Pioneers

If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.

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There is no substitute for real-world feedback.

Reposting an earlier post I wrote back in 2010 at the outset of the 10 City Bridge Run. All the details are still relevant, even if now overtaken by events.

There is no substitute for real-world feedback. Matt Mullenweg writes a compelling blog encouraging us to just ship it (this is the guy who helped bring us WordPress). He uses the example from Apple, and the development of iPhone. Steve Jobs commented in 1983:

Usage is like oxygen for ideas.

“If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.” This is great advice. Today, the design challenge begins for the 10 City Bridge Run. I have a design brief with 9 questions I need your help with in co-creating the pictorial petition. Will you help? The link to the page is here.

Note to self (after Voltaire):

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

Thanks to Seth Godin for sharing and making this original post known.

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Complexity and Simplicity: Avoiding the ‘Too Simple’

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Alan C. Kay
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The problem with ‘poverty porn’ is not that it is actually ‘porn’. If that were the case it would be the most appalling failure of care meaning that aid agencies would be distributing inappropriate pictures of the vulnerable in order to pull heart-strings to make money.

So what is the problem with ‘poverty porn’? I think Alan Kay, with his brilliant scientific mind, presents this idea clearly in this TED Talk A Powerful Idea About Teaching Ideas. He is not talking about poverty, he is talking about how we might better educate young minds.

When we reduce the complex to an over-simplified explanation it is just as unhelpful as making it unnecessarily over-complex. Much of the discourse of reduction of extreme poverty has been reduced to sound bites that make a good pitch for fund raising events. Einstein said:

Things should be a simple as possible, but not simpler.

Thinking like a child is an important skill that Kay presents as benefitting understanding. Creating a pictorial petition through the 10 City Bridge Run of 24,000 images using the human bridges people themselves capture on photograph is an attempt to present our ability to intervene into poverty into a pragmatic and meaningful form. Please join us on this journey.

Children are the future we send to the future… Children need mentors.

This entry was posted in Alan Kay, Education, TED and tagged , , .