Cities
"Because cities change constantly anyway, it's not all that hard to improve them." - Stewart Brand
(basically ben notes from Oct 3 2009)
Cities. APIs. increasingly the work of raising literacy levels around data visualization so we can work with conneiseurs is done, and the answer is "yes, Stamen." The inflating elephant in the room.
Let's rip the top off of it and make it 4 times faster than anyone internally can use it, is the story of a generational shift in how to look at cities
We pop up everywhere: Cabspotting / Crimespotting / Tell the story of oakland & sf / datasf.org / did you know that this, this, and this was all us?
Find the open stack advocates in a given company / city
We hired some kids from "California to make some beautiful thing" vs. "we hired these people to teach us how to do the open stack" (make silicon valley in CA). It's up to us to prevent forest fires.
how do we want this to turn out - make a bet about the future & participate in it. this is not just a better business opportunity but from a political motivation to see how cities turn out - so using the visualizations as a way into conversations about cities.
Turn city.stamen.com into a place to keep these experiments rolling, for aaron
Come up with our visions / assumptions for the future. We have assumptions (certainly mike does) about the future - how things will get built. T.Boone. - specific vision for the future, act against that, gets you through the ups & downs of the market.
Changing IBM is more important than pushing for the stack. The whole point of an API is that you don't have to care how it's built - all you care about is the seam.
This stuff is ready to go - there's evidence all around us that this is how things are going, the news just hasn't traveled very far yet. Not about Alvin Toffler - not about predicting the future - it's about current trends, extrapolated.