At least one person in the dealership besides K’s uncle came to see him as something of a “change-agent” — that is, as someone who was changed by his experience working at the dealership, but also as someone who changed the dealership in some way. Zack, the dealership’s only dedicated…

“Cashier? Cashier?! Where are you!?” K is sitting at a desk in the otherwise empty cubicle just across from the office of the dealership’s Controller (See 1 in Figure 3.1). It is Thursday, August 21, 1997, K’s fifth day on the job. His laptop computer is still in its carrying…

Our construction of the notion of whole person attempts to do justice to the multiple relations through which persons define themselves in commercial practice by effectively combining society’s working relations with the learning curriculum that is demonstrably present in those very relations. …

What sort of evidence can we bring to bear on such a problem? It is precisely at this point that the study of learning asserts not only its theoretical importance, but even its necessity as it may be impossible to recognize the co-variation and symmetry that define the logic of…

The “way in which manual labor is applied to production can range in different societies from the coercion of machine guns, bullets and trucks to the mass ideological conviction of the voluntary industrial army. Our own liberal democratic society is somewhere in between.”¹⁰⁷ The sociologist takes the same basic observation…

The field of participation is the “plane of organization and development” and is necessarily determined by a certain “transcendence” that distinguishes it from “the plane of immanence or consistency”.⁸⁹ From a cognitive ethnographic perspective, the former appears as a series of overlapping communities of practice and corresponding control mechanisms and…

To make your own “Constituent Success Platform on the Internet Computer” cocktail, gather together the four basic ingredients: Open source customer relationship management (CRM) software (e.g., CiviCRM) Robust models of participation (e.g. IAP2’s Public Participation Spectrum) Time-tested leadership-development concepts (e.g., Leadership Management Institute’s Concept) The Internet Computer (Dfinity)

OpenOakland is the local hacker brigade of Code for America, which meets at Oakland City Hall every Tuesday evening. I am not a member, but have joined a couple of meetings in the past. I let the current leadership know that I was interested in pitching my idea at an…

In The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are Fixing our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy, Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley carefully differentiate federal and state levels of government, on the one hand, and local or regional levels, on the other. …