Dominican Leadership Series Videos - Alex Pentland, Lt. Governor Gavin Newsome, Senator Elizabeth Warren

If you missed any of these events, you can now watch them on: Marin TV, Education Channel 30.  Check the program listings at Community Media Center of Marin - http://cmcm.tv/

Alex Pentland Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread - The Lessons From a New Science Wednesday, August 6, 2014 If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT's Alex "Sandy" Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he has distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread-The Lessons From a New Science will change the way we think about how we learn and how our social groups work.

My highlight from his talk ... Behavior change = 20% data 80% personal, face-to-face network behavior. Proof that its "who you know not what you know" that counts! Major implications for designing solutions to important issues like poverty, education gap, climate change etc.

Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsome  Citizenville Wednesday, August 27, 2013 A rallying cry for revolutionizing democracy in the digital age, Citizenville reveals how ordinary Americans can reshape their government for the better. Gavin Newsom, the lieutenant governor of California, argues that today's government is stuck in the last century while-in both the private sector and our personal lives-absolutely everything else has changed. The explosion of social media, the evolution of Internet commerce, the ubiquity of smart phones that can access all the world's information; in the face of these extraordinary advances, our government appears increasingly irrelevant and out of touch.

Despite your political perspective on Newsom this is a must watch for anyone interested in Digital Citizen Engagement and Democracy 2.0.

Senator Elizabeth Warren A Fighting Chance Wednesday, September 3, 2013 In this passionate, funny, rabble-rousing book, A Fighting Chance, Warren shows why she has chosen to fight tooth and nail for the middle class-and why she has become a hero to all those who believe that America's government can and must do better for working families. Elizabeth Warren is the senior senator from Massachusetts. A former Harvard Law School professor, she is the author of eight books.

Missed this one, wish I hadn't.

Visual Thinking, Innovation and Idea Card Decks

Here's a reprint of an article (on the Xplane blog)  I just read about a tangible tool to use visual thinking to solve problems and generate new ideas.  Yellow highlights = my emphasis (i.e. parts I think are super cool).

I often jot down my bits and bytes of ideas in my journal and then later cull through it to write articles or project proposals. The key, as noted below, is to have a "tagging system" so you can "see patterns" as they emerge. I do this (in my journal) with a consistent header for each item (date, person, headline, icon) and icons that I draw next to each piece of information (star person for a person reference, book icon for a resource reference, idea balloon for a quote etc.). Also the reason blogs work so well as a place to dynamically aggregate information - "its the tagging stupid" - blogs are just the front end of a dynamic database system for gathering, tagging, and rearranging information.

Always fun to come across an article with interesting background context connecting a personal practice to something larger.

Card Decks: Tactile Tools for Pattern-Finders, Integrative-Thinkers and Inspiration-Seekers

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By Stephanie Gioia

What do the Table of Elements, the first IBM computer, and the novel Lolita have in common? Before they were icons of human achievement, they were card decks.

What gives card decks this unique power to create new meaning in the world? The basis of visual thinking is the analysis (i.e. disaggregation) of a complex idea into “nodes”, followed by the synthesis (i.e. reintegration) of those “nodes” through “links” into a new meaningful whole. At the most basic level, cards are “nodes” in search of “links”. Card decks as a problem-solving tool are powerful because we often know the parts of a problem or solution, but we don’t yet know how they fit together in an insightful way.

Dmitri Mendeleev was the first scientist to order the elements by atomic mass, resulting in what is now the periodic table. Mendeleev carried a deck of cards – each with an element and some of its known properties – using time on train rides to play “chemical solitaire” and look for patterns.

Visual Thinking Tip: When looking for a pattern or structure to bring meaning to complex information, break information into movable nodes and seek multiple possible configurations until the relationships within the system comes into focus.

Herman Hollerith developed a machine that could tabulate statistics by reading information encoded on physical cards through the placement of holes in a grid. Hollerith’s invention revolutionized the field of data statistics and marked the beginning of the computing age. His Tabulating Machine Company later became IBM.

Visual Thinking Tip: “Code” your individual cards in as many ways as possible, using symbols and colors to categorize information. Structure may later emerge from this metadata.

Vladimir Nabokov, author of many novels including Lolita, composed his work using an index card-based method, assembling stories in fragments. In an interview with The Paris Review, Nabokov described his card method: “The pattern of the thing precedes the thing. I fill in the gaps of the crossword at any spot I happen to choose. These bits I write on index cards until the novel is done. My schedule is flexible, but I am rather particular about my instruments: lined Bristol cards and well sharpened, not too hard, pencils capped with erasers.”

Visual Thinking Tip: Save your thoughts in fragments – a memorable quote, a midnight brainstorm, a crucial statistic, a sketch – to maintain a pool of content that can be assembled or reassembled for multiple possible uses. Communicating your ideas to audiences that vary in their perspectives and needs is much easier when you can rapidly pull the most relevant content or storytelling approach for each audience.

Learn more about how to make and use card decks at www.deckaholic.com.