Thanks to the Internet, my iPod, and a fellow I only know as gporter, I’m reliving this funny part of my life through the Great Eastern archives. All the old episodes are there along with show notes, music playlists and other extras.

I’m listening to season 2 now but still haven’t found the part with the classic rock on CD collection. It’s from the end of one show where the host, Paul Moth, is comparing bland new digital recordings with the full bodied expression of an LP on coal-fired radio, using Led Zepplin’s Whole Lotta Love. Good times, good times…

Thank you gporter, whoever you are…

Case in point:  Mitch Joel is really digging into how traditional print media is dying due to the changes brought about by the Web.  He pointed me to a recent Charlie Rose episode with the CEO of the Associated Press and Arianna Huffington, where they describe to wildy different futures for journalism and aggregators of journalism.  

My favorite Charlie Rose episode is an interview with Marc Andreessen that aired in February.  It’s a rapid fire hour where Marc talks about where the Web is at and where it’s going.  

Thanks to Mitch Joel for pointing me to the Andreeson interview too.  Maybe if you don’t have time to watch Charlie Rose, you should just go read Mitch’s blog.  He’ll let you know the best stuff to watch!

[Damn! I can't get any consistency with the embedded video. Sorry about that. Check the link to the Charlie Rose site for a larger view]

The topic:  We’re building a new school in our neighbourhood.  Not to accomodate an influx of new kids, but to cope with the long slow decline in enrollment in the neighbourhood.   Three existing schools serving just over 500 kids [pre-K - grade 8] today and projecting out to just over 400 kids in the future.

The Good News:  We’re getting a new school!  One that will reflect all the best things in new teaching methods and a greater range of learning patterns.  A school built to bring out the very best in all our kids.  One that will set them up well to live and work in the new Creative Age.   Very rare to do this in an older neighbourhood and almost unheard of in Regina.

The Bad News #1:  Complete lack of agreement on what ‘Big’ or ‘Small’ is with respect to school size or what’s the optimal size for new ‘team teaching’ methods.  Instead, we’re bound to an arbitrary number of 200 kids as a minimum number for a school.   The result:  We’re not combining three schools into one, but instead three schools into two. 

The Bad News #2:  The two schools we’re combining are at the edges of the neighbourhood.    We need to pick one of the existing sites for the new school.  The end result is a serving area that looks like a big sausage with a school at one end.

The Bad News #3.  Because we’re only building a school for 225 kids, we’re not building a ‘full size’ school.  We’re getting a small (class C) gymnasium.  We get the bare minimum of project rooms and no specific project rooms for things like music, dance or the arts.

We’re really setting ourselves up for a problem in the future.   Even if you believe that 250 kids is an optimal school size and 200 is a minimum cut off  (and I’m convinced that’s still too small), the numbers just don’t add up well for two schools.

Best Case: 8 years from now we’ll have two schools just barely above the minimum cut off (203 kids per school.)  Each school has their nose just barely above water.

Worse Case:  One school is well above the cut (300 kids) and this school is overcrowded.  The other school is well below the cut (100 kids) and is on the list for closure.  It makes no difference which school is big or small here.  Either there are too many kids packed into a very old school or we built the new school way too small. 

In my mind, there’s an easy way to fix this — combine all three schools now and put a new school in the centre of the neighbourhood.     The school is built big enough from the start, with a full slate of features.  400 students is still not a Big School, even in Saskatchewan (Warman, SK for example is dealing with schools that can’t even hold all their kids.  500 kids from K-5 means grade 6-8 are in the high school.)

It’s getting to the point of groupthink.  The best ideas of individuals are combined to do a dumb thing, but we can all say we collaborated in the process.  And $15 million down the tube building something that will be either way too big or way too small.

All of this made me very receptive to the ideas in this post. It’s from Rands in Repose, which is on the top half of my ‘must read’ list.

In this case, Rands comes up with an elegant, and possibly tongue in cheek, way to pitch your next great idea to a friend to get some feedback. It’s for those really good ‘uns — the Next Big Thing that you Actually Might Implement.

I’m in a 12 step program to help me freely share ideas, but what about you? Are you the type of person who worries about other people stealing your ideas? Then maybe a FriendDA is the tool you need!

Much of the discussion on Triiibes lately has been the US presidential election. It’s easy enough to see why — it’s on a lot of people’s minds these days. But there hasn’t been any more common ground found in this group than with any other group of people I’ve talked with during this, or any other election season. Why is that?

Here’s a short video by Jonathan Haidt** that puts a lot of the election discussion into context. In the entertaining and ultimately hopeful presentation, he talks about morals as the reason for this polarity, and offers up ideas to find common ground even with moral differences.

Video Link: Jonathan Haidt on the Moral Mind

Please take a look, then let’s discuss. I’ll wait for you.

* If you’re completely miffed that you can’t get into triiibes, there is a way. But I need to know you’re serious about it before I’ll tell you.

**Mr. Haidt is the author of one of my all time favorite books “The Happiness Hypothesis” which is the one book on psychology that you simply must go read. But wait till we talk about the video.

Some background: We’re the stereotypical old, boring organization who runs some kids recreational programs, tries to start a few more now and then, installs some new playground equipment every 5 years or so, and bemoans the loss of volunteer spirit in the community (reality is lots of people volunteer, just not with us anymore.)

I’ve been trying to get more action / buzz / excitement going about the work we do. New website, more focus on the neighbourhood at large rather than the association, although my email updates have had a healthy dose of ‘we need volunteers’ in them too.

Seth’s talk got me thinking of how we need to change.  Here are some initial thoughts, in the hope they might kickstart your own ideas:

- Be clear on what we want to accomplish. More community programs? More connection between neighbours? There need to be causes before there can be tribes, and we might be nurturing different tribes for each cause.

- Make it easy for people to connect with each other around these causes — more than connecting with the association.

- Make it even easier for people to tell others about their cause.

- Make it easy for people to support the cause by doing what they already do. (ie. building a squidoo lens about their hobby can still help the cause.)

So how should I change my approach?

Well, shifting away from regular ‘Next Meeting’ emails is one thing.

Focus on getting our most active members (those who are enrolled in lots of programs) spreading the word about our programs.

Get those who are most visible in the neighbourhood spreading the word about the neighbourhood.

We become “the platform”, but really more of the guide for easy ways to spread the word.

Collect permission assets along the way, with the intent of connecting people to start new projects (that they design) Maybe we don’t start projects but guide people along the way.

Celebrate the heck out of everything the tribe does — not what the association does.

I think this is what Seth calls “organizing around a tribe” in his new book.

What am I missing?

Let me know in the comments!

I’ll do community stuff tomorrow, while the turkey is cooking.  Today, I need to find where we put the shovels…

Seth’s all about spreading ideas and has written at length about getting remarkable ideas to spread.  The concept of tribes expands on this — it’s about creating a platform so it’s easy for people (your tribe) to spread your ideas.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time this summer working on our local community association website and have been trying to embrace the tribe idea.  But I’ll leave that for another post.  For now, download Seth’s ebook , give it 3 or 4 good reads and tell me what you think in the comments!

Although birthdays are kinda quiet around here they’re still very special and today was a great day.   Up early to watch Ben play soccer, then off for a light lunch with Cindy (hot dogs at the Peavey Mart and Milky Way ice cream, then watch the Euro 2008 final before joining up with the kids and Cindy’s family for a movie (Wall-E) and finally homemade bbq burgers.  And I got some community association work done, some wood chopped for tomorrow’s pizza party and some dough mixed.  Not bad for a Sunday!

My birthday gift this year was the best ever.  Cindy signed the two of us up to the MS-Bike Tour this September in Waskiseu.  66km of hilly parkland and possibly bears.  Awesome!  The only problem is that neither of us has done much riding so far this year, so the training regimine starts, erm, tomorrow. But early tomorrow.   And I’ll eat pizza standing up or something.  Tuesday for sure.

Photo credit:  riacale, on flickr