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Community 9 May 2013

The Rebel Grandma: What my grandmother taught me about sex, love, and loneliness

Photo of a young woman, perched high atop a fence, taken in the early 1940s.

I am Lauren, daughter of Barbara, daughter of Eleanor, daughter of Elsie, daughter of Eleanor, daughter of Jane, daughter of Ann. Years ago, I attended a ceremony to bless a mother-to-be. And the powerful woman who led the ceremony asked us to gather in a circle and introduce ourselves with our matrilineal heritage. She is [...]

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Business, Community 4 Mar 2013

On Marissa Mayer’s Disavowal of Feminism

Photo of Marissa Mayer holding a microphone, onstage at Le Web 2008

I wrote a short, and necessarily incomplete, piece for Quartz on Marissa Mayer’s statement that she’s not a feminist. You can find it here. I struggled to write it, because I knew I was leaving so much context out – and therefore leaving myself open to misinterpretation. So I am expanding on it here, to [...]

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Beauty Tuesdays, Community 29 Jan 2013

Beauty Tuesday: Idle No More

Two women holding signs at an Idle No More march in Coast Salish territories, January 11, 2013

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. –Martin Luther King, Jr. I have been feeling hopeful about my country lately. I haven’t felt that way in a while. While my American friends often joke about moving [...]

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Community, Self-awareness 27 Nov 2012

From Our Ghosts to Your Ghosts: The Gospel of Springsteen

Here is the moment from last night’s Bruce Springsteen concert that I want to remember. He worked the crowd like an old-fashioned revival preacher, at times using the language of church – “Can you feel the spirit? Give me a ‘Yeah!’” – and in other ways more obliquely, walking into the crowd for the laying-on [...]

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Community 23 Nov 2012

Ninety-nine

Baby photo with Mom and Grandma and Grandpa MacLeod

Today, my grandfather Gordon MacLeod would have been 99 years old. Last year, I was hoping against all odds that my son would be born on his due date, November 23, as a kind of birthday gift for Grandpa. That didn’t happen, but I hear that gritty old, tobacco-and-weatherstained voice in my mind every day [...]

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Business, Community, Technology 14 Nov 2012

Livestreaming the Lean Startup Conference in Vancouver

The Lean Startup Conference logo

(Too busy to read this whole post? The TL;DR version is that I’m hosting a Vancouver livestream of the Lean Startup Conference on Monday, December 3. You should join me!) “If one more person tells me to read The Lean Startup, I’m gonna flip out,” complained one of my favourite tech startup founders recently.  Indeed, [...]

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Business, Community, Curiosity, Technology 26 Oct 2012

A Quick and Dirty to Creating Personas

Photo: Bea and the sun, by davic

I mentioned in my post on user matrices that I’d be blogging more about personas, and how you can use them to get inside your customer’s* mind. Personas are an underused tool that almost anyone can benefit from using. They’re an amazing framework for helping us get outside our own heads and unpacking our assumptions [...]

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Business, Community, Technology 19 Oct 2012

Users as Co-Creators: On Tech, Art, and Meaning

Peeling Yellow Paint, by GrungeTextures

Have you ever seen an interview with an artist – a writer, say – where they’re asked about the meaning of their work, and they say something like, “It is whatever you say it is?” It can come off as elusive, flippant, or falsely innocent. But those artists have discerned an important truth about their [...]

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Community, Curiosity, Technology 1 Oct 2012

Hackers and Makers: Language Matters

Saw this in my Twitter stream, thanks to Jennifer Pahlka, and thought, “Aha”: Dale: What’s in a name? Maker feels more open than hacker. #OHS — MAKE (@make) September 27, 2012 Yes, language matters. Especially when we’re inviting community. What feels more welcoming to you: A hackerspace or a Maker Faire? The hackerspace I know [...]

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Community, Quotations, Self-awareness 28 Sep 2012

Protecting Each Other’s Aloneness

I have been reading and re-reading this passage from Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak. Such richness. Communal processes [can be]… supportive but not invasive. They help us probe questions and possibilities but forbid us from rendering judgment, allowing us to serve as midwives to a birth of consciousness that can only come from within. [...]

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