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From Academic Kids
- For other uses, see Bishop (disambiguation).
A bishop is an ordained member of the Christian clergy who, in certain Christian churches, holds a position of authority.
Meaning of bishop
The etymology of the word bishop comes from the Greek word episkopos (επισκοπος), which can be generally translated as overseer, superintendent or foreman. From the word episkopos are derived the English words episcopacy, episcopate and episcopal.
Bishops in the New Testament
The New Testament uses the word episkopos only five times.
- Acts of the Apostles 20:28
- Epistle to the Philippians 1:1
- First Epistle to Timothy 3:2
- Epistle to Titus 1:7
- First Epistle of Peter 2:25
Words related to episkopos are used in two other verses. Some English Bibles translate this word as bishop, while others, attempting to distance themselves from certain types of church hierarchy, use a more neutral alternative.
The ministry of these New Testament episkopoi was not commissioned by Jesus, but appears to be a natural, practical development of the church during the first and second centuries AD. The portions of the New Testament that mention episkopoi do not appear to be ordering a new type of ministry, but giving instructions for an already existent position within the early church. In places it (particularly in the verses from the Epistle to Titus) appears that the position of episkopos is similar or the same as that of presbyter (πρεσβυτερος), or elder (later priest). The Epistle to Timothy mentions deacons (διακονοι) in a manner that suggests that the office of deacon differs from the office of the bishop, and is subordinate to it, though it carries similar qualifications.
In the Acts of the Apostles, episkopoi are mentioned as being shepherds of the flock, imagery that is still in use today. The other passages from the New Testament describe them as stewards or administrators, and teachers. In the First Epistle to Timothy episkopoi are required to be 'the husband of but one wife'. It is unclear whether this forbids men who have married a second time in series, or polygamists. However, it is clear that the New Testament has no prohibition against bishops marrying and having children.
It is interesting to note that in the second chapter of the First Epistle of Peter Jesus is described as 'the Shepherd and Episkopos of your souls' (τον ποιμενα και επισκοπον των ψυχων υμων).
Bishops in the Apostolic Fathers
At the turn of the first century AD, the church started to acquire a clear organisation. In the works of the Apostolic Fathers, and Ignatius of Antioch in particular, the role of the episkopos, or bishop, became more important.
"Plainly therefore we ought to regard the bishop as the Lord Himself" — Epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians 6:1.
"your godly bishop" — Epistle of Ignatius to the Magnesians 2:1.
"the bishop presiding after the likeness of God and the presbyters after the likeness of the council of the Apostles, with the deacons also who are most dear to me, having been entrusted with the diaconate of Jesus Christ" — Epistle of Ignatius to the Magnesians 6:1.
"Therefore as the Lord did nothing without the Father, [being united with Him], either by Himself or by the Apostles, so neither do ye anything without the bishop and the presbyters." — Epistle of Ignatius to the Magnesians 7:1.
"Be obedient to the bishop and to one another, as Jesus Christ was to the Father [according to the flesh], and as the Apostles were to Christ and to the Father, that there may be union both of flesh and of spirit." — Epistle of Ignatius to the Magnesians 13:2.
"In like manner let all men respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, even as they should respect the bishop as being a type of the Father and the presbyters as the council of God and as the college of Apostles. Apart from these there is not even the name of a church." — Epistle of Ignatius to the Trallesians 3:1.
"follow your bishop, as Jesus Christ followed the Father, and the presbytery as the Apostles; and to the deacons pay respect, as to God's commandment" — Epistle of Ignatius to the Smyrnans 8:1.
"He that honoureth the bishop is honoured of God; he that doeth aught without the knowledge of the bishop rendereth service to the devil" — Epistle of Ignatius to the Smyrnans 9:1.
— Lightfoot translation.
It is clear that, by this period, a single bishop was expected to lead the church in each centre of Christian mission, supported by a council of presbyters (now a distinct and subordinate position) with a pool of deacons. As the church continued to expand, new churches in important cities gained their own bishop, but churches in the regions around an important city were served by presbyters and deacons from the bishop's city church. Thus, in time, the bishop changed from being the leader of a single church to being the leader of the churches of a given geographical area.
Bishops and civil government
The efficient infrastructure of the Roman Empire became the template for the organisation of the church in the fourth century, particularly after the Edict of Milan. As the church moved from the shadows of privacy into the public forum it acquired land for churches, burials and clergy. In 391, Theodosius I decreed that any land that had been confiscated from the church by Roman authorities be returned.
The most usual term for the geographical area of a bishop's authority and ministry, the diocese, began as part of the structure of the Roman Empire under Diocletian. As Roman authority began to fail in the western portion of the empire, the church took over much of the civil administration. This can be clearly seen in the ministry of two popes: Pope Leo I in the fifth century, and Pope Gregory I in the sixth century. Both of these men were statesmen and public administrators in addition to their role as Christian pastors, teachers and leaders. In the Eastern churches, latifundia entailed to a bishop's see were much less common, the state power did not collapse the way it did in the West, and thus the tendency of bishops acquiring secular power was much weaker than in the West. However, the role of Western bishops as civil authorities, often called prince bishops, continued throughout much of the Middle Ages.
The most important of these prince bishops was the Pope, who ruled as monarch of the Papal States by virtue of his title as Bishop of Rome. His claim to this fief rested on the forged Donation of Constantine, but in fact his authority over this kingdom in central Italy grew slowly after the collapse of Roman and Byzantine authority in the area. The Papal States were abolished when King Victor Emmanuel II took possession of Rome in 1870 and completed the reunification of Italy. This became a perennial source of tension between the Papacy and the government of Italy. In 1929, Pope Pius XI made a deal with the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini and became the independent sovereign of the Vatican, while giving up any rights to the rest of the former Papal States. He was recognised as an independent monarch by the Lateran Treaties, an authority the current Pope continues to hold. The only other bishop who is a head of state is the Bishop of Urgell, a Co-Prince of Andorra.
Three senior bishops served as Electors in the Holy Roman Empire. By the terms of the Golden Bull of 1356, the Archbishops of Mainz, Trier, and Cologne were made permanent electors, who chose the next Holy Roman Emperor upon the death of his predecessor. The Archbishop of Mainz was President of the Electors and Archchancellor of Germany. Likewise, the Archbishop of Cologne was Archchancellor of Italy, and the Archbishop of Trier was Archchancellor of Burgundy. A number of other bishops within the Holy Roman Empire, although not being Electors, were sovereign prince-bishops in their own lands.
As well as the Archchancellors of the Holy Roman Empire, bishops generally served as chancellors to mediaeval monarchs, serving as head of the justiciary and chief chaplain. The Lord Chancellor of England was almost always a bishop up until the dismissal of Thomas Cardinal Wolsey by Henry VIII. Likewise, the position of Kanclerz in the Polish kingdom was always a bishop until the sixteenth century.
In France before the French Revolution, representatives of the clergy — in practice, bishops and abbots of the largest monasteries — comprised the First Estate of the Estates-General, until their role was abolished during the French Revolution.
The more senior bishops of the Church of England continue to sit in the House of Lords of the Parliament of the United Kingdom, as representatives of the established church, and are known as Lords Spiritual. The Bishop of Sodor and Man, whose diocese lies outside of the United Kingdom, is ex officio a member of the Legislative Council of the Isle of Man. In the past, the Bishop of Durham, known as a prince bishop, had extensive viceregal powers within his northern diocese — the power to mint money, collect taxes and raise an army to defend against the Scots.
Bishops in Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican churches
Although many Protestant churches have rejected the place of bishops in church leadership, churches rooted in tradition continue to ordain bishops to lead the church. Bishops form the leadership in the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Anglican Communion.
The traditional role of a bishop is as pastor of a diocese (also called a bishopric, eparchy or see). Dioceses vary considerably in their size of area and population. Some dioceses around the Mediterranean Sea which were christianized early are rather compact; whereas dioceses in areas of rapid modern growth in Christian commitment, as in some parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, South America and the Far East, are much larger and more populous.
As well as traditional diocesan bishops, many churches have a well-developed structure of church leadership that involves a number of layers of authority and responsibility.
- Archbishop
- An archbishop is the bishop of an archdiocese. This is usually a prestigious diocese with an important place in local church history. The title is purely honorific and carries no extra jurisdiction, though most archbishops are also metropolitan bishops.
- Metropolitan bishop
- A metropolitan bishop is an archbishop in charge of an ecclesiastical province, or group of dioceses, and exercises some oversight over the other dioceses. Sometimes a metropolitan may also be the head of an autocephalous, sui juris, or autonomous church.
- Suffragan bishop
- A suffragan bishop is a bishop subordinate to another. In the Roman Catholic Church this term is applied to all non-metropolitan bishops (diocesan and auxiliary bishops). In the Anglican Communion, the term applies to a bishop who is a full-time assistant to a diocesan bishop: the Bishop of Warwick is suffragan to the Bishop of Coventry (the diocesan), though both live in Coventry. Some Anglican suffragans are given the responsibility for a geographical area within the diocese (for example, the Bishop of Stepney is an area bishop within the Diocese of London).
- Titular bishop
- A titular bishop is a bishop without a diocese. Rather, the bishop is head of a titular see, which is usually an ancient city that used to have a bishop, but, for some reason or other, does not have one now. Titular bishops often serve as coadjutors or auxiliary bishops. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, bishops of modern diocese are often given a titular see alongside their modern one (for example, the Archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain).
- Auxiliary bishop
- An auxiliary bishop is a full-time assistant to a diocesan bishop (the Roman Catholic equivalent of an Anglican suffragan bishop). Auxiliaries are almost always titular bishops, and are often appointed as the vicar general of the diocese in which they serve.
- Coadjutor bishop
- A coadjutor bishop is an auxiliary bishop who is given automatic right to succeed the incumbent diocesan bishop. The appointment of coadjutors is often seen as a means of providing for continuity of church leadership.
- Honorary assistant bishop
- This title is usually applied to retired bishops who are given a general license to minister as episcopal pastors under a diocesan's oversight.
- Primate
- A primate is the bishop of the oldest church of a nation. Sometimes this carries jurisdiction over metropolitan bishops, but usually it is another honorific. An exarch is like a primate in the Eastern churches. The title Presiding or President Bishop is often used for the head of a national Anglican church, but this title is not usually associated with a particular episcopal see like a primate. The primate of the Scottish Episcopal Church is chosen from among the diocesan bishops, and, while retaining diocesan responsibility, is called Primus.
- Cardinal
- A cardinal, although not until recently necessarily a bishop, is usually a primate, patriarch or titular bishop within the Roman Catholic Church.
- Patriarch
- patriarchs are the heads of certain ancient autocephalous or sui juris churches. Some of these churches call their leaders Catholicos; the patriarch of the Orthodox Church of Alexandria, Egypt, is called Pope. While most patriarchs in the Roman Catholic Church have jurisdiction, all Latin Rite patriarchs, except for the Pope, are honorary.
Bishops in all of these communions are ordained by other bishops. Depending on the church, there need to be two or three bishops for validity or legality.
Apart from the ordination, which is always done by other bishops, there are different methods in different churches as to the actual choosing of a candidate for ordination as bishop. In the Roman Catholic Church today, the Congregation for Bishops oversees the selection of new bishops with the approval of the Pope. Most Eastern Orthodox churches allow varying amounts of more or less formalized laity and/or lower clergy influence on the choice of bishops. More information on this topic is needed.
Only a bishop can ordain a bishop, priest, or deacon.
In the Eastern Orthodox Church and in the Eastern Rite liturgical tradition, a priest may celebrate the Divine Liturgy only with the blessing of a bishop. An antimension signed by the bishop is kept on the altar partly as a reminder of whose altar it is and under whose omophorion the priest at a local parish is serving.
The Pope of Rome, in addition to being the Bishop of Rome and head of the Roman Catholic Church, is the Patriarch of the Latin Catholic Church. Each bishop within the Latin Catholic Church is only answerable directly to the Pope and not any other bishop except to metropolitans in certain oversight instances.
In the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches and the Anglican Communion, the cathedral of a diocese will have a special chair set aside for the exclusive use of the bishop. This is the bishop's cathedra, which is often called the bishop's throne. In some other Christian denominations, other churches besides the cathedral will maintain a chair for the use of a Bishop when he visits their parish.
Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox Christian bishops claim to be part of a continuous sequence of ordained bishops since the days of the apostles, the apostolic succession. However, since a bull of Pope Leo XIII issued in 1896, the Roman Catholic church has insisted that Anglican orders are invalid, because of that church's changes in the ordination rites. The Roman Catholic church does however recognize as valid (though illegal) ordinations done by breakaway Roman Catholic bishops, and groups descended from them, so long as the people receiving the ordination conform to other canonical requirements; this gives rise to the phenomenon of episcopi vagantes. Roman Catholics also recognize the validity of ordinations of bishops, priests, and deacons in the Orthodox churches.
Bishops in other churches
Some other churches, such as Lutherans, Methodists and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("LDS Church"; see also Mormon), also have bishops, but their roles differ significantly from the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican ones.
United Methodist Bishops
In the United Methodist Church, bishops are administrative superintendents of the church; they are elected for life from among the clergy by vote of the delegates in regional (called Jurisdictional) conferences and, among their duties, are responsible for appointing clergy to serve local churches as pastor, for performing ordinations, and for safeguarding the doctrine and discipline of the Church. The Juridictional Conferences, meeting every four years, are comprised of an equal number of clergy and lay delegates. In each Annual Conference, United Methodist bishops serve for four year terms, and may serve up to three terms before either retirement or appointment to a new Conference. John Wesley made Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury bishops for the United States of America in 1784, where Methodism first became a separate denomination apart from the Church of England.
Notable bishops in United Methodist history include Coke, Asbury, Richard Whatcoat, Philip William Otterbein, Martin Boehm, Jacob Albright, John Seybert, Matthew Simpson, John Stamm, Marjorie Matthews, Ntambo Nkulu Ntanda, William Willimon, and Thomas Bickerton.
Methodists in Great Britain acquired their own bishops early in the nineteenth century, after the Methodist movement in Britain formally parted company with the Church of England. The position no longer exists, however, in British Methodism.
Bishops of the LDS Church (whose role corresponds to that of the pastors of other churches) claim a restored apostolic succession (see Priesthood (Mormonism)). Methodist bishops do claim a type of theological apostolic succession through John Wesley, though Wesley himself was never consecrated a Bishop. Lutheran bishops do not claim apostolic succession, except in the Church of Sweden and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland.
New Apostolic Church
The New Apostolic Church (NAC) knows 3 classes of ministries: Diacons, Priests and Apostles. The Apostles, all conclused in the apostolate with the Chief Apostle as head, are the highest ministries.
Of the several kinds of priest-ministries, the bishop is the highest one. Nearly all bishops are set in directly from the chief apostle. They support and help their superior apostle.
In some smaller Protestant denominations and independent churches the term bishop is used in the same way as pastor, to refer to the leader of the local congregation. This usage is especially common in African American churches in the USA.
See also
- List of United Methodist Bishops (http://www.umc.org/interior.asp?ptid=1&mid=5881)
- Episcopalian church governance
- List of Bishops and Archbishops
- Presbyterian church governance
- Mitrebg:Епископ
cs:Biskup da:Biskop de:Bischof es:Obispo eo:Episkopo fr:Évêque ko:주교 it:Vescovo nl:Bisschop is:Biskup ja:司教 no:Biskop pl:Biskup pt:Bispo ru:Епископ fi:Piispa sv:Biskop uk:Єпископ zh:主教


text: UChicago Charter continues to push boundaries and rise up. We currently rank top in college persistence among all CPS charter schools according to the To&Through Online Tool. We maintain a strong college-going culture, provide many exciting enrichment opportunities, and leverage the opportunities that arise from being embedded in the University of Chicago. Read more about the progress we're making here.

subset: commoncrawl


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ice2ice – ERC Synergy grant on «Arctic Sea Ice and Greenland Ice Sheet Sensitivity» (ERC 2014-2019)
Principal investigators: Kerim H. Nisancioglu (UiB), Eystein Jansen (UiB), Bo Vinther (UCPH), and Jens H. Christensen (DMI)
Ice2Ice from UiB – Universitetet i Bergen on Vimeo (2min intro):
inspired to see more? Check out rest of the ice2ice videos on our news blogg
Ice2Ice from UiB – Universitetet i Bergen on Vimeo.
eastgrip – The East Greenland Ice-core Project – EastGRIP. An international ice core project lead by Dorthe Dahl Jensen at the Center for Ice and Climate at the University of Copenhagen and with Kerim Nisancioglu at the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research as the Norwegian PI.
EISCLIM – Eurasian Ice Sheet and Climate interactions: Reconstructing and modelling the climate and ice sheet evolution of the last glacial cycle (NFR POLARPROG 2014-2017)
ClimVoTe – Coupled climate, volcanism, and ocean tectonics in deep time (NFR ISP-GEOFAG 2015-2020)
SiU – Partners in Higher Education – Ice, ocean, atmosphere interactions (SiU NorAm 2012-2015)
Turspor – Formidling av geofag ute i naturen (Sparebankstiftelse 2015-2017)
DYNAWARM – Dynamics of past warm climates (SKD)
Past4Future – Climate change – Learning from the past climate (EU FP7)
SiU – Norwegian-American partnership in climate research (SiU NorAM 2008-2011)
NICE – Network for Ice sheet and Climate evolution (EU ITN 2007-2010)
ARECTREC – Arctic records of climate change – dynamics, feedbacks and processes (NFR NORKLIMA 2007-2011)


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Crewe Alexandra can confirm that our Carabao Cup tie against Bolton Wanderers has been moved to Wednesday 9th August. The League Cup tie will kick-off at 7.45pm at the Alexandra Stadium.
The decision has been made between the two clubs because Bolton are playing away at Leeds United in a televised game on the previous Sunday.


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Ethnography + Art: Convergence or Collision?
'Today there is a related paradigm in advanced art on the left: the artist as ethnographer. The object of contestation remains, at least in part, the bourgeois institution of autonomous art, its exclusionary definitions of art, audience, identity. But the subject of association has changed: it is now the cultural and/or ethnic other in whose name the artist often struggles.'[1]
Hal Foster, 'The Artist as Ethnographer?'
From the flurry of interest emanating from exhibitions, publications, and other initiatives since September 11, anthropologist Kirsten Scheid infers that 'all signs suggest an imminent flourishing in the study of contemporary Arab art'.[2] In an effort to focus this 'unprecedented opportunity,' Scheid endeavours to identify precisely 'What We Do Not Know' about contemporary Arab art. As such, she enumerates four key areas ripe for enquiry: '1) historiography; 2) concepts and forms; 3) audience cultivation; and 4) institutional support and funding.'[3] With their attention to social and cultural relations and processes, anthropologists are well situated to address these contextualizing frameworks in ways that pull them out of the background and demonstrate the importance of these lived realities.
As a fellow anthropologist, I want to suggest another area of enquiry, which is concerned with ethnographic aesthetics and affective modes of knowledge production, an area of theory that visual anthropologists, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists of the senses and the body have been developing in recent years. Rather than focusing on 'background' dimensions of the art world, this intersection between art and anthropology addresses shared practices and methodologies. Anthropologists Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright argue that anthropology needs to critically engage with artistic practices that draw on material and sensual registers rather than only textual ones. These contemporary art practices provide means for apprehending the performative aspects of quotidian experience, embodied meaning, affective intensity, and agency of objects and images. These are ideas that are likewise central to anthropological understanding.
Shifting the frame of analysis to the sensory and affective registers of contemporary Arab art has radical implications. Based on my own research with filmmakers and mixed media artists in Lebanon, the idea of making sense - not based on comprehension per se, but rather on sensory experience - is productive for engaging work that deals with incomprehensible lived experiences. In other words, the production of states of confusion in contemporary Arab art is an important challenge to the frenzy of interest in the Middle East in this post-9/11 era, which carries with it assumptions about the accessibility of understanding and the mastery of knowledge.
As new forms of representation emerge with the increasing accessibility of digital media, especially in the hands of those dispossessed of their histories, traditions and land, we must continue to grapple with the role of media as an expressive tool in these contexts. It is particularly important to consider these new renderings of 'reality' in societies that have undergone forms of violence or trauma that undercut realist notions of truth and evidence. While Lebanese film and video has been faced with the burden of representing the failure of the nation and its replacement with prolonged political violence, experimental approaches have emerged that emphasize the 'impossibilities' of traumatic historical representation. The impossibility of representing the political violence in Lebanon is of course debatable in the strict sense, however, more than the idea of a prohibited practice, 'impossibility' serves as a critical muse. For many artists, like Walid Raad, Lamia Joreige, Jalal Toufic, Tony Chakar, among many others, their work conjures the impossible in order to undercut the taken-for-granted assumptions about representational possibilities. In the face of personal and communal suffering, media saturation, ideological machinations, historical density, and inaccessible lived experiences, neither art nor anthropology can hope to represent something as abstract as the 'Lebanese civil war'. Instead, these artists utilize non-linear personal narratives, embedded documentary elements, and media recycling in order to blur boundaries between fact and fiction, art and ethnography, and identity and subjectivity.
These documentary endeavours are efforts to make manifest the imaginaries that haunt a landscape of forgetfulness, amnesia and impossible representations. Documentary artefacts are thus not records of the real, but casings, hollow shells, empty remnants of remembering. That is to that say that these media remnants exist as fossils, always decaying, but also always as an object that is simultaneously of the past and of the present. By re-enchanting these mimetic artefacts, Lebanese documentary experimentalists break through the blockages of amnesia, to see around representational eclipses, and rupture ossified narratives that reify violence. In other words, the impossibility of representing the traumatic past is met by creative approaches to understanding the remnants of the past in the present. This critical distance doesn't provide time to see the past more objectively, but rather to see the way ideas, images and objects from the past refract in the present in ways that elucidate the social and political imaginaries. The interface between art practices and ethnographic enquiry provides a key site for apprehending the affective potential of ficto-criticism to momentarily crystallize these imaginaries. It is worth noting that direct criticism would not yield the same result regardless of the merits of each approach. In order to demonstrate this, I want to engage here withthe oeuvre of a little-known experimental filmmaker working in Beirut who goes by the name of Marhaba Tata.
Tata's work provides a poignant case study of the way experimental documentary in contexts of recurrent violence engenders alternative archives, fabulated narratives, and critical auto-ethnography. These experimental modes of documenting help to elucidate the intersection of postwar subjectivity and the mundane experience of geopolitical processes. The breadth of Tata's work has fallen under the banner of 'The Post Script Project' (2005-11). He explains the rationale of this project, based on the notion of an addendum to a written document, as accentuating the idea of an afterthought. Like the appended postscript to a letter, he told me, 'an afterthought is a latent reverberation, something that occurs out of time, displaced from its originary instance…when afterthoughts can easily be edited into the body of the correspondence, the postscript serves a more nuanced function, one potentially against the grain of the preceding message'.[4] Post thus aligns with a series of concepts, like postmodern, postcolonial, postwar. Each of which are also types of afterthoughts. Accordingly, we can see Tata's work as revisionary.
Most of this work, he says, 'interrogates the history of American wars in the Orient'.[5] Provocatively, he addresses these issues primarily through a re-mediation of an American expatriate child living in the Middle East during the early 1980s. Tata's efforts to re-voice the American diplomatic missions in the region draws upon objects he found in the debris of the US embassy after it had been obliterated by a car bomb in 1983. In the rubble he found this bag containing a child's memorabilia: toy camels, home movie videotapes, and an illustrated story written for school, among other things. He re-enchants these found objects with subversive narratives about the politics of foreign intervention.
Inscribed inside the bag is the name P.S. Westmoreland. The first two initials of the bag's owner clearly connect to Tata's evocation of a postscript. Tata thus appropriates both the initials and the contents to utter a subversive afterthought from the rubble-reduced edifice of the American diplomatic mission. In his video, Objects of Oppression (2001), Tata re-enchanted these mundane objects as latent evidence of imperial domination, by drawing on footage from the found videotapes.
In Marhaba Tata's next piece, In a Family of Hearts and Minds (2003), he traces the origins of P.S. Westmoreland's belongings to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,
which is depicted in the home movies recovered from the rubble. Here he learns that the father of P.S. Westmoreland worked for the Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation, a diplomatic project that was to foster relations between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States.
Following this lead, Tata discovers a familial relationship between Olan Mills and US General William Westmoreland, who led the American war in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968 and then served as US Army Chief of Staff until 1972. For critics, General Westmoreland is often accused of escalating the war in Vietnam under false pretenses. This piece makes an inter-textual
reference to Peter Davis' 1974 film Hearts and Minds, in which General Westmoreland says on camera that the 'oriental' does not value life as highly as do the Americans. Tata locates the parents of P.S. Westmoreland, Olan and Eugenia Westmoreland, now residing on a golf course in central Texas. Here, he confronts them about their past in an escalating series of interrogating interview questions. And yet, the film removes the questions, thus eliminating the context for answers that at times seem confrontational and at other times nonsensical. Bordering on documentary, but always infused with fictional elements, Tata's representation of these people inscribes them within over-determined ideas of conspiracy, of which they claim no direct knowledge. While he interrogates the meaning of a diplomatic mission and the ubiquitous presence of American expatriates living in the Middle East, one cannot help but be struck by the ordinary ways in which these individuals talk about their experience.
I met with Marhaba Tata when I was doing my fieldwork in Beirut. When he learned my name, however, he became instantly excitable and seemed rather suspicious. Westmoreland is certainly a unique enough name to stand out among the Smiths and Joneses, so this correlation between my identity and this P. S. figure proved too coincidental for Tata to accept at face value. He refused to talk to me more about his project and said he had to leave quickly for another appointment. After this encounter, Tata refused to take my calls and when I saw him at Al Madina Theatre he acted as if he had never met me. I later learned that he was telling people that the CIA, presumably referring to me, had interrogated him and demanded the return of the bag and its contents featured in his films. It was unclear what the CIA would want with these childish objects. Could Marhaba Tata's interest in these objects and their ability to create fantastical conspiracy narratives also be motivating the CIA? Of course, the evocation of these objects as sensitive material could be read another way, but Marhaba Tata did not seem interested in re-embodying P.S. Westmoreland as a child swept up into cosmopolitan geopolitics. As such, this child remains a ghostly figure in Tata's productions, only appearing in archival footage.
Marhaba Tata's subversive ideology runs deeper than merely experimental art, he has also been accused of assuming a false identity. In a recent copyright infringement case, the Tata Group sued Marhaba Tata for falsely associating himself with the industrial magnate, Ratan Tata, who runs the Tata Group. It seems that Marhaba Tata's claims to be related to Ratan were initially ignored as a harmless prank, but the Tata Group was forced to take legal action when Marhaba Tata's true identity was allegedly linked to a radical American academic. The Tata Group's reputed connection to this rogue figure had mired the company's ambitions to acquire the Jaguar and Land Rover car companies in accusations of anti-Israeli sympathies. The outcome of the case required that Marhaba Tata stop making claims that involved the Tata Group and family, but could continue to use Marhaba Tata as a pseudonym. Looking into these court documents, I made a startling discovery. The courts identify Marhaba Tata as one 'P.S. Westmoreland' - the figure he was supposedly investigating in 'The Post Script Project'.
By now the reader should be rather suspect about this narrative and the accompanying documents referenced herein. Indeed, Marhaba Tata and P.S. Westmoreland are imaginary as are the conspiracies and structures of feeling that they inhabit. Though these characters are my creation, the structures of feeling are not. My point here is to elucidate the way fictional characters become believably real when placed within these structures of conspiracy and suspicion.
My rationale for this fabulated research is three-fold. First, it is an attempt to parody the aesthetics of ficto-criticism recurrent in Lebanese experimental documentary, which asserts new methodologies for analysing histories of violence by appropriating mundane archival objects and imbuing them with a radical affective force of fabulated narratives. Second, I utilize this narrative to draw attention to the way taken for granted personal histories reverberate with over-determined historical narratives, and yet, by playing with the frequency of this reverberation, narrative can ultimately critique cross-cultural representation and geopolitics through the retelling of the mundane as it intersects with the imaginary. And lastly, I create this project to assert a self-reflexive critique of my position within a public to which I claim intellectual authority. Since the subjects of my research already scrutinize this problematic relationship, this endeavour aims to take ownership of my own troubling positionality, as an American researcher working in the Middle East, in order to redefine the terms of this scrutiny, and to open myself to my research subjects in a way that does not retreat into a confession of identity politics, but instead attempts to articulate the affective forces of doing fieldwork in a complicated political terrain and to think about how these forces crystallize in the making of particular ethnographic imaginaries.
In conclusion, I return to the epigraph that started this essay. Hal Foster's now dated essay, 'The Artist as Ethnographer', launches a powerful critique of artists whose art employs a 'pseudoethnographic' practice, but spares little ink in also condemning anthropologists with 'artist-envy'.[6] Inspired by Walter Benjamin's essay, 'The Author as Producer', Foster redeploys Benjamin's 'productivist' argument to situate a critique of artists appropriating ethnographic frameworks. For those artists who have appropriated ethnography within their practices, Foster's critique is three-fold. Firstly, he suggests that these artists presume that 'the site of artistic transformation is the site of political transformation', which presumes that the site of political transformation is 'elsewhere' among the 'cultural other, the oppressed postcolonial, subaltern, or subcultural'.[7] Building on this, the second assumption that Foster critiques is the idea that 'alterity is the primary point of subversion of dominant culture'.[8] And, thirdly, that the artist must be one of these cultural others in order to fully access this 'transformative alterity'.[9]
While I wholeheartedly endorse a critique of this set of assumptions, I fear that Foster reifies these constraints based on his own set of assumptions about ethnography, positionality and disciplinarity. The space of this essay does not allow me to fully grapple with the nuances of Foster's argument, however, a few comments are in order. Firstly, Foster relies on an antiquated notion of ethnography that most anthropologists now rigorously scrutinize. Anthropology does continue to grapple with the questions of difference, but not as naïvely as Foster assumes. Secondly, the authority of the ethnographer is fraught with various forms of contestation as should be the artist engaged in social critique. My narrative of the fictitious artist Marhaba Tata should help us begin to question this paradigm. Lastly, rather than fixating on the notions of artist-envy and ethnographer-envy, which works to police disciplinary borders, I am interested in methodological borrowings across these vocational structures. To be clear, with this ficto-critical rendition I do not situate myself as an artist. To do so would take for granted the various structures of legitimization that practitioners from the Middle East and across the global south must constantly negotiate in order to access the global art world. To acknowledge these is not the same thing as legitimizing them, but to ignore them would be to dismiss the 'background' parameters mentioned at the beginning of this essay. In other words, for the relationship between artists and anthropologists to be most productive, there needs to be greater sharing of our respective practices, theoretical concepts, and methodological toolkits.
[1] Hal Foster, 'The Artist as Ethnographer?' in The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, eds. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 304.
[2] Kirsten Scheid, 'What We Do Not Know: Questions for a Study of Contemporary Arab Art,' ISIM (International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World) Newsletter 22 (2008): 14.


text:
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25 January 2015: The Conversion of St Paul
Acts 9:1-22; Ps. 67; Galatians 1:11-24; Luke 21:10-19
St Stephen Lutheran Church
The Rev. Maurice C. Frontz, STS
Even though today's feast is called
'The Conversion of St Paul,'
the word 'conversion' does not appear in our texts for today.
But it seems an appropriate enough word.
To 'convert' is to turn around.
You are walking one way,
and then you turn around and you walk the other way.
Oddly enough, St Paul did not 'convert' in this literal sense.
He was on his way to Damascus,
and then he kept going to Damascus.
But when he got to Damascus,
he began to walk in a new way,
in the way of suffering and witness,
in the way of Christ.


text:
My Ten Weeks at Pillar
Margaret Mead amongst the Agilists
Charles Roth
Techblog top
Started 8/25/2009.
First released draft: 9/18/2009.
I. Introduction
I began work as a Pillar employee on 6/8/2009, on-site at Gale Research, jumping into the middle of the Career Transitions ("CT") project. The work has been fun and educational, and I hope to continue with it, if and when CT resumes.
I also saw individual and group behaviours that intrigued me: good and bad, intentional and unintentional, explicit and implicit. The time spent at Gale was a mother-lode of gold nuggets for the would-be "Agile anthropologist". I'm no
Margaret Mead
, but I do have a life-long interest in group dynamics and anthropology... and unlike most software developers, I also
to write.
Thus, this article.
There were many implicit (unexplained, undiscussed) behaviours of the team that surprised and sometimes concerned me. Some of these may be worth notice and possible discussion inside Pillar. To summarize, my purposes in writing this article include:
Point out implicit "fish-in-water" team behaviours that concerned me, on the chance that they might be something that Pillar could improve on.
Point out the same to Pillar folks who might be interested in discussing them... because I might learn more that way.
Scratch my itch, in good Agile/open-source style. I can't believe <grin/> that no-one has written about these things: so it might as well be me.
Just to emphasize... this is
a complaint or a diatribe. Where I name names, it is only to point out what I consider exceptionally positive behaviour. I mean for this to be feedback in it's truest, engineering, sense.
II. Context
Just a little bit about me and where I come from, to provide context to my observations.
Wrote my first Fortran program in 1970 at the age of 14; computers hooked me and I've never looked back.
Graduated B.S. Comp Sci from
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
in 1977.
Taught computer science 1980-1982 at Wayne State University. Loved teaching, but the pay sucks.
Lived through, embraced, and helped teach many paradigm changes: structured programming, C, OO, the Web, founding/surviving a
$3M .com/.bomb
, and now Agile/XP. Confident enough to believe I can help others embrace new(er) practices, humble enough to remember that my thinking will get up-ended at each new shift.
I am new, and not new, to Agile. I spent three weeks at
Menlo Innovations
in May 2006. Much of what I learned about XP there had the "aha" shock of "
is what I've been fumbling towards for years!". But I found Menlo too rigid, too cult-like, to stay. I then tried to drag a small U.S. SaaS company (with mostly remote Chinese developers) into Agile practices, teaching myself simultaneously. I made a lot of useful changes, but it wasn't pretty, and they never really embraced TDD.
So I explicitly chose to move on to some place that really believed in Agile, but was not rigid. Hence, Pillar.
III. Field Notes
These are literally field notes about the behaviours I saw that were interesting, or that concerned me. I have organized them into categories that (roughly!) parallel published Agile methodologies.
I have tried to clearly separate out my recommendations (in separate blocks following each section), although I confess to some (gasp!)
of each behaviour.
Pairing newbies.
During my first week at Gale, I was paired with another new person, Laurence Rama. This seems counter to normal pairing practice... but oddly enough, it worked very well. We were given cards about new features that were reasonably transparent to anyone familiar with any java/web platform, so we were able to add some velocity immediately.
Because we were both new, neither of us deferred to the other, and we were able to make good use of our complementary skill-sets. This was either brilliant planning on Matt Van Vleet's part, or damned good luck, as there were other possible first pairings that would not have worked nearly as well.
When this happens, assign a specific person -- not the team manager, not the tech lead -- to be their immediate go-to person for questions. It's good when a newbie pair can work things out together, but some may hesitate to ask questions when they're stuck. (Fortunately, I have no fear of looking stupid, so I asked most of the questions for our pair.)
Vague pairing rules.
During my initial interview, I was told that pairing was frequent but often optional. During my first few weeks at Gale, almost all work was paired. But as time went on, and as some people were slowly moved to other projects, pairing behaviour changed a lot. It was frequently unclear whether we should pair, with whom, and why.
At one point, my then-pair "P" and I were working on three cards A, B, and C: P on A, me on B, and "we" on C. All three cards had significant built-in delays in the test/develop cycle, which is what led to this curious arrangement. We did examine each other's work on A and B before check-in, to at least preserve the spirit and some of the benefits of pairing. It was efficient, it worked, but it was weird.
Even later, when the number of developers grew very small, I usually worked solo, but grabbed another person any time I had a doubt, felt like I needed a sanity check, or before check-in. This worked well (as far as I can tell!), but it was never really discussed explicitly.
I did at times return to traditional pairing when there was a need for deep knowledge sharing, or for me to pick up another's work that was in-progress while the first person went on vacation.
Be flexible about pairing, but be
about the flexibility. Don't force pairing for everything. Don't force pairing unless you really mean it. Otherwise it lowers morale and encourages cynicism.
Pairing difficulties.
The most fascinating thing about Agile, from an anthropologist's point of view, is pairing behaviour. With essentially no instruction or explicit norms, most of the developers seemed to pair readily and effectively... even as the styles of pairing varied widely.
There were a few difficulties that I saw on repeated occasions that are worth noting:
Large disparity in project-specific knowledge. I've been on both sides of this pair.
In one case, I was new to the team, and simply overwhelmed with the level of class dependency knowledge needed in order to work with my (extremely thorough and knowledgeable) pair partner. After several days, I recommended that I was not ready for this pairing, that it would take too long for me to come up to speed, and that I was slowing my pair down. He agreed and was very gracious, and I moved to a different pairing that had worked on cards with smaller scope, which gave me a chance to absorb more about the class structure without being overwhelmed.
In a different case, near the end of my ten weeks, I paired with a young newcomer, recently out of college. I specifically picked part of a card that I knew she could handle, tried to give her a "10,000 feet down to this point" overview, and handed her the keyboard. Success was mixed, but she was able to be productive.
"Introvert thinking". There is a tendency for introverts to think silently, to invisibly go from A to M, and then surface -- which can leave everyone around them wondering how the heck we just got to N? This can be quite confusing in a pair, where frequent conversation seems to "grease the wheels". This is especially true if the introvert is a senior team member, and the partner is new and more hesitant to insist on step-by-step communication.
High bandwidth, low communication. The reverse of the introvert case is the pair partner who talks almost constantly. This "high bandwidth" can reduce actual communication, and stir uncomfortable feelings in the other partner... who may end up feeling responsible for managing both sides of the conversation. The high bandwidth partner is frequently very skilled, knowledgeable, and productive... but the situation can require great strength and delicacy from the other partner.
Ambiguous speech: demonstrative pronouns and adjectives. Words like "it", "that", and "this" in pair conversation about classes and objects are prone to ambiguity, especially in rapid or high-bandwidth monologues.
Shoulds vs. Wants. Different members of a pair naturally approach any given problem (e.g. defining the responsibilities of a new class, or what a reasonable set of tests would be) with different assumptions. On multiple occasions I observed the beginnings of conflicts about just "how far" the responsibility of a class should go.
What I found helpful in these cases was to be explicit about what we each thought a class
do at a minimum, versus what we each
the class to do. (In one case I actually drew out a 2x2 matrix of "should do/not-do" vs. "want to do/not-do" to make it clear.)
The danger here is when pair partner A interprets B's "wants" as "shoulds", and begins an argument about it. When the distinction is made clear, the "virtual argument" disappears and forward velocity resumes.
effect. A fancy name for a common phenomenon. In rare cases, a pair member may be so utterly confident -- and wrong -- about something, that the other partner may hesitate to question them. In one (and only one) case in a triple, I felt that I had to be rude in order to demonstrate that we had gone down a very wrong track.
More to follow in a later draft.
Story Cards.
The quality and legibility of story cards varied enormously. Most of the time it was necessary to find the person who wrote the card, and get them to explain what they meant.
Cards were taped to the (former) cube-walls. They frequently fell off, and were retaped, and fell off...
Mark Price repeatedly had to ask people to write in their actual times on the cards, once the card was complete. There were only vague (and frequently differing) understandings of how to record time on a card.
Provide a few made-up sample cards, that show "best practices" for writing cards.
Require card writers to put their name and a title in big letters at the top of a card. Cards without those get moved to a visible "not accepted" board.
Allow developers to take a really ambiguous or unclear card back to the card-writer, and require the writer to rewrite the card.
Write short examples of how to record and fill-in times for cards. Put them in the wiki.
Find a better way to make cards stick. I cut a 4x4 foot piece of
, screwed some L-brackets onto it, and hung it over the cube walls. People could tack or tape cards to it with having them fall off. I'm sure there are even better/easier ways. (Maybe duct-tape a big piece of stiff laminate to the wall, and tape cards to
Information Sharing
Word of mouth.
Works great most of the time. Sometimes it's hard to know when to interrupt others; sometimes we get layers on layers of interrupts happening.
This belongs in a retrospective. Each group is different. How
we interrupt each other? 5 minutes of explicit conversation about it in the group might save several person-hours of hesitation time.
Written information.
This group seemed positively hostile to writing anything down. Some key pieces of information got passed around via email, but we never even had a consistent/updated email list(!!).
There is an understandable Agile reluctance to commit anything to writing that isn't code. That makes sense, far too much documentation gets out of synch with live code 2 minutes after it is written.
But I suggest that this can go far beyond the natural Agile mindset; it can instead become a rationalization for avoidance. When you have to tell more than 3 people something, it's time to write it down -- even if you know it will become out of date.
if you know new people will be added to the team later on.
Build a team email list -- a real list with an alias, not an email with a bunch of cc's that gets passed around. The latter is a guarantee for failure. If you could write a test for it, you know it would fail.
Build a team wiki. Use it! Commit the little nuggets of key information to it. (A handful of real examples: "How do I turn on/off eclipse/liferay debugging". Or "Where did we put the modified Liferay files we have to plug-in by hand?". Or "How does
LinkedIn integration
work?" Or "What's the URL to access the integration server report from my desktop?" Or... you get the idea.)
If you're tempted to send an email, don't -- put it in the wiki, then send the email with a pointer to the relevant wiki page.
The "tech lead as benevolent despot" role works well, to cut thru uncertainty. So appoint a benevolent despot to rule the list and the wiki. (It should
be the tech lead.) Give him/her the power to insist that people use the wiki; if developers try to use email, the despot gets to bounce it back and tell them to immediately put it in the wiki. Make sure the despot gets a little time now and then to keep the list and the wiki clean.
Don't depend on "someone" at Pillar to maintain blogs or wikis. Make it local, control it locally. (OK, maybe it can live on a Pillar server. But it's got to feel local.) One senior Pillar staff member told me "The Pillar Wiki is where information goes to die."
Classes, objects, naming.
The book "Clean Code" talks about readable code as a domain-specific language. That means that class names
have to make sense
in the context of a larger language.
Define some domain-specific key-words at the outset, or along the way as concepts evolve. Write them on a whiteboard, a wiki, a shared file, anything.
Write 2-3 sentences at the top of each class, describing what the heck this thing is. Not what it
, not how it works, but what it
! Or even
it is!
Granted, both of these are edgey -- they slide towards waterfall, towards documentation rot. But you cannot have a language without a basic vocabulary, and you cannot have readable code in the style of "Clean Code" if it doesn't at least hint at a domain language. Otherwise your "WTF?" count increases, as you end up with not-very-meaningful class names like UrlTarget and method calls like BigBlob.getTextSize().
Integration Server.
The integration server was mysterious. There was a fair amount of knowledge about its operation, and the norms for using, that just didn't live anywhere, and couldn't easily be described by word-of-mouth. A very few people worked hard to keep it clean, and it was an honorable but unenviable task.
The integration server builds broke. A lot. If anything, the longer the project went on, the more often the builds broke. There was much good-natured pleading (esp by the tech lead) for people to keep the builds from breaking, or to clean up after a build broke... but there was no obvious pattern that anyone was doing anything in particular wrong. It was also hard to tell who was
responsible for any given build breaking.
Possible reasons for the frequent build breaks included:
Multi-phase commits. Builds commenced on a commit, but since the production code and the integration tests were in separate projects, a commit to one could trigger a breaking build, because the integration test project commit had not yet happened. "False positives" like this encouraged a "just wait 'till the next commit" attitude.
EasyB test failures. These were often the "shoemaker's children" of the project, possibly because there was confusion about who was writing them from the beginning.
Database changes. Early on, all database changes were basically emailed around, which caused confusion and sometimes broke a build. Eventually a subversion-based tool was added that automatically ran database updates, which was a vast improvement and deeply appreciated by all.
And sometimes we just didn't know "why the damned thing broke" and just kicked it again and waited for (or even forced) the next commit.
Reduce false positives. Arrange projects so that developers can easily choose to run unit-tests separate from integration tests, yet both are handled by a single commit.
make a build commence on a commit, but only after a certain delay. Or... I don't know, but this problem must have been solved somewhere already.
Make it easier for anyone to take responsibility for integration server cleanups. A
one-or-two page
guide might suffice.
When frequent pleas don't get results, then lean on it in the retrospectives. These are good people, if something's not happening, then the situation itself may be at fault.
Information flow / teaching / learning.
Overall, these were great opportunities. The publicity for them was mixed and often unclear. If in doubt, I went anyway, and then left if it didn't seem useful.
The best was Dan Wiebe's talk on EasyMock -- not just because I personally found it useful, but because he was very clear about what this was, why he thought it useful, and only
delved into details.
The worst was a departing Gale employee talking about "ATDD". I stayed for 45 minutes, and never actually found out what it was or why it might be useful. (And as a former teacher, I was not, shall we say, a passive listener.)
As silly as it may seem, I think it would be possible to do a lunch-and-learn on how to do lunch-and-learns. Subject matter experts do not automatically know how to teach, but there are some basic principles that can help. The simplest is: start with
I am,
I'm talking about, and
that might be useful to you.
dive into details right away, start at 10,000 feet and work down.
give short, specific examples of how something was useful.
Books. I found it highly ironic that, at Gale of all places, nobody seemed to use books. There seemed to be a belief that, if you needed to learn something, you should find it on the 'net.
A few people did pass around one or two books: if it looked useful, I immediately bought my own copy. (
jQuery in Action
was particularly useful.) I brought in a load of ~15 books that I thought helpful; a few people used them on occasion.
There may be some tension here between "travel light" and "gain mastery" that I do not understand. It troubles me, but I do not (yet) have recommendations.
Technology choices.
Obviously, the choice of technologies affects how well a project progresses. But more subtly, the choice of technologies affects how well specific Agile practices work... or don't.
The choice of
as the base platform is a good example.
On the surface, it seemed like a reasonable choice. But because of the way it "takes over" certain Tomcat functions, it had the affect of really slowing down the develop / test / deploy / test cycle. Unlike "vanilla" Tomcat or JBoss deployments, with Liferay in the middle, it was impossible to just change a JSP and immediately see the results. This wasted a lot of time, and caused developers to "batch" many changes together.
Liferay seemed to offer some features that would be useful: built-in user creation/authentication, and the handling and arrangement of portlets. But in practice, neither of these appeared to help very much, and in fact required some serious "working around" their features at times.
In 20-20 hindsight, this may be a case of "use the simplest possible tool for the problem". I believe the overall velocity would have been significantly higher if we had built our own pieces just on top of Tomcat.
The use of
was a well-intentioned attempt to have business stake-holders write application/behaviour test skeletons, which would then be filled-in with Groovy code by developers.
Unfortunately, it never happened that way, so the responsibility for the application tests was always unclear, and thus they always lagged behind "real" code. And many UI problems had to be discovered by live human testing.
In this particular instance, we might have been much faster, and the responsibility much clearer, if the developers were told to just write the application tests directly in Selenium (no EasyB, no Groovy), and run them straight from JUnit.
In general, the responsibility for the application tests should be made explicitly clear at the outset, and then let
drive the choice of technology.
IV. Closing Observations
Compared to my experiences in other similarly-sized environments, at Pillar/Gale I observed very robust code, moderately high velocity, and high developer enthusiasm. I attribute this to these practices:
Buy-in of TDD across all levels.
Story cards (mostly) ensured good-sized tasks.
Developers could write story cards, especially for bugs, problems, and doubts.
The "shared honesty" enforced by pair-programming.
Frequent rotation of pairing.
Shared group norms of "Travel light", "don't speculate", and "simplest solution that works".
Strong encouragement of immediate refactoring.
Interviewing process that (mostly) ensures basic competence with all of the above.
But you knew that already, right?
What I found particularly interesting, however, was a group sense that somehow these practices could (or should) solve
the problems that the developers faced. When these practices did
lead to solutions, I observed frequent pleas and exhortations to "do it better", "take more responsibility", "remember to fill in times on the cards", and so on. The pleading was generally good-natured, but had a background feeling of helplessness, of puzzled frustration that "damn it, we're good Agilists, why aren't we solving these problems?".
Now, in many cases, some of these problems
solved, often by someone "scratching their itch" after an issue was repeatedly brought up during the retrospectives. (The management of incremental database changes is a good example of a problem that was -- eventually -- solved.)
But my main point here is that there can be a disparity between what the team believes that "Agile can do", and what the situation actually allows. And like any group with a strong shared belief system, when the beliefs fail to change reality, sometimes the frustration turns inwards to the team, that somehow "
were not good enough, did not practice our beliefs strongly enough".
(I am reminded -- distantly -- of many "millennialist" and Utopian movements in the U.S. in the 1800's. When the promised Second Coming or social revolution did not occur, these groups felt puzzled and defeated, and lost a great deal of their energy and focus.)
This "turning inwards" is actually much more positive than the historical response of frustrated developers -- to blame the management, choice of technology tools, lousy specifications, etc. An inwards look can encourage developers to reflect on what they could do differently, what itch could be scratched earlier, and what different technology choices might help.
The retrospectives are a powerful tool to use this "turning inwards" and redirect the energy towards identifying the real problems. Curiously, I observed, at best, "mixed" energy levels during the retrospectives. I'm not sure why this was, but it was decidedly lower than the energy during stand-up meetings, or during daily development. Possibilities include:
Many developers just wanted to get back to programming.
Pointing out the same problems repeatedly was discouraging.
Problems would be assigned to some people (esp managers), but progress was unclear (not testable!)
V. Conclusion
I break with anthropological tradition here to (briefly) sermonize, and end with a question.
Agile/TDD turns the most common programmer vice -- "I just want to write code" -- into a virtue. In doing so, it also releases a huge amount of energy -- the unspoken, often repressed anxiety that "my code will break the next time it is changed". (Which can lead to "nobody but me should ever change it.")
Agile solves huge problems. But having done that, there is a temptation to believe it solves
problems. We must not, in our enthusiasm, fall into that trap.
"Always test it!" is a powerful message and tool. How can we extend it to problems that we have
been solving?


text:
Instagram Round-Up
Hello from the Big Apple! I'm so excited to be back in the city and have enjoyed every minute so far! The BH&G event was gorgeous and the best part was seeing all the friends I don't get to see in person unless we get together at events like this. Today, we're heading out on a food tour and I can't tell you how much I've been looking forward to that- especially the Italian fare! Then, it's onto a show and dinner before catching an early flight home tomorrow. I will be sure to do a detailed recap of everything soon, but first I'll probably need to sleep for a week! #oldlady
Today, I'm doing something a little different and sharing a big round-up of Instagram favorites from the last month. I like these everyday outfit shots because they are easy snaps out and about and don't require getting all gussied up for a professional photo shoot. I hope they give you inspiration for your own wardrobe!
For fit reference, keep in mind I'm super short, just 5'1, about 105 pounds. I often wear petite or size down for the best fit for my frame, but I'm also busty (34D) with 'athletic' i.e. big legs, so that can be a challenging combo.
Long Cardigan XSP ⋅ Tank US 2⋅ Skinny Jeans 25 ⋅ Similar Mule ⋅ Clutch (similar) ⋅ Y-Necklace⋅ Bar Necklace ⋅ Hoop Earrings • Rose Gold Watch ⋅ Bangle
I'll take my peplum tank with a side of cardigan perfection! ✨ It's lightweight enough to wear now and the longer length is super elongating, even for a short girl! ? Comes in regular & petite and so many pretty colors!?
Peplum Top XXS on sale + extra 30% off • Pendant Necklace • Coil Ring • Hoop Earrings •Rose Gold Watch • Bangle • Bar Necklace • Mules • Skinny Jeans 0P • Stone Bracelet
Monday's are the longest! Definitely need extra ☕☕! This striped peplum top is on sale and has the cutest button back all the way down! ?
Shirt Dress XS under $50 ⋅ Similar Bootie on sale ⋅ Necklace ⋅ Leopard Clutch 50% off
I will forever be grateful that this dress brought me good luck at my talk with the sweet ladies at St. Anne's mom's group! I was sooo nervous, but they were great and so easy to talk to. This little t-shirt dress is incredibly versatile and comes in several pretty fall colors. See 5 ways to wear the black one here and more ways to style the navy one here.
Top XSP ⋅ Jeans 25 ⋅ Bag ⋅ Necklace ⋅Watch ⋅Bracelet
Loving the pop of red and embroidery detail on this short sleeve top. Those details make it feel extra special.
Skinny Cargo Pants 24P ⋅ Top XXS (but could've went w XS) ⋅ Pink Sneakers (size down 1/2) ⋅ Pink Bag ⋅ Necklace
Nothing beats a pair of fitted cargo pants for running around on the weekends. My exact pair sold out, but this pair is nearly identical. ?They are my go to for when I want to be extra comfy, particularly perfect for running around with the kids ??? and they are super slimming. Pink sneaks are cushy and cute, size down 1/2. ?
Similar Pants 24 • Earrings • Ruffle Hem Cami • Rose Gold Watch • Bar Necklace • Bag • Sunglasses • Bracelet • Trio Ring • Strapless Bra • Sneakers
Spent the morning ??♀?, then got some hair added to my head (see Stories ?, thanks @reneedelray!?), now off to ⚾ in the cushiest slip on sneaks! I seriously searched high and low for these babies and they are amazing! ? Size down 1/2. ?
Jeans 0P 40% off • Long Cardi XSP • Tank XS • Slides • Bag • Rose Gold Watch • Bracelet • Bar Necklace • Pendant Necklace • Lips
Polka dot cami ($12) + the best, long lightweight cardi for early Fall! ? The cardigan is so good for work and weekend and the length is ?even on us short girls! Comes in regular and petite, and so many pretty colors- I have tan and navy and want the pale pink next! ?
Tunic • Skinny Pant Leggings (tried on 24P, got 25P) on sale⋅ Bra • Bar Necklace • Initial Necklace • Coil Ring • Earrings • Leopard Clutch (similar) •Booties • Bangle
Feeling pretty good after a salon visit with @christoph_do! He lightened up my roots and even though I love him, I'm so happy I don't have to go back for color for another 5 months! I wore my must have tunic for fall. It's only $39, but feels totally luxe and comes in several colors. Fits TTS.
Cami XS • Swing Cardi.XS on sale + extra 40% off ⋅ Bar Necklace • Y Necklace • Trio Ring • Swing Cardi • Jean Shorts • Stone Bracelet
Cami + cardi + shorts = bunco tonight! ???Loving these flared sleeves and soft grey color.
Joggers XXS • Top XSP • Slip-On Sneaker (size down 1/2) • No Show Socks ⋅ Bracelet • Rose Gold Watch • Bag
Comfy cozy joggers for school drop off this morning! James insists I walk him in and they frown on pj's, ?so next best thing! ? They sold out in a hot minute, but are back in all sizes, including olive green! ? Size down 1/2 in the blush pink sneakers.
Cami ⋅ Jeans 25 ⋅ Slides ⋅ Strapless Bra ⋅ Adjustable Y Necklace
I got this cami recently and love this soft pretty color, the double layering and that it has adjustable shoulder straps. Very feminine and pretty! It'll be gorgeous with a white cardigan layered over it soon!
Jean Dress 0 40% off ⋅ Similar Mule ⋅ Watch ⋅ Necklace ⋅ Suede Clutch ⋅ Similar Earrings ⋅ Bracelet
This little shift chambray dress is amazing! It's a baby doll style and seriously adorable on! It's on the shorter side, but not at all revealing up top with the short sleeves and high neckline, so showing off a little leg is fine! It's actually longer in the back so you won't worry about flashing! It's on sale 40% off, but there's only a few sizes left!
Sweatshirt 33% off ⋅ Jeans ⋅ Bar Necklace
You had me at sweatshirt + stripes, then upped the ante with your cute tie sleeves! ?❤ Comes in more colors and both reg/petite and I want them all, I'm wearing SP. ?
Tank US2 ⋅ Jeans 25 ⋅ Similar Bootie ⋅ Clutch (similar) ⋅ Bar Necklace ⋅Y Necklace ⋅ Rose Gold Watch ⋅ Bracelet ⋅ Earrings
These jeans are a designer splurge but worth every penny! I don't know how they do it, but they make you look so super skinny and they make your legs look so long! Both of which are miracles for me at 5'1 with bigger thighs for my size. No wonder nearly 300 women gave them rave reviews!
Tie Waist Cargo Pants on sale $24! ⋅ Tank US2 ⋅ Similar Leopard Flat ⋅ Clutch (similar) ⋅ Bar Necklace Y Necklace ⋅ Rose Gold Watch ⋅ Bracelet ⋅ Earrings ⋅ Tote
We had an impromptu baseball practice on Friday night, so I changed out of my jeans and booties, into my ultra comfy tie-waist joggers. These have come in and out of stock, but are back now in several sizes so grab them now if you haven't already!
similar Cardigan ⋅ Dress XS ⋅ Adjustable Y Necklace
This lightweight cardi that is similar to the old one I'm wearing here is perfect for that purpose. It's still thin enough that you won't be dying in warmer temps, but you'll still get that layered effect. It comes in tons of colors, including black/white stripe with a hi/low hem.
This is another great lightweight sweater cardigan with the cutest ruffle hem. It's nice and slim fitting through the waist with a darling ruffle at the end. It looks great buttoned or unbuttoned, and dresses up well with a pair of heels!
Cowl Neck Sweater Tank (XSP) ⋅ Boyfriend Jeans 0P ⋅ Sneakers (size down 1) ⋅ Pendant Necklace
One of the first things I tried on and fell in love with was this cowl neck sweater tank and it's also 40% off now. How cute is it with those blush pink sneaks?! I'm also smitten with these boyfriend jeans that came home with me. As much as I love my skinnies, a good boyfriend jean is a must have! They are super comfortable and I like that this pair isn't too baggy, but still shows your shape. I've come to know and love this brand and I'm so happy they come in petite, no alterations needed!
Tunic S ⋅ Bootleg Jeans 0P ⋅ Bra ⋅ Nude Heels ⋅ Necklace (Similar) ⋅ Rose Gold Watch ⋅ Ear Jackets ⋅ Bangle
Coming up manana on HWH, the 'must have' tunic for ? fall ? that checks all the boxes! ?Fantastic quality ✔ (silky smooth but on the thicker side and minimal wrinkles) ✔ great fit (TTS, S) ✔ stylish ✔ comfortable ✔ multiple colors & styling options (swipe left to see it untucked) and only $39! ?And don't forget about those budget boot cut jeans that give you legs for days ??, size down! @Nordstrom
Sweatshirt 0 ⋅ Boyfriend Jeans 0P ⋅ Pink Sneakers (size down 1/2)
The boys also take their football very seriously! This time of year it's on nonstop, but I could take it or leave it. I do enjoy going to the game, but you won't find me sitting around watching from beginning to end. Which is why I splurged on this sweatshirt that I plan to wear from now til eternity!
Leggings XS • Top • Water Bottle • No Show Socks • Seamless Panties • Sports Bra • Tank • Watch
Is it terrible that a new workout outfit totally motivates me for the gym?! My super favorite high waist crop leggings are silky smooth and keep you all tucked in! ?Love this new pink/olive camo style! ?
Cozy Cardi XS/S⋅ PJs XS
When your baby keeps you awake all night last night ?? so tonight you're in your pj's, ready for bed at 5pm! ???They fit TTS and the softest cardi everrrrr adds a serious dose of cozy! ?#prrrr
H&M ⋅ 20% off Women's + FREE ship over $100. Until Sept 30, H&M is matching customer donations to Hurricane Harvey up to $100,000.


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Dian Jen Lin, the Sustainable Angle: Post-Carbon Fashion: Regenerative Sustainability Activism
Video with Dian-Jen Lin on Thursday 21st February 2019
The price of clothing has been decreasing for decades, while the human and environmental costs have grown dramatically.
The fashion industry has a devastating environmental and social impact on our planet. Pollution, unethical labour practices, deforestation, hydrocide, climate change, and ever-increasing waste generation has been intensified by the phenomenon of fast fashion. While it is crucial that fashion producers transform their business models given the industry's strong growth trajectory, we, the consumers, hold immense power in our ability to vote with our pounds and demand ethical, just and environmentally-friendly clothing. The apparel sector has a pivotal role to play in the transition to a low-carbon economy and we must start challenging the status quo of unsustainable fashion and take meaningful steps towards a sustainable and ethical system.
About the Speaker:
Dianjen Lin is a designer with 6 years of professional experience across costume/fashion design, photography, art and silver metalwork. Born and raised in the Taiwanese countryside, she has an innate awareness of the symbiosis between humanity and nature. She is particularly interested in science, technology and ecological ethics. Dianjen is currently studying MA Fashion Futures at London College of Fashion, UAL.
Her project "Regenerative Sustainability Activism" aims to make sustainability as easy and accessible as putting on an item of clothing. Dianjen has begun researching the development of Post-Carbon material, i.e. materials that absorb CO2. While her research is still in the preliminary phases, she has merged algae cultures with fibres and her initial results have been promising: one Post-Carbon T-shirt can produce 4% more oxygen than generated by a tree.
Dian-Jen Lin #
Dian-Jen Lin is an interdisciplinary designer with the academic rigour of a researcher, the analytical rationality of a scientist and the aesthetic sensitivity of an artist.


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Fittipaldi S, Ibáñez A, Báez S, Sedeño L, Manes F & García AM. More than words: Social cognition deficits across variants of primary progressive aphasia. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 100, 263-284. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.02.020
Although primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is clinically typified by linguistic impairments, emerging evidence highlights the presence of early deficits in social cognition. This review systematically describes the latter patterns, specifying their relation to the characteristic linguistic dysfunctions and atrophy patterns of non-fluent, semantic, and logopenic variants of the disease (nfvPPA, svPPA, and lvPPA, respectively), relative to closely related dementia types. Whereas the evidence on lvPPA proves scant, studies on nfvPPA and svPPA patients show consistent deficits in emotion recognition, theory of mind, and empathy. Notably, these seem to be intertwined with language impairments in nfvPPA, but they prove primary and independent of language disturbances in svPPA. Also, only the profile of svPPA resembles that of behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia, probably reflecting the overlap of fronto-temporal disruptions in both conditions. In short, the neurocognitive relationship between linguistic and socio-cognitive deficits cannot be precisely predicated for PPA as a whole; instead, specific links must be acknowledged in each variant. These emergent patterns pave the way for fruitful dimensional research in the field.


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1. Introduce the concepts of global warming and climate change
Introduce students to the terms "global warming" and "climate change." Although this activity focuses on one effect of global warming, it's important for students to understand the difference between these two terms and that they should not be used interchangeably.
Write the terms "global warming" and "climate change" on the board. Ask for volunteers to define the two terms. Ask:
- Do you think the terms mean the same thing?
- If not, how are they different?
Say to students: Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of Earth's air and oceans and that climate change is a long-term change in the Earth's climate, or of a region on Earth. Global warming refers to surface temperature increases, while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas amounts will affect—like melting glaciers, heavier rainstorms, or more frequent drought. (Source: "What's the difference between global warming and climate change?", NOAA, Climate.gov)
Show students the "Global warming cartoon" and ask them to describe how the cartoon illustrates what they have learned about global warming and climate change.
2. Delve deeper into the causes and effects of climate change (optional)
(NOTE: Use this step if your students have not studied the causes and effects of climate change. If you have already covered these topics, you might choose to move on to the next step.)
Have students read the following resources that define climate change—causes and effects.
- Climate Change: Encyclopedia Entry http://nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/climate-change/
- A Student's Guide to Global Climate Change http://nsdl.oercommons.org/courses/climate-change-kids-site/view
Divide students into small groups and have each group work together to complete a four-column chart with the headings Natural Causes, Human Causes, Effects, and Solutions. Ask students to include as many items as possible in each column. When finished, ask the groups to share a summary of their charts and discussions.
3. Discuss the causes of sea level rise
Remind students that the two major causes of global sea level rise are thermal expansion caused by the warming of the oceans (since water expands as it warms) and the loss of land-based ice (such as glaciers) due to increased melting.
Tell students that "... records and research show that sea level has been steadily rising at a rate of 0.04 to 0.1 inches per year since 1900. Since 1992, new methods of satellite altimetry (the measurement of elevation or altitude) indicate a rate of rise of 0.12 inches per year. This is a significantly larger rate than the sea level rise averaged over the last several thousand years."
(Source: "Is Sea Level Rising?", NOAA)
Ask: Which type of melting will cause a greater increase in sea level? Have each student make a prediction.
4. Investigate predictions on causes of sea level rise
Tell students that they are going to see a demonstration that illustrates how melting ice impacts sea levels and test their predictions.
Lead students in conducting the following activity that demonstrates a cause of sea level rise.
- Use the clay to build "land" on one half of each tub. Form the clay to represent land rising out of the ocean. Label one tub "Ice on Land" and the other "Floating Ice."
- Place stick pins close to the edge of each land mass.
- Place four ice cubes on top of the land mass in one tub and on the bottom of the other tub.
- Pour water into the Floating Ice tub until the ice floats. Be sure to add enough water so the ice is floating, not resting on the bottom.
- Pour water into the Ice on Land tub with the ice resting on the clay (be careful not to disturb the ice cubes) until the water levels in the two containers are equal.
- Set the tubs side by side
- Wait for the ice to melt. Take photos of the changes in the level of the water in the tubs or note changes in the levels in a chart.
- When all the ice has melted mark the new water level on each tub. Note the change(s).
5. Discuss students' observations and learning
Lead students in a discussion using the following or similar questions:
- In which situation did the water level rise more? ("Ice on Land" container)
- How do the results compare with your predictions?
- Why do you think this happened? (When ice cubes sitting on the modeling clay melt, the water runs off and adds to the volume of water in the "ocean." Conversely, floating ice is already taking up space in the water—displacing a mass of water that is equivalent to the mass of the ice. When the ice melts, the water fills that existing space. Make sure students don't confuse this with rising sea level that results from water expanding as it warms. This experiment only deals with the result of melting land ice.)
To wrap up the activity, show students the "Why Melting Glaciers Matter to Coasts" video and discuss how rising sea level impacts coasts around the world.
Alternative Assessment
Informal assessment options might include:
- Have students create a presentation on the causes and effects of climate change or global warming, including suggestions for solutions.
- Have students create a short video, drawing, cartoon, or other visual media artifact illustrating the impact of sea level rise.
- Have students conduct the demonstration for younger students, explaining the concepts in terms appropriate for the age group.
Extending the Learning
Use the Assessment ideas to extend the learning.
Subjects & Disciplines
- Biology
- Earth Science
Learning Objectives
Students will:
- describe the differences between global warming and climate change
- recognize causes and effects of climate change and global warming
- identify causes and effects of sea level rise
Teaching Approach
- Learning-for-use
Teaching Methods
- Demonstrations
- Discussions
Skills Summary
This activity targets the following skills:
21st Century Student Outcomes
- Learning and Innovation Skills
Critical Thinking Skills
- Analyzing
- Applying
- Understanding
Science and Engineering Practices
- Analyzing and interpreting data
- Asking questions (for science) and defining problems (for engineering)
- Constructing explanations (for science) and designing solutions (for engineering)
- Planning and carrying out investigations
Connections to National Standards, Principles, and Practices
National Science Education Standards
- (5-8) Standard A-1: Abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry
- (5-8) Standard B-1: Properties and changes of properties in matter
- (5-8) Standard D-1: Structure of the earth system
- (5-8) Standard F-3: Natural hazards
- (9-12) Standard A-1: Abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry
- (9-12) Standard B-6: Interactions of energy and matter
- (9-12) Standard F-3: Natural resources
- (9-12) Standard F-5: Natural and human-induced hazards
Ocean Literacy Essential Principles and Fundamental Concepts
- Principle 1d: Sea level is the average height of the ocean relative to the land, taking into account the differences caused by tides. Sea level changes as plate tectonics cause the volume of ocean basins and the height of the land to change. It changes as ice caps on land melt or grow. It also changes as sea water expands and contracts when ocean water warms and cools.
- Principle 2e: Tectonic activity, sea level changes, and force of waves influence the physical structure and landforms of the coast.
- Principle 6a: The ocean affects every human life. It supplies freshwater (most rain comes from the ocean) and nearly all Earth's oxygen. It moderates the Earth's climate, influences our weather, and affects human health.
- Principle 6d: Much of the world's population lives in coastal areas.
- Principle 6e: Humans affect the ocean in a variety of ways. Laws, regulations and resource management affect what is taken out and put into the ocean. Human development and activity leads to pollution (such as point source, non-point source, and noise pollution) and physical modifications (such as changes to beaches, shores and rivers). In addition, humans have removed most of the large vertebrates from the ocean.
- Principle 6f: Coastal regions are susceptible to natural hazards (such as tsunamis, hurricanes, cyclones, sea level change, and storm surges).
Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy
- Reading Standards for Informational Text 6-12: Integration of Knowledge and Ideas, RI.6.7
- Reading Standards for Informational Text K-5: Integration of Knowledge and Ideas, RI.5.7
ISTE Standards for Students (ISTE Standards*S)
- Standard 3: Research and Information Fluency
- Standard 4: Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making
Next Generation Science Standards
- Crosscutting Concept 1: Patterns
- Crosscutting Concept 2: Cause and effect: Mechanism and prediction
- Crosscutting Concept 4: Systems and system models
- Crosscutting Concept 7: Stability and change
What You'll Need
Materials You Provide
- Clay
- Fine-point black marker
- Ice cubes
- Plastic tubs, see-through, mid-size (2)
- Push pins
- Water colored blue
Resources Provided
The resources are also available at the top of the page.
Required Technology
- Internet Access: Required
- Tech Setup: 1 computer per learner, 1 computer per pair, 1 computer per small group, Monitor/screen, Projector
Physical Space
- Classroom
- Home
- Laboratory space
- Meeting space
- Museum
- Other
- Heterogeneous grouping
- Homogeneous grouping
- Large-group instruction
- Small-group instruction
Background Information
Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of Earth's air and oceans and climate change is a long-term change in the Earth's climate, or of a region on Earth. Global warming refers to surface temperature increases, while climate change includes global warming and everything else that increasing greenhouse gas amounts will affect—like melting glaciers, heavier rainstorms, or more frequent drought. (Source: "What's the difference between global warming and climate change?", NOAA Climate.gov
The two major causes of global sea level rise are thermal expansion caused by the warming of the oceans (since water expands as it warms) and the loss of land-based ice (such as glaciers) due to increased melting. Melting sea ice, on the other hand, does not contribute to sea level rise. "Melting sea ice has no impact on sea level rise because it's already floating in the ocean. Like a glass of water. As it warms, the ice in the glass melts, but the total volume of water does not change. (Source: "Loss of Land Ice (Not Sea Ice) = More Sea Level Rise," Yale Climate Connections. Put another way, "The melting and growth of sea ice...does not affect sea level because the sea ice is already floating in the ocean and is in equilibrium with it. Sea ice is nonetheless still important in the context of climate change. Sea ice, with its high reflectance and the insulation it provides between polar atmospheres and oceans, is a key part of the climate system." (Source: NASA Earth Observatory: "Global Warming and Land Ice."
Records and research show that sea level has been steadily rising at a rate of 0.04 to 0.1 inches per year since 1900. Since 1992, new methods of satellite altimetry (the measurement of elevation or altitude) indicate a rate of rise of 0.12 inches per year. This is a significantly larger rate than the sea level rise averaged over the last several thousand years. (Source: "Is Sea Level Rising?", NOAA.gov)
Prior Knowledge
- None
Recommended Prior Activities
- None
all weather conditions for a given location over a period of time.
gradual changes in all the interconnected weather elements on our planet.
mass of ice that moves slowly over land.
increase in the average temperature of the Earth's air and oceans.
increase in the average reach of the ocean. The current sea level rise is 1.8 millimeters (.07 inch) per year.
having to do with heat or temperature.
Articles & Profiles
- National Geographic Education: Encyclopedia—Global Warming
- National Geographic Education: Encyclopedia—Climate Change
- National Geographic: All About Climate
Tips & Modifications
If you do not have time or resources to conduct this investigation in class, you may choose to show the video "Why Melting Glaciers Matter to Coasts" to students instead. You can still use the prediction component of the activity by stopping the video before the ice begins melting, asking for predictions, and then leading the discussion after the end of the video.
Preview the "Why melting glaciers matter to the coasts" video yourself to get a visual representation of the finished products for this activity.


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Consulting, convening, coding, covering new ground, plus occasional commentary.
Changing technology funding practices (again)
Over the last couple of weeks, I was thinking a lot about "network leadership," and the role of innovative technology, and how it all becomes part of a movement here in Canada that could change the field of innovation. The last burning question for me is: How can Canadian grant makers play a bigger role in catalyzing the necessary networks, and helping innovators build the necessary relationships?
Lots has already been said about the opportunities for a more holistic approach to financing non-profit technology initiatives. So, when it comes time to explore new ways of financing social innovation, I hope that foundations and grant makers will invest some time to integrate the "old" ideas too. But, when I return to the question "how can Canadian grant makers play a bigger role in ensuring that technology projects are successful and sustainable," I always come back to the same conclusion: the funding model needs to be innovative too.
Innovative funding catalyzes innovative approaches to problems
My thinking around "innovation 2.0" can be summarized as: it's not the technology that is important here, it's the innovative approach to problem solving and an enterprising spirit that will rule the day. And, similarly, I'm convinced that changing the way that organizations and projects are funded would catalyze new approaches to problem solving, networking, and relationship building.
Basically, grant recipients take their cues from the grant maker; reporting periods, reporting requirements, and project length and size are all set in advance. The funding program drives the focus of applicant's projects, and the funding requirements drive the approach to problem solving. So, as I see it, there's an opportunity to introduce some system-changing interventions at this level (because, no matter how the funding program is set-up, organizations will still figure out a way to apply and work within the guidelines.)
So, if grant makers were to take a cue from the Web 2.0 companies that they're often enamored with, the first change that I'd recommend is move toward nimble funding. After all, if we're going to encourage the grant recipients to be innovative, should the grant makers lead the way?
Nimble funding
Currently, funding program cycles in Canada tend to be pretty darn long. From application submission, to application review, to negotiation, to the release of funds -- it can often take up to 12 months before a project gets off the ground. (In some situations, I've experienced a three or four month turn-around. But that is the exception not the norm.)
So what, you say? Well, here's the issue when it comes to funding technology projects...
Internet technology -- unlike community organizing which has been around for centuries in various forms -- is still very new. It's changing at an incredible pace. Think about the Internet you experienced as recently as two years ago, or even twelve months ago, and how much things have changed. Think about Microsoft's dominant market position as recently as five years ago, and where organizations like Google are today. One thing is clear: where this is all going is still very unpredictable.
So why are technology projects funded like something that's predictable? Let's think through that twelve-month period that it took to get an application through the funding process. Now, it's a year later, and the ideas in the application are twelve months out of step with where the Internet is right now. Personally, I can't think of a single recommendation that I made last August that I wouldn't at least take the time to re-consider if I was asked that same question today.
This leaves us with the question: What would nimble funding look like? And how could it address this inherent challenge when funding non-profit technology initiatives?
Grant making could look more like social acceleration
If grant making organizations were to explore the idea of nimble funding, they might look first to the world of venture capital, or maybe venture philanthropy. The idea of "social return on investment" is something that most grant makers have probably already embraced (at least unconsciously, if not publicly). And, though I'm certain that most grant makers think their funding programs are reaching their full potential, I know that many of them could be providing much more return on that social investment (any researchers out there?). Specifically: many grant makers could acheive this by re-tooling the approach to funding (often expensive) technology initiatives. And, by re-tooling the approach to technology funding, grant-making organizations could actually help to improve the success of technology projects, mitigate "shareholder" risk, and move toward the role of social change accelerator.
Where should funders start? Simple:
Iterative funding cycles: Short applications, fast reviews, and project time lines that produce useable pilots (or "perpetual betas" if you will) very quickly. Look to the Knight Foundation's News Challenge funding for an example of leadership in this area.
Open standards over open source: Programming languages, development frameworks, and technology stacks are still evolving rapidly. New tools and approaches to building Web applications are emerging every day, and this field is sure to look as different next year, as it did this year. However, through all of this change, standards have -- for the most part -- kept things sane. Think of faithful old standards like HTML or XML, or newer ones like RSS or iCal -- in most cases, documents created in the earliest versions of these standards can still be used today. The opportunity here is for funders to help their grant recipients to embrace standards over languages, applications, or even licenses.
Be SaaSy whenever possible: Over the last few years, there has been a huge shift away from installed applications -- software that organizations need to run, maintain, and upgrade internally -- and toward hosted, or provisioned, applications. With provisioned applications -- often referred to as "software as a service" (SaaS) -- the headaches involved with managing the hardware infrastructure and software stack are transfered to outside organizations that specialize in delivering the software "on demand" to many users. The advantages here outweigh the risks, in my opinion. Too many organizations are now saddled with aging, insecure, and outdated applications that have no upgrade path -- shifting these responsibilities and decisions to market-based, and market-driven, specialists just makes good, long-term, sense.*
Finally, I'd like to see more funding that focused on taking an idea from concept to pilot -- the Office of Learning Technology program got this part right -- and then from pilot to the next iteration or cycle. Or, like Askoka, looking for the field-changing initiatives that are already having an impact, and accelerating them with follow-on rounds of funding that are focused on growth, reach, and replication. And, for extra points, I'd like to see non-profit technology funding that steers clear of Goliath undertakings, too much complexity, or technology that needs to be directly managed by the grant recipient for a period greater than 12 months.
I'm sure you have your own thoughts on changing technology funding practices ... why not post them in the comments below?
* Before my more radical colleagues pounce on me for that statement, I should just say that there are very specific situations -- usually related to the type of organization -- where I would not recommend exploring the SaaS options, and I've talked about them in detail here, and here.
Hi, I'm Phillip Smith, a veteran digital publishing consultant, online advocacy specialist, and strategic convener. If you enjoyed reading this, find me on Twitter and I'll keep you updated.
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Browsers like Chrome, Firefox and other offers "Save Page as" option in their File menu which lets you save complete web page or web page as HTML only, few moths back Google introduced Google Cloud Print technology for Chrome which lets you print to your printer from any device securely over the web by signing in your account, this feature addition to Chrome has also other benefits to the users, with integrated Google Cloud Print in Print dialog of Chrome you can able to save or convert web pages as PDFs in your Computer or to your Google Drive account so that you can always access that document from anywhere.
With freeware PDF printers and online conversion sites available on internet, Chrome is the only web browser in the World with built-in capability that lets you print web pages as PDF files from its print dialog. This has been made possible with Google Cloud Print technology.
PDF is better option to save reports generated after online transaction for future reference, because text, images, font all others are preserved from the page you're on in a converted PDF file than in a saved HTML file.
Converting web page as PDF and saving to Computer in Chrome
All you need to do is from the web page you're on in Chrome use shortcut Ctrl +P to get Chrome's print dialog, click on change button and select "Save as PDF" as local destination and click on Save button.
To a save web page as PDF to Google Drive
Sign into your Google account, then select Print button from Hot dogs icon to open print dialog, under Google Cloud Print select save to Google Drive and click on Save button under Print on top-side left of the page then your page will be converted and saved to PDF format in your Google drive which will be synched and appear in Google Drive folder in your Computer if you've installed Google Drive for Windows.