Get the shakers

OneLeap is an (unlaunched) web service that promises to introduce you to the relevant "shakers":

OneLeap guarantees you direct introductions to hard-to-reach “Shakers” – employers, investors, clients and advisers.
Every OneLeap introduction also benefits your and the Shaker’s favourite charity.

I kinda like the idea, but I guess it's gonna be difficult for OneLeap to generate trust and a sufficient mass of users to make this worthwile.

(via Chris)

No simple answers

Obama

There's a veeery long - and very good - interview with Barack Obama in the current edition of Rolling Stone (thanks to David Bauer for pointing me to it). One of my favorite parts:

One of the things that you realize when you’re in my seat is that, typically, the issues that come to my desk — there are no simple answers to them. Usually what I’m doing is operating on the basis of a bunch of probabilities: I’m looking at the best options available based on the fact that there are no easy choices. If there were easy choices, somebody else would have solved it, and it wouldn’t have come to my desk.

And then of course the bit where he describes his encounter with Bob Dylan:

Here’s what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you’d expect he would be. He wouldn’t come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practicing before the set in the evening. He didn’t want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn’t show up to that. He came in and played “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I’m sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves. And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That’s how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don’t want him to be all cheesin’ and grinnin’ with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise. So that was a real treat.

Of course, Obama is shining a bright light on his successes and downplaying his failures. But he still makes the impression in the interview of being a considerate, intelligent guy who can talk straight. Go read the whole thing!

Two TED talks you should watch

Coming back to Zurich from Frankfurt, I watched the two TED talks above in the train. They both weren't as surprising and insightful to me as other TED talks, but for a simple reason: They are making a point that we at Sandox have believed in for quite some time now: When smart people come together, good ideas emerge.

Having spent the weekend in Berlin with 25 awesome Sandboxers from across Europe, this rings especially true.

Cool up: Looking back on Project M Frankfurt

Together with the rest of the Sandbox Zurich team, I spent the last two weeks in Frankfurt to visit Project M, a creative school that brought together 40 young exciting people to work on new ideas for the city and the banking industry. As part of our documentation, we created the short video above about the project (or, rather: Antoine did - fantastic job!!). More details on Project M over at the Sandbox blog.

Wikihistory

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James Bridle looked at the entire revision history of the Wikipedia article about the Iraq War, and made a book out of it. Or rather: 12 books.

This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future.

I believe that it will be invaluable for historians in the future to have all these changelogs. Maybe the Library of Congress can archive them, like it did with every tweet ever written?

(via Bits)