Week #388

Horrible week, my friends. The kind of week you try very hard to give your best and it seems to be simply not enough… what a miserable feeling. The atmospheric pressure apparently agrees with my mood, as autumn and the rain are already present in Reykjavík.

Alberto came from a one week vacation and was working in Bazaar and doing a few more tests in different payment gateways. I was working in Verkami to ship more features for the admins and for the authors while managed to make a db migration in the process. I fought to design two whole features in Bazaar: UI design is still hard as hell to do for me.

My recommendation this week: buy a plane ticket to Brighton. The Brighton Digital Festival will be celebrated during all September:

Brighton Digital Festival is a month-long celebration of all things digital bringing together the city’s vibrant arts and digital communities. From small-scale meet ups to big name conferences, from digital artists’ experimental ideas to fully mounted exhibitions, the Festival promises something for everybody and because most events are free, plenty of opportunities to discover something new. Hands on, participatory, exciting, challenging, wondrous, fascinating, the Brighton Digital Festival has it all and it uniquely reflects the spirit of the city.

I can’t describe how awesome is the festival. Not specially because what it is, but because what it means and what it implies. Next time you hear a politician or institution in your country to say “We’re going to build the next Silicon Valley”, please forward them this note:

Estimated Elected Idiot(s),

I’ve heard you are trying to build the next Silicon Valley. Stop. Stop saying it. It made my ears bleed. Stop. You don’t have the faintest idea what that means. So stop pretending you know. You can’t build ecosystems. Even to fake them is difficult. They are complex, dynamic, disembodied, decentralized, emergent creatures. So shut the fuck up.

The only thing you can do with ecosystems is inhabit or nurture them. Pay attention to the small signs of change and take care of them, encourage their growth, give them the needed resources. Learn from the Earth: be the background that gives support and stay out of the way. And wait. Just wait. Please, don’t mess the whole thing with “innovation”, “networking”, “co-entrepreneurship”… these are the effects, not the causes.

FOR GOD’S SAKE STOP BEING A COPYCAT.

Then, one day, if you keep doing the right thing you’ll have something like http://2012.brightondigitalfestival.co.uk/ and it’ll be a fucking gazillion times better than your mythical promised techland.

Yours sincerely,
X

PS: My business still have to use Windows to talk to you in the web. Fix that too.

Have a good weekend.