[tt] [FoRK] WTF?

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org> -----

From: Jeff Bone <jbone at place.org>
Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 23:42:04 -0500
To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork at xent.com>
Subject: Re: [FoRK] WTF?
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.2)
Reply-To: Friends of Rohit Khare <fork at xent.com>


On May 22, 2007, at 10:26 PM, J. Andrew Rogers wrote:

>I would refute a tacit assumption you are making with the following  
>observation:  almost no one is as interesting, intelligent,  
>disciplined, and ambitious in meatspace as they appear to be when  
>chatting on a mailing list.

I'm not actually making that assumption;  I'm merely asking:  are we  
any of the above, and interested in focusing any of that in any  
particular shared direction?  Could we be?  Should we be?  If so,  
how?  If not, why?  There is a lot of raw horsepower here, both in IQ  
and jawbone. ;-)  And I thoroughly believe in the power of the  
jawbone to shift the course of things, so if that's all there is ---  
well, that's fine, too.  In no way am I complaining;  FoRK has  
enriched my life in countless ways.

I'm hoping to follow this up w/ a list of some of the things I want  
to do but can't find the time, a list of causes, and a couple of  
"paradigm shifting" ideas that I've been knocking around.  Just to  
season the pot a bit before stirring:  Charlie Stross has an  
interesting phrase --- evocative if only semi- and somewhat non- 
sensically defined in his books:  venture philanthropist.  I'm also  
interesting in figuring out how to cross the gap between open source,  
limited time to focus on the things one might really be interested  
in, and need to get paid for *lots* of talented developers (or  
writers, or artists, or anybody who might be interested in  
contributing to the IP commons...)  Second evocative phrase:  swarm  
of angels.

Ironically I haven't had the time since the other night to write any  
of this up in detail because, well, I'm too busy fighting "the money  
problem."  (I'm rather fortunate in that what I'm doing day-to-day on  
that front is right smack in the middle of what I'd be doing anyway  
to solve some of the other interesting problems.  But for a large  
part of my career, even when building my own companies, there was  
inevitable conflict between the need to focus on the commercial task,  
very constrained, and putting the effort into more leveraged and  
forward-looking efforts...)  So a first-order question is:  how to  
build the fulcrum to place the lever to move the world without  
getting distracted by "the money problem?"


$0.02, more later.



jb



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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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