Over the holidays, our friend Dean Read, the national sales director for RedDot, loaned us his copy of Young@Heart, an outstanding British-produced documentary about a singing group of old folks from Massachusetts who inspire audiences by rocking out on young songs. Formed by its musical director, Bob Cilman, in 1982, the group originally sang lots of old standards, but has steadily gotten younger with its music over the years. In their concerts today, they perform numbers by the likes of the Talking Heads, The Clash, and Coldplay. The film deservedly got a lot of attention when it was released in 2008. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Community’
Young@Heart
Sunday, January 11th, 2009Heather Champ, Improviser
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
Heather Champ, the Director of Community for Flickr, was the subject of Chris Colin’s Sept 29 On the Job blog on SFGate. Ethan Bauley, social networking entrepreneur for the online marketing company, M80, sent me the link, as he often does when business improvisation makes news.
Heather Champ and her team at Flickr improvise for a living. A big part of their job, according to the article is deciding whether certain photos belong in Flickr or not. The guidelines are not etched in stone. In fact, aside from a few Flickresque sayings like ‘Don’t forget the children,’ guidelines hardly exist at all. Rulings by Champ and her team arise more from the dialogue they have about an issue than from strict black-and-white policies. Policies are riffs on a theme; the rules of the game can change from scene to scene. (more…)
Small Farming in the Networked World
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008A hundred years ago, a family could make a living — and a life — off forty acres of land. Today, not likely. Today’s agricultural realities make the small farm a footnote in the history of rural America.But nothing ever really goes away. Life evolves. The land is still with us, but our relationship with it has evolved (and clearly must continue to evolve).
The small farm is still with us, too, it’s just that the farming most of us do is not agricultural, it’s cybercultural, and the labor is not physical, it’s intellectual. (more…)