CURATING

COLLABORATIVE

COLLISIONS

CONSCIOUSLY

Paul Pajo @pageman

http://developer.smart.com.phappspartner@smart.com.ph

CURATE

• To apply selectivity and taste to, as a collection of fashion items or web pages

• to act as curator of <curate a museum> <an exhibitcurated by the museum's director>

WHAT IF?

• WE CAN CURATE SERENDIPITY?

• WE CAN CURATE COLLABORATIVE COLLISIONS?

SERENDIPITY

• The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

• n. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.

• n. An instance of making such a discovery.

ACCIDENTS?

• Excellent work is an accident. Practice makes you more accident prone to excellence.

– Jim Paderes, APO Hiking Society, Elements Camp 2014

ACCIDENTS?

“There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”

-Steve Jobs

PRACTICE+ACCIDENT=?

“Research has shown that most innovation actually happens from something outside your industry being applied to your own. And those are the results of random conversations at bars or coffee shops or just when you have collisions with other people,”

- Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO

citing a book called “Triumph of The City”

PLACE vs. CITIES

“Place is supplanting the industrial corporation as the key economic and social organizing unit of capitalism. Density, the clustering of creative people – in cities, regions, and neighborhoods –provides a key spur to innovation and competitiveness.” - Richard Florida

PLACE vs. CITIES

“Despite all the predictions that technology—from the telephone and the automobile to the computer and the Internet—would lead to the death of cities, the creative economy is taking shape around them. Urban density, the clustering of people and firms, is a basic engine of economic life. Place is the factor that organically brings together the economic opportunity and talent, the jobs and the people required for creativity, innovation, and growth.”

- Richard Florida

SPONTANEOUS MEETINGS?

“Florida calls this place, but it’s really more about how a location can support and encourage social density, a critical mass of interactions and connections between people to create a cocktail of creativity, intelligence and courage. From the studios of Florence, to the coffee houses of Paris and the skunkworks at Google [x], vibrant environments in which people from wide and varied backgrounds have spontaneous meetings and explore interesting problems have been the engines of economic growth, innovative ideas and human wonder from the dawn of humanity. “

- Boundlss.com on Richard Florida

ONE ENTRANCE ONLY

“(Tony Hsieh’s) already trying to cultivate serendipity at the Zappos headquarters. The office has only one entrance, so employees from all departments run into each other. And Hsieh has reduced the square footage per employee to around 120, less than average.”

- Tech.co on Tony Hsieh

ZAPPOS SERENDIPITY

“At Zappos’s interim office downtown, evidence of planned serendipity is everywhere. Employees have to walk several blocks – ample time for conversation – to get from the parking garage to the office, and everyone clocks in on the sixth floor. Big couches line the windows, perfect for impromptu meetings. Wires with outlets hang from the ceilings, rather than being rooted to the floor, so desks can be moved around at will. And the food options are different on different floors: seventh-floor dwellers have to come down to the sixth floor for salad, and sixth-floor dwellers have to head upstairs to store their brown-bag.” – Kira Newmannches in a communal fridge.

SERENDIPITY EQUATION

“Research has shown that when someone sits twice as far away from you in an office environment, you don’t see them half as often. You see them … a quarter as often”

- Tony Hsieh

RESEARCH

• Festinger, Schachter, and Back found that space, or more specifically the density of social interaction, facilitated by a particular environment, was the key to friendship formation: “friendships are likely to develop on the basis of brief and passive contacts made going to and from home or walking about the neighborhood.” – Boundlss.com

RESEARCH

• They found that it wasn’t so much that people with similar attitudes become friends, but rather that people who pass each other each day tended to become friends and later adopt similar attitudes (their findings have since been replicated with fancier tech by more recent MIT dons – see Alex Pentland’s new book Social Physics). – Boundlss.com

PROMOTED ENCOUNTERS &

UNPLANNED COLLABORATIONS

“If a building doesn’t encourage [collaboration], you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity. So we designed the building to make people get out of their offices and mingle in the central atrium with people they might not otherwise see.” - Steve Jobs

PROMOTED ENCOUNTERS &

UNPLANNED COLLABORATIONS

“Casual collisions are what we try and create in the work environment. You can’t schedule innovation, you can’t schedule idea generation and so when we think about our facilities around the world we’re really looking for little opportunities for engineers or for creative people to come together.” – David Radcliffe, Google

(NOT A GAME) BUT PRACTICE

“If I can't practice, I can't practice man. If I'm hurt, I'm hurt. I mean … simple as that. It ain't about that... I mean it's... It's not about that... At all. You know what I'm saying I mean... But it's...it's easy … to, to talk about... It's easy to sum it up when you're just talking about practice. We're sitting in here, and I'm supposed to be the franchise player, and we in here talking about practice. I mean, listen, we're talking about practice, not a game, not a game, not a game, we talking about practice. Not a game. Not, not … Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it's my last. Not the game, but we're talking about practice, man. I mean, how silly is that? … And we talking about practice. I know I supposed to be there. I know I'm supposed to lead by example... I know that... And i'm not.. I'm not shoving it aside, you know, like it don't mean anything. I know it's important, I do. I honestly do... But we're talking about practice man. What are we talking about? Practice? We're talking aboutpractice, man. [laughter from the media crowd] We're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. We ain't talking about the game. [more laughter] We're talking about practice, man. When you come to the arena, and you see me play, you see me play don't you? You've seen me give everything I've got, right? But we're talking aboutpractice right now. We talking about pr... [Interrupted]” – Allen Iverson

SOCIAL PHYSICS

“The largest factor in predicting group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn taking; groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn taking.” - Alex Pentland

SOCIAL PHYSICS

“Unexpectedly, we found that the factors most people usually think of as driving group performance—i.e., cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction—were not statistically significant. The largest factor in predicting group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn taking; groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn taking. The second most important factor was the social intelligence of a group’s members, as measured by their ability to read each other’s social signals. Women tend to do better at reading social signals, so groups with more women tended to do better ”- Alex Pentland

FROM WALKS to CARS to

WALKS/BIKES

• CITIES WERE ORIGINALLY BUILT FOR WALKING

• WALKING CITIES

• THEN AUTOMOBILES HAPPENED

• “SPRAWL” / BAD “WALKING SCORE”

• CARMAGGEDON / PAYDAY FRIDAY

• BACK TO WALKING / BIKING

• COMMUNITY TABLES

The inaugural event last year brought together key people from around the world -investors met founders, newly-formed friendships blossomed into new startups and the feedback we got - where attendees rated the event a whopping 9.5/10 -clearly sent a message that Geeks On A Beach was a resounding success!

The inaugural event last year brought together key people from around the world -investors met founders, newly-formed friendships blossomed into new startups and the feedback we got - where attendees rated the event a whopping 9.5/10 -clearly sent a message that Geeks On A Beach was a resounding success!

WHERE ARE YOU ON WEEKENDS?

• STARTUP WEEKEND• LEAN STARTUP MACHINE• STARTUP GRIND• HACKER NEST• COMMUNE AND CULTIVATE• CO.LAB GELLYS• TEDx MANILA • ANGELHACK HACKATHON• ASPACEMANILA EVENTS

LAST YEAR I WAS …

• IN or INVOLVED IN 47 DEVELOPER EVENTS

• 5 HACKATHONS

• TECHNOLOGY IS THE GOOD NEWS

• BUT … THE COMMUNITY AROUND THE TECHNOLOGY IS THE BETTER NEWS

• BE A TECHNOLOGY EVANGELIST TODAY and HELP US BUILD THE PHILIPPINE TECHNOLOGY ECOSYSTEM

SOCIAL PHYSICS

“It is not simply the brightest who have the best ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting ideas from others. It is not only the most determined who drive change; it is those who most fully engage with like-minded people. And it is not wealth or prestige that best motivates people; it is respect and help from peers ”- Alex Pentland

THANK YOU!

• Facebook.com/groups/SMARTDEVNET

• Facebook.com/SMARTDEVNET

• Twitter.com/SMARTDEVNET

• http://developer.smart.com.ph

• @pageman

• appspartner@smart.com.ph

• Or say hello to me! Practice Serendipity!