected officials don’t run our government. Government employees do. Every citizen interested in changing our country must understand this."

And I laughed at all my Yale pals in the early 80s who, with cherubic sincerity over their bongs, kegs, and freemasonry, swore they were going into investment banking and white-shoe law firms in order to “fight the system from the inside.

Worth reading every word. Worth commenting on, I think.

"Because that's not the way we do it, that's why."

"The main advantage of an un-conference is that it helps build social capital among participants. In addition to the participatory sessions and collaborative / anarchic scheduling, there were places for people to do things together."

"Successful open source projects combine meritocratic leadership, "doing" more than "talking", and breadth..."

"Give a damn. Your students are not fungible data-production units..."