Who Invited Charlie?
We continued our “snowpocalypse” movie series tonight. This evening a bit more justified with over a foot of fresh snow on the ground. We watched Who Invited Charlie?. The movie revisits the COVID-19 lockdowns following a wealthy family as they escape New York City to the Hamptons, and their visitor Charlie joins them.
MnTech Leadership Forum: Generative AI
Today I hosted the MnTech Q1 2023 Tech Leadership Forum. The organization is changing the format of this event to have technology leaders run these quarterly forums. I thought it would be fun to focus on the topic that is making so much press lately — Generative AI: Harnessing Disruption into Innovation.
I was lucky enough to get three others to join in the dialog:
- Todd Van Nurden, Principal Developer Cloud Architect and Mad Scientist, Microsoft Technology Center’s
- Sam Pierson, Chief Technology Officer, Talend
- Tammylynne Jonas, Global CIOGlobal CIO, Donaldson
Some of the topics discussed:
- Why now? AI has been in the works for a long time. Has there been a technological breakthrough recently?
- How does Generative AI affect how we build software.
- How does Generative AI benefit from these early releases.
- Opportunities technologists see to use this capability in their organizations.
- What are some of the risks to keep an eye on?
- AI as a coach or mentor?
Since it was an invite only event for members there isn’t a video to share. 😕
Of course there is a POAP for the event! And even more exciting, the POAP is also held by POAP.MnTech.eth which is the first POAP that MnTech is officially producing.
Dog Gone
With the “snowpocalypse” bearing down on us we decided to make it a movie night. We all love movies about dogs, especially Tyler. Tammy had Dog Gone on her “to watch” list for a while. Then I saw the Walker family had watched it and suggested we would like it.
Good movie about growing up and the, the relationship between parents and their kids, and of course about a great dog.
We had fun watching Amazing Race S34 E11 as they raced through Iceland and visited so many places that we were at this summer! 🇮🇸
Ukraine Stamps
One of our team members from Ukraine was able to visit us here in Minneapolis for the first time since before the pandemic. The team sent three of the Ukrainian postage stamps as a gift. I have these safely stored away until I can get them framed. 💙💛
The events from left to right in the image are: Russian Warship on Snake Island, the Crimean Bridge blast, and “Kherson is Ukraine!”. 🇺🇦
Florida Man may be the strangest board game I’ve ever played. With that said, a large group of adults having a few beverages would have a lot of fun with this somewhat silly game.
I Adopted Thinking Face Emoji
I ran across this Adopt a Character campaign from the Unicode Consortium and felt like a donation made sense. But what emoji to pick? After thinking through a few I decided Thinking Face. 🤔
This is fun, but I think it would be so much cooler if this program worked by selling NFTs. It has all the right characteristics with Gold and Silver levels being limited, and Bronze being “open editions.” It would be really fun to have this in my wallet as proof of participation.
Macaron Class
We drove an hour out to Buffalo, MN this morning to take a macaron class at Abundant Kitchen led by owner Becki Melvie.
Melvie shared that the recipe was taught to her by Nikkolette of Nikkolette’s Macarons, which we have had before and thought were amazing! The recipe had a lot of precision with all ingredients in grams. I didn’t find the macarons that complicated, but they are definitely very fussy. I tend to like things that are fussy, like fancy coffee. 😁
Our blue macaron shells came out well but had a pretty wide variety of sizes. Not bad though for our first try!
The orange shells were made by the instructor and we filled them. This was my very first macaron that I made, and it was all gone in just two bites. 🤤
To Kill a Mockingbird
We went to the Orpheum to see To Kill a Mockingbird with new screenplay by Aaron Sorkin and directed by Bartlett Sher. It was an incredible and powerful performance. Richard Thomas was so engaging as Atticus Finch. Some may remember him as “John-Boy” from The Waltons.
Tyler wanted his favorite cheeseburger from Lions Tap for his birthday dinner 🍔 and to eat in the Tesla while watching Abbott Elementary. ✅ Eating in the car was something he found fun during the pandemic.
Countdown at Mission Manner
Tyler enjoys escape rooms and for his birthday we went to Mission Manor and did Countdown!
We had a slow start with not much happening the first few minutes. There were a lot of locks and obvious clues, but it wasn’t clear what to do with them. Then we started rolling and we escaped the room in 45m 55s, with 14m 05s remaining on the clock!
And, a first for the Thingelstad family, we had NO CLUES! A total “clean sheet”! 🙌
And a first for us at an escape room, Mission Manor produces an actual score. With 2,240 points we hit the highest level of Escape Gods. 🤜🤛 We were only 60 points short of the record for the room, which if we would have finished just 1 minute earlier we would have beat.
I’m sure that we’ll be back to Mission Manner to do the two other rooms.
We saw Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D EMAX at Emagine Eagan. The story was great and the imagery was amazing.
Extending the Minnestar Community Supporter Program
In a recent conversation with Minnestar Executive Director Maria Boland Ploessl I was very pleased to hear about the amazing growth of the Minnestar Community Supporter program. Community Supporters were something that we launched when I was on the board of Minnestar to create an opportunity for individuals to support Minnebar and Minnedemo, in addition to companies. It was always significant, even on the first year, but it has grown a lot in recent years. The biggest part of that growth has been the structured year-end giving program which I was happy to be a matching supporter of this year.
The growth is awesome, but the program itself hasn’t changed materially since the launch. The primary benefit of being a Community Supporter is that you are guaranteed a ticket to the highly in-demand events that Minnestar hosts. That is a great benefit, but I’ve always wondered what more could be done for this great group of people that are helping support our technology community. Particularly what could be done outside of events.
In my opinion, being a Community Supporter of Minnestar should be table stakes for any technology leader in the region. It should be the most direct way to give back to the technology community we are all part of, and provide meaningful value to the supporter individually. I think supporting the events and community is solid, but the only meaningful value to the individual is a guaranteed ticket.
So what more could be done to grow the program? Some ideas…
Create Connection
People that become Community Supporters are a pretty special and fun group. Creating more connection in that group could be incredibly valuable. This could be done with in two phases.
First, launch an every-other week newsletter just for Community Supporters. This newsletter could include:
- Easy to parse list of upcoming community events
- No more than three relevant links to news about the tech community
- Community Supporter Highlight, randomly share a bio about one of the community supporters each issue
- Project Highlights from Community Supporters to submit and share a project (personal, hobby, business) that they would like to highlight for everyone
The newsletter could be the whole thing, but if there is an increase in engagement a forum for Community Supporters could get traction. I specifically do not mean Slack or Discord. Those are far too high engagement. A platform like Discourse seems much better suited to this. I think Minnestar could benefit from a Discourse like platform for everything, with Community Supporters being a member only section.
Membership
There needs to be more ways to show a persons affiliation with Minnestar, and recognize that support. I’ve been a Minnesota Public Radio member since 1995. How do I know that? My member card says it. I’ve been an Electronic Frontier Foundation member since 2010. It’s on my member card.
First step of this should be to issue an actual Minnestar Community Supporter member card. Cards have to be printed, they expire, etc. There is effort to do this but it gives me something to carry with me and show my membership.
This should also be extended into the digital world with POAP tokens. There should be a POAP for each year given to community supporters. Over the years, you collect each yearly POAP.
This would also be an opportunity to highlight the work of a local artist and create a uniquely designed card and token each year that isn’t just membership, but something that people feel like collecting.
I’ve been a Community Supporter member since the program started, but I have no idea how long that has been!
Input & Direction
Community Supporters as a group could be given the opportunity to have input on Minnestar activities. As a group votes could be taken. Thought would have to be given on what the votes are on. There is a Minnestar Board and various committees, and they should continue to do what they do. But there could be decisions that the community supporters are asked to give a vote on.
I had long thought that it would be really great for one of the Minnestar board seats to be a Community Supporter seat. In this case, the Community Supporters would elect amongst themselves one member that would represent them on the board. This could be facilitated via the forum above, with members raising their hands to serve and make their case followed by an official voting period.
This would lend itself exceptionally well to a Minnestar DAO, with membership gated via the Community Supporter POAP that you receive each year.
Ecosystem Benefits
It would be interesting to explore ways that other organizations in the technology community may want to extend benefit to Community Supporters of Minnestar. This is one of the key reasons to create Membership with a card and a token. Perhaps Twin Cities Startup Week would offer some unique opportunity. Or Tech.MN give a discount on membership. Or early access to certain events.
This would require that Minnestar reach out to have conversations around this with other events, and require proof of being a Community Supporter without access to Minnestar resources. I think this could work, and may be welcome from other organizations as well.
Ice Palace
We visited the Ice Palace at Fountain Hills Winery and thought it was really cool. We had dinner there and were blown away by the Wood Fired Pizza. We wandered through the several tunnels in the Ice Palace. We saw the Fire performers and enjoyed a couple of dozen Mini Donuts as well. I suspect this will become a tradition for us to visit.
Three Kinds of Listening
I loved the framing of these three kinds of listening from Carolyn Coughlin “Become a Better Listener” in episode 157 of the Knowledge Project Podcast.
Listening to Win: Let me make the problem go away, by telling you don’t have a problem.
Listening to Learn: Getting underneath what is being said and reflecting back to the person.
Listening to Fix: Let me take your problem and solve it for you.
Minneapolis Downtown Council Annual Meeting
I was able to attend the Minneapolis Downtown Council Annual Meeting today. I believe this was the first back in the Armory since the 2020 meeting.
The outgoing chair Mike Ryan gave a good overview of the improtance of downtown and the council, and also welcomed the new chair Karin Lucas from SPS Commerce!
SPS is the 10th largest employer downtown with 1,346 people!
I enjoyed the session that Amelia Santaniello led with Steve Cramer, Greg Cunningham, and Mayor Jacob Frey. Frey got up at one point and gave a stump speech for Minneapolis which was great.
Why are your eyes
cast down? Look up
and listen. The world
offers its own poetry.
Sidewalk poetry in Northfield, MN.
Not Writing for the Timeline
I’m done writing for the timeline.
There is a concept in Indieweb communities called POSSE. The acronym stands for publish on your own site, syndicate everywhere. This approach is an attempt to give you the best of all worlds. You can own your own content. Solve the not your domain, not your words problem. Then use various tools to syndicate your content to other services.
It is a fine idea but in practice I think it is broken.
The medium affects the message. Ultimately how you write and publish affects your writing. Social media brought with it whole new norms. No titles for content. Short posts. No rich markup so images and links are handled as metadata.
Some of this, like titles being optional and brevity, are probably good things.
But others are not. And when you syndicate to various platforms it is hard to not have that ultimate destination impact your writing.
What does this look like?
On micro.blog limiting myself to four photos because I know that when it syndicates to Twitter it will only include the first four.
Being cautious about which hyperlink to use first because that is the one that will show up on Twitter regardless if it makes sense for the content.
Not using titles because it changes how syndication works.
I’ve even seen posts use hashtags and @username conventions on a platform that is ignorant to them, but are solely intended for the service it is syndicated.
I disconnected my blog from all syndication and it is interesting how freeing it has felt.
I use titles more. I use the number of photos I want. I add links where they make sense.
Writing for a timeline is a job. The timeline is a distilled and sterile system to give the algorithms an equal chunk of content to drive engagement. The limits of those chunks are non-sensical outside of that timeline.
Let’s break free of the timeline.
Let’s make the web weird again.