First, because the supposed traits of “originality” are a sham, except among the insane. You’re riding the yellow line next to “schizophrenic” if you’ve written an unintelligible contextless ramble in a private language. You may already be a sociopath if you consistently disavow the conversations and training and cultural embeddedness of your work’s greater context. You’re probably delusional—even though we’re all out to undermine you—if you keep ignoring the frequent simultaneous appearance of similar works in diverse settings around the world.

And as any decent crazy person should, you will get upset when you see “your” idea popping up all over the world as if other people had stolen it.

Second, because originality is an artificial limitation on a contextual but intrinsically unlimited resource. Creative problem-solving. Could you build me a house for this landscape unlike other people’s? Could you make me think about the monolithic raw fact of the world, at least one facet which concerns me today, in a way nobody else ever has? Could you design me a drug for my disease, or a valve for my plumbing, or a rocket for my war, or a chair which inspires my aesthete crowd in a way others in my salient cultural network will not have experienced? Could you please write a book for me, referring to the touchstones of my cultural identity, but which at the same time takes an eye-opening new stance?

But don’t use any weird materials or techniques or too much other funny stuff, of course. Make it just different enough.

Third, because the illusion that contingent creativity is limited fosters rent-seeking behavior where no reasonable claim exists. Of course I will cite you when I explain to my students about your evocative imagery of raindrops on certain varieties of flower petals, and also your view on the whiskers on kittens. I agree to pay that license fee whenever I drink from a cup with the opening cunningly placed at the top, rather than the bottom. I will happily relinquish this thing my people have known since before the missionaries came, having heard of your recent patent of the active compounds therein. All I have are these cites, whuffie, money, jail time and public apologies: please take whichever you feel best ameliorates my mistake.

Not because yours is substantially better than this other one, but because it has been duly recorded in the Big Book of One Law that you used up the entire fucking idea when you staked your claim.

Fourth, because the rent-seeking infrastructure supports leeches. Not much more to say on this, right? We will pursue your claim. We will root out the interlopers. We will create and maintain a central catalog that includes your work. We will monitor the medium itself so that your privilege is not undermined. We will strive ceaselessly to extend your privilege, indeed until well after you are dead.

For a nominal fraction of the fees you are owed.

These cannot be new stories. And I can’t be bothered to look up who’s been writing about them.

Except everybody since forever.

I’m not ranting because I’m tired of the easily-ridiculed but onerous legal restrictions, the growing tissue of lies centered around “creativity” and “exclusivity” in our legal framework, or any of that old crap. Those are easy. Everybody is mad about them.

Hell, we were mad about all that crap before the rest of you started jumping on the bandwagon.

No, I’m upset because I got mad the other day when an asshole German engineer I know from a conference published a preprint where he posed an “original” theory essentially identical to stuff we talked about years ago—and he didn’t cite anybody I think he should have, implying that he is mapping out some New Frontier of Thought.

And because Stephen Wolfram, the man personally, pisses me off—because his doorstop relegates the life’s work of smart people I know to occasional mentions in the tiny appendix, implying to most people that he invented Science Itself.

I’m upset because when I look at something in some random book or website, or hear something, or somebody mentions it to me, and it’s a thing I once felt pride in doing or even knowing, but now everybody does or knows it —I am driven to feel that they’re doing it wrong.

I know because it was something I invested actual thinking time in back when. And here it is now, much later, being popularized! And if you look, none of the “original” creative people who made it a thing to me are mentioned. It’s all these new mainstream immigrants.

What right have they to it, without giving credit where it’s due? Worse, what right have they to use our words to mislead their naive followers now?

This has happened through the years with “Chaos theory”, “complexity” research, “biocomputing” research, “agile” software development and management, “coworking”, the “social Web”, “social networks”, “Pragmatism”… that’s just a quick off-the-cuff list for me. I did early work with a thing, and nobody much cared, and then much later somebody else did slightly overlapping work, and now it’s all the fucking rage.

And I think Dammit, in my day we were trying to save the world, not just sell widgets like this asshole. Why are they all listening to him? Doesn’t anybody ever read what we said back then when this was really new?

Your mileage may vary, but I will make you eat your hat if you haven’t experienced this same emotion when faced with interlopers and other latecomers announcing their discovery of certain styles and genres of “science fiction”, “painting”, “photography”, “local food”, “book arts”, “user experience”, “functional programming”, “punk”, “conservatism”, “progressivism”, “minimalism”, “sustainability”, “blogging”, “anarchism”, “free verse”, “that crap they call ‘roleplaying’ these days”, “that crap they call ‘news’ and ‘journalism’ these days”, “economic development”, “genetics”, “perennial gardening”, “aeronautics”, “compassion”, “Christian faith”, “Buddhism” and so on.

Some folks might think I’m describing envy; that one has a sense of violation because these newfangled popularizers are getting all the rents one feels are owed to the “real” inventors. But it’s not.

I admit it might be a bit like pride. But a strange sort of pride, where you didn’t realize you had any until a plug was pulled and it all drained out.

No. I think not.

I think it’s a lot more like the feeling you get—as my wife Barbara pointed out a couple of days back (see what I did there?)—when you first realize your child is her own person, and that she’s made her own decision, and that despite all your early work to bring her up right, she’s going to hare off in her own direction.

Because you know what’s over in that direction. You know the hassle and danger, the illusions and pain, the inefficiencies and unsatisfying experiences she’s heading for, because you experienced them all years ago. You tried to keep her from doing that stupid stuff, and tried to get her to see the cool stuff, the life-saving and simple stuff, the right stuff, but she’s thoughtlessly skeptical about anything she actually heard. And worse, someday she will come back and announce as “new” something you knew all along.

I think I’m upset because “originality culture” makes me feel that all the time now. Not content to be a mere hipster claiming to have prior knowledge of every cultural and intellectual phenomenon, I am reduced to some horrific recursive hipster, who feels that sadness whenever I am shown somebody is exploring a known thing with their own perspective.

Because of course it’s “originality culture” that makes me imagine that my experience of that thing, long ago, which I failed to communicate to these newcomers, is in any way salient to what they have going on in their lives. When I did it, it was new, and we expended valuable resources and took personal risks to do all that, and coined all these new terms to describe the amazingly insightful stuff nobody had ever talked about before.

I like to call this the Tozier Effect.

Of course the asshole German can talk about stuff we both have done, for the same reason I can: it’s cool and it will help the world to know more about it. And because I am also an asshole German to somebody.

Of course Wolfram can be the Edison of the Symbolic World, for the same reason Edison could: it’s cool and it will help the world to know more about it. And because I have also played Edison in my time.

And the nouveau “agilists” and “complexologists” and “Web 3.0 gurus” and the latest Business Revolutionaries and TED-talking Inspirational Crowd are welcome to carry on.

There’s enough reason for me to question the very notion of originality just in the fact that we so rarely question the vocabulary we use to discuss it.

I don’t care if you keep using those terms and notions… mostly. Why should I waste time striving to undermine your claims about how “originality” works? Especially by framing my arguments in that same questionable language of universality, exclusivity and rights? That’s a sucker’s bet.

I have evidence that I’m going to turn out being right when I stop thinking and talking about “originality” in your terms. But I also have evidence that you do real good by using those terms. And I have evidence that we’re both wrong and should use some other words and ideas instead.

’Tis but the nature of the world.

That said, I’m just deciding to stop using those words, even around you. Even when you talk about “your” “culture” “needing” to “promote” “innovation”, even when you talk about “economic” “growth” and your cultural “obligation” to be “cited”, or how “artists” will “starve” without your “support”.

We’re not going to have those conversations with those ideas any more, you and me, is all I’m saying.

And I will be a bit happier, and you will be sad and confused.

And that’s an improvement, in my book.

Well, OK. Except for one thing.

When it becomes clear that your vocabulary about ownership and rights and priority and value is clearly hurting people? That’s when we will intervene. Your wounded ego, your claims that imagination is a zero-sum game, your rent-seeking, your leech squad—they will become our targets when you cross that line.

Not you. We’re not going to target you. But when you sharpen your final vocabulary into a harmful tool, or a cage, or a wall—that’s when we are supposed to come along with the breaker bars.

It’s OK. There are other ideas and words in the world. There are always other ones. And you’d be surprised how helpful and good it can be, sometimes, to just start with a new batch.

Well, not new as such. You know what I mean.

I’m looking at the Michigan/Ohio/Indiana region for an interesting place to run it. If you’re interested in scheduling me for a two– or three-day workshop, feel free to contact me online.

You know how to do that.

The Mirror Dojo: Genetic Programming for Agile Teams

Genetic Programming has been actively researched and promoted for more than a quarter century. It’s a broad collection of design practices and modeling techniques for the “automatic” discovery of abstract patterns and structures.

And that means full-fledged patterns and structures: algorithms, predictive models, complete mechanical and optical and electronic designs, and even blue-sky artificial intelligence systems.

Some of the field’s big hits include:

• the “automatic” rediscovery of the basic rules of physics [PDF] from digitized video of experimental systems,
• the complete and “automatic” redesign of an antenna for a space probe,
• systems that let robots “introspect” to find ways of walking, even when seriously damaged,
• “automated” stock trading systems,
• patentable commercial analog circuit and optical designs,
• “automatic” design of backgammon players [PDF], and
• “automatic” discovery of code patches for real, working software [PDF].

Sexy stuff! Nerds like us love it.

Better yet: I can describe all the basic design principles of Genetic Programming in four sentences. It’s so simple to describe that I’m completely confident that I can help you you—a competent software developer working on an agile team—write a working GP system in an hour or so!

And that’s just what we’ll do in this two-day workshop.

But there’s one more thing.

You’ve probably noticed that I always put extra-scary scare-quotes around “automatic” whenever it comes up.

During this dojo we’ll be approaching this material as an agile team. We’ll build at least two full-featured genetic programming systems, and we’ll bump very quickly into those scare-quotes.

And that’s what this workshop is about.

See, I’ve been working in this field for most of 20 years. It turns out that even after all that time, there’s a large and troubling gap between the tutorials and demos of genetic programming, and successful problem-solving with GP. You can measure that gap in terms of time, or computational resources, or expected quality of results.

Sound familiar?

Much of the advanced academic research being done today in Genetic Programming focuses on ways to increase the computational power, to bring more processors and faster code to bear so that “automatic” problem-solving has a better “chance of success” on a complex problem.

Ah, look; more scare quotes.

See, in this workshop we’re not advanced academic researchers in Genetic Programming. We’re much better prepared than they are: we’re an agile team.

In the workshop we’re going to be exploring how to tell our little artificial “team” of “automatic developers” what it is we want, and how they should go about making it for us, and (because GP just works) they’ll be “releasing software” for us. What we’ll be doing is designing the rules by which they solve our problem: especially the ones that spell out how we want them to interact with one another.

Which should explain the name of this dojo. And maybe even why it will take little bit longer and a bit more effort than most others you’ll run into.

Scope: This is a two– or three-day workshop, for three to eight software developers, engineers, coaches, designers, scientists, and other nerds.

The majority of participants should be familiar with common platform-agnostic programming languages (Ruby, Python, Java, Smalltalk). They should be comfortable working in an agile team: we’ll collectively work in one shared programming language, and rely on automated unit and acceptance tests, rapid release schedules, agile planning, and pair programming. There should be enough laptops for every pair to code, and network connectivity enough to use github for version control and coordination.

On the first day of the workshop (6 hours plus lunch) we’ll establish the social infrastructure, and implement a simple but full-scale genetic programming system for symbolic regression. At the end of the day, we’ll choose an advanced project for the next day.

Because we’re all nerds, you and I both know you can’t “stop working” after just five or six hours—and that’s fine. But the work day for the project is six hours plus lunch. So no commits overnight!

On the second day (6 hours plus lunch) , we’ll use genetic programming to address a technical problem where results are obviously practical—and probably publishable.

In three-day workshops, the final day can be used (at the team’s discretion) for either refinement and public release of tangible product from the prior days, or for a third project using different GP design patterns.

Why?: The dojo is just what it says: an exposure for agile software developers to a sexy but poorly-understood technical practice with great economic potential in the coming years. At the same time they’re learning about the tech, they’ll be surfacing aspects of their own work, and the way agile practices mold project management in the “real world”: requirements, goal-settings, information-sharing, metrics, collaboration patterns, infrastructure, delivery schedules, and even the jurisdiction of management vs. developers.

Cost: The most important cost for this exercise is the participants’ interest and attention. If those have been made available, the only financial costs are for the venue, travel, food and board (where needed) for the participants.

When I was a young complexologist, “chaos theory” meant something about deterministic dynamical systems. But gradually the specific field of mathematical research got popular, and stupid management consultants (I say this with love) decided they would use the phrase to mean something about touchy-feely intuitiveness and dinosaurs and more like what they and the Ancient Greeks assumed it meant all along, about disruption and meaninglessness.

When I was a young theoretical biologist, “computational biology” meant something about agent-based models of evolutionary and molecular dynamics, and exploring emergence. But cheap computing resources became available to everybody and their brother, and suddenly the People With Too Many Base Pairs On Hand (I name them with respect) decided they would use the phrase to mean something more about sequence alignment, and not multiscale structural biology.

When I was a slightly older complexologist, “complex systems” went through the same exact bullshitization process as “chaos theory” did before it. Now, to be frank, it’s just mostly powerlaw-bullshit-on-networks (I say that with no little bitterness).

Luckily, “astrobiology” doesn’t really have an easy mapping to business consulting, so that one was kind of safe. But—amusingly enough—I didn’t get to do it for very long before the good old Ivy League Cell & Molecular Biology Department I was working in decided that astrobiology itself was bullshit, or at least not Cell & Molecular Biology the way they did it, and they kicked me out. What the heck; turnabout is fair play.

Then there’s “social network”, which used to be a bunch of circles and arrows, not a street term for “privacy invasion”. There’s “genetic programming”, which became just-plain-symbolic-regression. And “agile software development”, which used to be about bringing value and reducing the risk to developers working on software projects, not speeding up product delivery for their goddamned (and I say that with no love whatsoever) corporate managers. And “anarchism”, which only a few people in the whole damned world still remember means something about being nice to one another because it’s the right thing to do, not throwing rocks at coffee shops. And “conservatism”, which you may be surprised to learn used to mean something a lot more like “being reasonable and taking into account people’s differences”, not being an asshole about rich people getting richer. And “Pragmatism”, which isn’t about compromising your principles for the sake of The Law.

And so on. I’m used to it; I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch. “Skepticism” for example.

And maybe now “coworking.”

Today we learnt of another coworking business closing down. And it looks and feels and sounds like the same old process of terminological failure to me.

You may not have noticed that I’ve been deeply involved with Workantile Exchange in Ann Arbor since before it began. It hasn’t come up much. Mike Kessler is the founder of that business, but it was a matter of coincidence that Barbara and Laura Fisher and I ran into him after we’d spent more than six months looking for an affordable space for our community of informal colleagues, and he had spent months building out a wonderful commercial space in downtown Ann Arbor on spec, hoping for a community to crop up.

The detailed story’s for another day, but the short version is salient: From the get-go, we understood the contingent realities of the coworking business.

• You can’t sell jack shit to unemployed people, so don’t expect to make money by “supporting those transitioning to an independent lifestyle” (aka, “layoff victims”). Leave that to the government, and pure nonprofit people.
• People who think they want a desk and a phone and a mailbox really just want to project an illusion of corporate-style success, and thus they don’t want to cowork, they want a bargain-basement price on an office lease, and a fucking butler (I say this with a whole heap of wry bonhomie). So send those people to a landlord so they can learn the prices and hidden costs of actual real estate, and not merely leech off your coworking space’s lease and limited staff and service budget.
• Diversity of membership reduces the risk to every member, so don’t try to specialize in “makers” or “creatives” or “startups” and ferchrissakes not Realtors.
• 30% of the workforce is an independent. That compares to something like 10% that’s a dopey seat-of-the-pants looking-for-venture-capital startup-style big-E Entrepreneur (I say this with love, and the knowledge that “entrepreneurship” is a cognitive disorder; I myself am a high-functioning entrepreneur), and besides they don’t want to spend one thin dime, so don’t even bother dealing with college kids or the local incubator’s castoffs.
• Most landlords (but apparently not ours, thank goodness), the Useless Chamber of Commerce, the local Economic Development grant-givers, the State Government, the candidates who want to demonstrate their “effectiveness”, the Newspaper Business Columnist, anybody who thinks of themselves as an “angel investor”, and for that matter any person who has ever watched an unironic hour of Bloomberg Television? Those people do not get it. In their world, the only way to make money is to raise prices and offer improved services until demand tapers off. Coworking is not about quid pro quo, it’s not a zero-sum game, it’s not about being a landlord or finding arbitrary tenants or even—this is important—making money. You cannot make a profit by running a coworking space.

That last one’s important. We’re not communists, we’re not anti-capitalists and we’re not running some kind of pep club. It’s just that we’ve thought about it. You cannot make a profit selling community.

So the question is: what the hell is “coworking” then? I mean, I’ve disqualified renting desks to people, and setting up offices for independents, and all that other normal stuff. What is it?

It’s community. Not the kind you join because it “offers good opportunities for networking and professional development”, but the kind you join because it would be neat.

It’s church. Not the kind where you worship, but the kind you go to for fellowship with people from diverse backgrounds, but who are in the same essential and existential position you are: Independent in a world that assumes you have a “job title” and a “boss” and “employer healthcare” or you can “send a purchase order”.

It’s a club. Not the kind you go for help, but—and I’m sorry if this makes me sound like a supercilious asshole—the kind of club you join in order to build a strong barrier between you and the Pinks, the Normals, the hoi polloi. Though in our case, those hoi polloi are often the bosses, the politicos, the nominal movers and shakers of the “working world”.

We’re not them. We’re the 30% of the people who are independent of all that.

That 30% is all over the place. But whoever it is we actually are, we’re also proud. Of who we are, and of what we’re helping to create.

I’m not as full of hot air as normal, here. During the first two years of Workantile Exchange’s existence, Mike Kessler tried selling desks, and selling mailboxes, and subleases, and startup incubation, and nonprofit meetings, and maker spaces, and all the rest of that stuff. You know what broke every one of those business models? Those people don’t want to belong to a community. They want services, and they want discounts.

All this boils down to: sustainable coworking isn’t anything to do with office space at all. Any moron can buy a cubicle and set it up in her garage or her spare bedroom, and sit there and play My Special Office whenever she wants.

It’s not about “work” at all. Real coworking is about the “co-” part, about being together. Pride. Like-mindedness. About avoiding the risks and vicissitudes of sitting at work by yourself, not being exposed to the externalities of real life by yourself, about not reinventing the wheel by yourself every time a computer acts weird or a contract gets confusing or a lawsuit pops up or your dog needs a play date or you have too much work.

And (because this comes up) it’s not about being some kind of consensus-driven co-op, either. We remain independent, or we lose our self-definition completely and fall back to being mere amateurs with “lifestyle businesses”.

Nope. Coworking is a way of eating entropy. Redirecting risk using community dynamics. If you want to think about it in a confrontational way, it’s about co-opting the same social design patterns—colocation, team formation, complementary skillsets, tacit knowledge banking, and collaborative risk balancing—that corporations bring to bear against us.

It saddens me that I never got a chance to visit Carrboro Creative Coworking, and it saddens me more to see them join the ranks of those who have fallen. But it doesn’t surprise me.

We’re weird. We’re probably weird enough that we’re wrong in a lot of ways. It’s deathly tiring to constantly have to explain all this to guests and visitors and people looking for things we’ve decided not to offer, and just have it bounce off their foreheads’ Cognitive Dissonance fields. And as Workantile Exchange transitions from a failing for-profit to a stable what-the-hell-who-cares-about-money low-profit, maybe we’ll fall by the wayside ourselves.

I don’t think so, though.

We have more than 60 members right now who are diverse, powerful, enthusiastic experts in their fields. We have architects, filmmakers, authors, editors, business development people, lawyers, activists, traders, programmers, graphic designers, students, consultants, remote employees, marketers, and even a dilettante or two (like me). We have tequila tastings and book fairs, art gallery openings and WordPress Users meetings. We have the amazing volunteer contributions of Trek Glowacki, the honored and respected Member who’s been working for more than two years as our de facto “community manager”, and of Tom Brandt and David Erik Nelson who (with me) are trying to “manage” us into a new, more reasonable business model. And all the many volunteers among the Contributing membership, who have given time to mop and tidy and run events and introduce people to one another, share lunch and talk and offer advice, fill the air with music and chatter.

And tolerate one another. And see value in one another.

Anybody can be wrong. But see: the more different you all are from one another, the less likely that becomes.

Maybe to succeed in the long term we really do need to specialize, and exclusively rent desks to dudes who wear identical khakis as they work on the Next Google, or market more to women entrepreneurs whose businesses have been singled out by local economic development experts as leading the way into the 20th Century, or give discounts to poor out-of-work corporate layoff victims who need a hand during their transition to this unfamiliar world that has no “work life balance”, which only includes life, with work as a part of that.

Maybe we’re wrong.

Who cares? If this is wrong, it’ll do for now.

Every day it lasts is wonderful.

Workantile Exchange is a coworking club for freelancers and remote employees.

It’s not a cheap office. It’s not just for nerds. And it’s definitely not an “incubator”.

It’s a professional community of peers.

Members of the club can use the facility at 118 S. Main Street in Ann Arbor whenever they want, 24 hours a day. For work or meetings, professional or social interaction, to get away or to get together.

Current Members’ “official” professions include architecture, film production, business development, scientific consulting, writing, history, graphic arts, music, engineering, trading, publishing, programming, activism, journalism, accounting and marketing.

And you’ll find most folks around here know a lot of other useful stuff as well.

The Mission

Workantile Exchange is a social enterprise, and it’s been in existence for about two years. At the moment there are about 60 Members.

Our mission is to support the existing independence of our Members by reducing their social and physical isolation from colleagues. To that end we promote fellowship, collaboration, and training among our Members, and outreach to the broader community. We help our Members collaborate with one another, and not just in their work.

Why Would Anyone Do That?

According to Forbes Magazine, at least 25% of the current US workforce are freelancers. That number is growing.

Our Members pay their monthly dues to cowork here because they have access to one another. Most of us have offices somewhere else. As a rule we’re not looking for work, or swapping business cards to “network”, or trying to “grow”—at least not in the way most other business associations seem to think is crucial.

We don’t even sell stuff to one another. I know! What can we be thinking?

Because we’re traditionally physically and socially isolated, independent workers and remote employees often experience more professional risk than the equivalent corporate employees sitting in well-staffed 9-to-5 office building.

So we work alongside one another. When you’re at Workantile Exchange, it’s not just your cat there in the room, it’s a bunch of real human people. Professionals, each with a different perspective, who might have already dealt with the same problems you’ve got. Who probably have wildly different and very useful skills and experience.

Coworking together lets us bounce ideas off each other, hand off or simplify extra work, and draw on one another’s astounding collective expertise. Unlike those sitting in their basement “home office”, we can interact with one another, whether it’s to ask a quick question or to get together with and form a well-staffed project team.

We all still work on different things. We’re still independents and remote employees. And to be honest we’re typically very busy.

But by working together, we’re all better off.

And of course there’s the Pizza Lunch. And the Bourbon Tasting. And Game Night. And Night at the Races. And the Friendly League.…

The Clubhouse

We maintain about 3200 square feet of open space in downtown Ann Arbor, in a renovated 1860s storefront. There are two small conference rooms available for Members to reserve, and a tiny phone room where you can use your cell phone. Otherwise, the space is broken up into two large shared spaces. All the furniture is mobile, and Members are encouraged to rearrange it to suit their needs. Nobody “gets a desk”.

The large ground floor “Café Level” tends to be the daytime, conversational workspace. The large mezzanine “Training Loft” tends to be the quiet daytime space, but has whiteboards and projectors so it gets used for events in evenings.

We also have a small kitchen with fridge and coffeemaker, and of course a bathroom. There are lockers for Members’ day use, a projector for meetings, and indoor bike racks for smart commuters. Some of our Members are kind enough to share their printers and scanners for office documents. Healthy (and unhealthy) snacks are available for a donation. There’s even a centralized speaker system that lets any Member play their music in the background. Very soon we’ll be adding a small circulating library of books and games: entirely on loan from Members, made available for other Members’ use.

Outreach Events

You’re probably reading this now because you’re attending one of our Outreach Events.

We know that space for public meetings in downtown Ann Arbor is at a premium.

We also think it’s crucial to bring together freelancers, independents and remote employees with the rest of the local community.

The best way we know to do that is by supporting users’ groups, training classes, community fairs and parades, and similar social events.

So we make our space available for selected events in keeping with our mission, and for events sponsored by Workantile Members (as long as they don’t disrupt others’ work). We don’t charge much: 10% of fees collected. All we ask in return is that you allow interested Workantile Members to attend your event, that you’re respectful of the space and the Workantile Members who’ve invited you to share it, and that you leave it at least as clean as you found it.

Contact our event coordinators by email to ask about scheduling an event.

Membership

You don’t have to be a freelancer or a remote employee to join. You just need to be a person.

No, really: Membership is not available to corporations or other institutions. You personally are enrolling as a member of the club, even if somebody else is paying for you.

Day Passes cost $15, and allow you to use the public spaces in the clubhouse. They don’t allow scheduled reservations of the conference rooms.

A Supporting Membership costs $100/month, and gives you access to the clubhouse up to six days per month.

A Full Membership costs $160/month, and gives you 24-hour access, 7 days a week. You’ll be expected to spend a couple of hours a week participating in community events and supporting the mission of Workantile Exchange.

A Nose-to-the-Grindstone Membership costs $250/month, and gives you the same benefits as a Full Membership, with no social obligations.

For the time being there’s an informal membership application process; the contact information is on the website.

For more information

Information on Workantile membership, scheduling an Outreach Event, and Coworking in general is available at http://workantile.com

Developing an awesome Genetic Programming system… from scratch

The Point:

We often run these agile coding exercises as if user stories and acceptance tests drop from the sky. In real projects, they’re typically the biggest source of confusion and pain—even in projects we’re working on by ourselves. The subject matter we’ll explore here, Genetic Programming, is hugely sexy, technically simple, and offers only trivial coding challenges.

You might wonder why so few people use it, then, after 20 years. Why it hasn’t changed the world and made artificial intelligence part of our everyday lives.

The answers to those questions have nothing to do with the computer.

The Structure:

Two or three sessions, each about 2 hours.

We’ll run the sessions in a CodingDojo format, much like the “coding randori” we’ve seen in earlier CraftsmanGuild meetings, where there’s one “driver” and one “navigator” pairing on a laptop connected to a projector, with the entire “audience” helping them along the way as they write code (and do chores).

If it seems practical in a later session, we may split into two teams (still with one customer and one project).

I’ll role-play “the customer representative” for a customer who’s off-site, with the rest of the group acting as “the dev team”.

In addition to the coding computer, we’ll set up a projector up showing a live PivotalTracker instance where we can collect, sort and make progress on stories as an integral part of the development process.

During the first iteration we’ll decide on language and infrastructure, based on who’s there and what they want and know.

As code is written it’ll be committed to the github project (so the audience can fork it and work along), but we’ll have formal review sessions with “the customer” accepting or declining particular solutions after every iteration, looking at the stories we worked on and gathering new ones as they crop up.

Participants:

…should have used some modern testing framework, but they don’t need to be experts (or evangelists) at either TDD or BDD. They should be comfortable, but don’t need to be fluent, in at least one modern programming language like Java, Ruby, Python, &c. They should at least have looked at pivotaltracker.com to familiarize themselves with the feature set and story-sorting idiom.

The language we pick should be the one which most participants are most comfortable using when they do real work. Whatever language and infrastructure we decide on, it shouldn’t be an obstacle to take a simple user story like “Adding two numbers together should return their sum” and actually write the acceptance test, and then run it.

The Project:

The Customer’s overall goal is to build a Genetic Programming system that can accept a set of data, a set of mathematical primitives, and will evolve mathematical equations of the form that fit the data. Here’s an (antique!) Java applet that does something along those lines already.

This sort of GP project typically breaks down into five chunks:

• build a simple but full-featured interpreter for a domain-specific language (DSL) intended for mathematical modeling
• build an evaluator that determines how well an arbitrary DSL script matches target data
• write methods to create random programs, and also mutate and cross over DSL scripts
• build a simple symbolic regression system that fits numerical data with arbitrary mathematical models
• adapt to some minor problems that may arise along the way

These may sound like big, ambitious steps, but in fact they’re all technically simple.

The goal of the dojo is not to learn to type something quickly or get as much done as possible.

It’s designed so we adapt the emerging codebase and our collective understanding of the problem the customer is asking for, in a context where there are no “tricks” (I won’t be lying to you, except maybe by omission), but where there are plenty of traps.

Little-e entrepreneurship is the charming eccentricity that drives business innovation in our culture and economy.

It’s a willingness to accept risks that others would shy away from, in exchange for eventual rewards nobody else can see.

It’s the Earliest Adopter’s enthusiasm for a fad that doesn’t yet exist.

It’s the heady taste of hubris that helps you move step past thinking I could do that, and actually give it a try.

It’s an inordinate willingness to ignore risks, to forge ahead, to plot a course into the unknown. On a promise.

Big-E Entrepreneurship is the cultural fetishization of that risk-seeking behavior, magical thinking and obsession. It’s taught in business schools. It’s the sole focus of some economic development institutions, it gets investors’ hearts racing, it’s the stated core of our government’s hope for the national future.

This cartoon “Entrepreneurship” has become a pervasive economic fetish.

Why is that a problem? Look:

Some young women are naturally beautiful, and also naturally thin. Our culture’s fetishization of Thin Beauty has fostered deadly anorexia, poor self-images among normal women, the sexualization of children, drug abuse, and more.

A real cottage in the country is unusual, and can also be pretty and restful. Our culture’s fetishization of Suburban Life has fostered an industry of chemical lawn treatments, greige developments at the edge of every city where the windows never open, social isolation, mortgage debt, financial crisis, the necessity of driving everywhere, and more.

It’s rewarding and healthy to play sports. Our culture’s fetishization of Professional Sports has built media empires and lobbying companies, offered false promise to disadvantaged youth, encouraged drug abuse by even school-age athletes, glossed over the effects on city centers, and more.

We’ve fetishized commerce and craft into shopping mall sprawl. We’ve fetishized the complex consensus-bulding of politics into talking points and intransigent argument. We’ve fetishized combat and national defense into gun sports.

In the same way these other unusual but natural extremes have given birth to social evils, the notion of big-E Entrepreneurship depends on over-exaggeration and over-generalization of natural but unusual extremes: the little-e entrepreneur’s eccentricities of risk-seeking, and magical thinking and obsession.

We’re told we can be “entrepreneurial” church members, “entrepreneurial” social activists, “entrepreneurial” artists, “entrepreneurial” employees.

Think about that. What does that really mean?

You don’t need Angels or VC to change the world. They need you. They need you to rush ahead. They need lots of you in their portfolios; your rare returns are their sole resource. You are their crop. You are their slot machines.

You don’t need to monetize everything, or promise ten-fold returns. Financial capital is not the only kind. A project can make you rich in social capital, intellectual capital, individual capital.

You don’t need to grow forever, or to burn down to bankruptcy. Maybe what you’ve done so far is enough. Even if you disappoint business culture because you’ve started a “lifestyle business”, at least you still have a life to live.

You don’t need to think of people as tools and resources. People are people. This institution you’ve started must be for the people who comprise it, more than they are expected to work for it. Never lose sight of the fact that it is an it.

You never have just one goal. Your venture is not your world. Even the most obsessive investor will admit that reducing risk is as much a goal of any venture as increasing returns. When you begin to believe some subset of “winning” is the only goal, when your investors drive you to forge ahead at all costs, when your instinct is to cut away the parts of your life that other people think are important just to make it to launch? That’s when you’ve become a danger to yourself, and to society.

Big-E Entrepreneurship is just like Hollywood and the NBA and the Billboard charts and the bridal magazines. You are not going to make next Google or Facebook. Your idea isn’t as original as you imagine, your skills aren’t all you need, your beautiful office in a fashionable ZIP code won’t make your product any better.

And those successful, rich people you find egging you on, “advising” you and “supporting” you and “connecting” you?

They’re just as caught up in the illusion as you are. Pity them. It was their luck that got them through the maze. Not their skill, not their mentors, not their investors, not their “best people”, and certainly not The System as a whole.

The culture reinforces them at every turn. Is it any coincidence they’re surrounded by all the evidence they need to keep believing that their illusion is universal and valid? They’re swimming in success. They see evidence of the System of Accepted Business Practices and Rituals working around them, all the time.

Because they have arranged life so they never see it fail. They’re not allowed to see anything else as success.

Where are the Big-E Entrepreneurs whose ventures didn’t grow? Didn’t hit it big? They were torn down for parts and raw materials, skillsets and capital, and dumped right back into hopper to be fed into the machine.

Who are you? If you define yourself by your project, I don’t think you’ve answered the question.

What do you want? If you only mention your project, you’re a liar.

What are the risks? If you don’t know, I can start your list with this one: “I don’t know the risks”.

What will be enough? If you don’t have any idea, I’ll guarantee that “more” isn’t the only answer.

What will you sacrifice? If you didn’t say “myself”, then take a moment to consider the Big-E Entrepreneurship complex out there, waiting and ready, yearning to drop you into the hopper.

You’re a pile of raw materials.

Portfolio filler for investors.

Promotional material for your city.

Future donating alumni of your University.

The cover of unsold magazines.

Oh yeah, and you did some stuff once. What was that thing, that company you did back when?

That was your vision? Huh. Who knew?

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