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The Social Innovation Camp June 2009 call for ideas is now open!

Once again, we’re looking for the best ideas that use the web to, in the words of Tim O’Reilly, tackle stuff that matters.

Over one weekend from 19th-21st June 2009, we’re bringing together some of the best of the UK’s software developers and designers with those at the sharp end of social problems at the Saltire Centre, Glasgow.

Their mission will be to turn six back-of-the-envelope ideas that could change the world into social start-ups in under 48 hours – complete with working software.

You’ve got until Friday 22nd May 2009 to send us your idea that uses the web to create social change and you could be joining 100 other participants to try and make it a reality.

Leah Buechley is an Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directs the High-Low Tech research group. The High-Low Tech group explores the integration of high and low technology from cultural, material, and practical perspectives, with the goal of engaging diverse groups of people in developing their own technologies. Leah is a well-known expert in the field of electronic textiles (e-textiles), and her work in this area includes developing a method for creating cloth printed circuit boards (fabric PCBs) and designing the commercially available LilyPad Arduino toolkit.

Dear Members of the Cult of Done,

I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.

While MacRuby is a younger, lesser known implementation, it has the potential to become a game changer – at least for Mac developers. Based on Ruby 1.9, MacRuby’s main aim is to provide programmers with the ability to write Mac OS X applications in Ruby, making Ruby a first class Cocoa programming language. In what may sound like an utopistic effort, MacRuby strives to provide the high level abstractions, power and syntax sugar of Ruby, without the characteristic performance hit of its main implementation.

Over the last week or two, I’ve put together a handful of hacks demonstrating how to do various mashup related things using the Guardian open data on Google spreadsheets, and the open platform content API. So here’s a quick summary – think of it as a single post mashup uncourse…

If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to understand these Internet-derived expectations, and then reinvent its management practices accordingly. Sure, it’s a buyer’s market for talent right now, but that won’t always be the case—and in the future, any company that lacks a vital core of Gen F employees will soon find itself stuck in the mud.

With that in mind, I compiled a list of 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life. These are the post-bureaucratic realities that tomorrow’s employees will use as yardsticks in determining whether your company is “with it” or “past it.” In assembling this short list, I haven’t tried to catalog every salient feature of the Web’s social milieu, only those that are most at odds with the legacy practices found in large companies.