For instance: yesterday, some crazy dude emailed me from out of the blue wanting me to blog about a Capitol Hill open house event for urbnlivn, the real estate blog I write for. I had no context for who this person was. Today, I install Rapportive, and voila:

You can even make little private notes to yourself about where you met these crazy people and why they know who you are! Genius!

(Many thanks to Brian for waking me up last night in time to outclick my formidable uni-named nemeses.)

So I’ve booked my flight to Washington. I’ve tried repeatedly to make appointments, but his secretary doesn’t realize who I am, so that hasn’t panned out. However, I hear he frequents modern dance performances, so I’ll have to attend those regularly. Posh restaurants might be a good idea too.

I’ll be telecommuting to my day-job, and never fear, I’ll be back to Seattle in the fall. My partner Brian got some dead-end fellowship to work for a scrappy little nonprofit called Public Knowledge, so he’ll be tagging along. And I figured I’d better bring the geekling for cover when I’m attending children’s events on the lookout for Malia and Sasha.

So ping me if you’re in or around DC. I won’t be spending the whole time harassing my backwards elected officials. I do like some of them – like that dreamy Jim McDermott and his fantastic single-payer health care plan. I should bake him some cookies. I will be hopping around the east coast some while I’m out there, and you should be able to find me at local tech or storytelling events (BarCamp, PechaKucha, Ignite, etc.)

Bon Voyage!

In short:

Twitter at http://twitter.com/sarahdavies

Blog at http://sarahdavies.cc

Liveblog at http://nten.org/ntc-sarahdavies (doesn’t go live until Sunday)

I’m MCing the ignite talks in the Grand Ballroom on Monday and Tuesday which will be off the hook. I’ll be liveblogging about the ignite practice sessions tomorrow, so be sure to tune in!

This week we toured a small independent school on first hill in Seattle called Giddens School.

Giddens School was recommended to me by my colleague Leah Lee, who used to work there. She had endless praise for all the faculty and staff there, so I went in with extremely high expectations.

We first met in the library, which is a cozy little room on the top floor. It’s like a maze with creaky floors and book lined alcoves ideal for children looking to lose themselves in the wonders of reading. Our guide asked us what other tours we had been on. We told a more diplomatic version of our Waldorf experience. She seemed casual and sincere, which was a pretty big departure from the nervous and approval-seeking guides at other schools.

The guide explained that everything at Giddens revolves around their mission of social justice. This immediately impressed me. I do technology work for nonprofits because I believe that I can change the world for the better, and it’s very important for me to be able to instill that feeling in the geekling.

We went on a classroom tour, and they actually encouraged us to talk to the kids (who were all very excited to show us their work, and passionate in their love for school). Traditional academics appear to be strong there, though not spectacular. The kids get Spanish for half an hour twice a week. It’s not an immersion program, so I would guess that they come out of 5th grade exposed heavily to Spanish, but far from fluent. The music program is run by a local musician who writes social-justice oriented songs for the kids and runs an after-school choir. Each classroom has three desktop computers set aside for the kids to work on spelling, word processing, and educational games.

The kids at Giddens have a “secret garden” where they grow food. They then put the food into little red wagons and haul it over to the food bank across the street. They also plan meals for hundreds of people at the senior center down the block as one of their math projects. One of the teachers told us about how the fourth grade class implemented a postal system for the school where they sell stamps and deliver letters and packages for people. They then employed a democratic process to decide what to do with the money earned by the postal system, and ended up donating it to a local park to help them make their play structures more diverse so that kids of all ages and sizes could play there. The school has a student council which influences the decisions of the administration. Each class has representatives elected to the council.

I was very impressed by the amount of exposure that kids get to public service, democracy, and activism. After the tour, we spoke with the principal. He was very passionate about child development, and we were able to have a great conversation with him over when it’s developmentally appropriate to expose kids to things like hunger and poverty, and how to expose them in a way that inspires optimism and activism rather than cynicism and inaction.

The level of conversation that I was able to engage in with the students, teachers, and administration was orders of magnitude above the other schools we have talked to. They were open, honest, sincere, and genuinely dedicated to inspiring children to be active adult citizens.

We will definitely be applying to Giddens, and I suspect that we will become active and passionate members of the Giddens community come next year (if we can afford to!).

I presented this talk at the “Best of Ignite” session at Gnomedex 8.0. I’ve also posted the slides, transcript, and feedback.

Here’s the ogg download of the video for all my freedom-loving readers!

This presentation is dedicated to the Public Domain. It may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.

So, last week I donated $8.34 some guy running for state congress in Kansas. I’ve never been to Kansas. I don’t much care about what happens in Kansas, but this guy, Sean Tevis made a webcomic that got carried on a blog that I read. You might have heard of it. It’s called BoingBoing.

When I read the comic, I knew that it could only have been made by a geek; it was clear that Sean Tevis and I shared common sacred knowledge as citizens of cyberspace. I knew he must be part of my tribe, and if he shares the values of my tribe, then by god, that man is qualified to fix Kansas.

Sean Tevis raised nearly $100,000 from more than 5,000 people (only about 6,000 people voted in his district last year). And this made me think that we as geeks need to own our buying power, we need to own our political and technological power, and we need to take over the world.

We must employ Tevisian economics throughout the square states and the bible belt, infiltrating decision-making bodies nationwide with our gold-farming, youtube making kin. The economic power of the tech-savvy coasts will woo the votes of the advertising-addicted drones in the middle states.

It is common geek knowledge that lotteries are merely a tax on those who can’t do math. So once we have a geek majority firmly in place, we must repeal all gambling laws and drain the wallets of all statistics challenged Americans, of whom I have been informed there are a large number.

This will provide a huge budget surplus for our new geektatorship, our glorious geekocracy. With these enormous piles of cash, we will wage a global battle, an epic game of risk, pitting luddite against linux programmer, corn farmer against gold farmer. Human casualties are a very serious matter,

so the first step in the plan is to pick select non-geeky cities across the globe and send in an army of remote controlled lego robots. Each robot will have a spy cam and gps for remote navigation, as well as multiple processor-motor nodes throughout their body, so that even if they are dismantled, the individual parts can still be controlled autonomously.

Toward the end of this phase, we are basically expecting a swarm of various robot parts, which even if unarmed, will be able to climb to tall heights and then land on unsuspecting and now unconscious passers-by. We are confident that this will cause all people incapable of reprogramming the robots to flee for their lives.

With the people gone, we will need to clear a large flat area. This can be accomplished by printing out thousands of copies of the DMCA and using them as kindling to burn down the city. This has the added benefit of obscuring our location in smoke. Infrared googles will be provided.

Once we have cleared a secure a base, we’ll bring in Jimmy Wales to build wiki-barracks that can be quickly put up and taken down. Any buildings not considered “notable” or suspected of being built based on original research will have to be demolished.

Communications between bases must be dual key encrypted. Public keys will be projected onto the copious clouds of smoke via big green lasers. Disclosure of private keys will be punishable by a 24-hour suspension from both Twitter and GMail, certainly not something to be attempted by the faint of heart.

We will need Adrian from the RepRap project to create self replicating wifi routers which will spread themselves over the earth, providing infinite high bandwidth internet. We’ll have to lock down the network of course, SSID:fabulousbitches password:pwning your town.

Dan Kaminsky will be a double agent, pretending to secure enemy networks while in actuality causing all of their DNS information to point to a fail whale.Then it’s time for the attack! Ariana Huffington will swing into the enemy camp from the north on a cat5 cable and blog to death as many enemy combatants as possible,

but we’ll need some diversions so they don’t see her coming. To the east will be a text-message coordinated flashmob of cosplayers, to the south will be Randall Monroe publicly performing acts from his mistranslated Kama Sutra, and to the west will be Sarah Lacy in hot pants.

Now if this mission should fail because someone is too busy flirting with Mark Zuckerberg, Ted Stevens will be on hand to lead us through the underground tubes. At the end of the tubes will be Ron Paul’s blimp. It should have sufficient fuel on board, but in an emergency, we can fill it with Michael Arrington’s ego and escape unharmed.

There are always casualties associated with battle, and death from over-blogging is tragic. To ease the trauma, we will have chaplains available from the church of Richard Stallman. Burial expenses will be covered, or the family may opt to have a sculpture created from the ashes in the shape of Wil Wheaton’s head.

Compensation for bereaved loved ones will consist of free passes to Foo Camp and a linkback from Slashdot. You may not voluntarily sacrifice family members. You may however, sacrifice yourself for the pagerank of others.

Once we have captured the enemy, we will place them in a humane Matrix-like environment, where they will be under the impression that they have a larger SUV than all their neighbors. And THEN the geeks will inherit the earth.

Thank you very much. I’m Sarah Davies. You can read more of my work at sarahdavies.cc and freedomforip.org. I also have a panel proposal up at SxSW.

Feedback from the backchat:

<Elk> Sarah Davis?
<aPpLe_CiDeR> wow, one breath
<tsparks> I worked with her
<Elk> Woo! Public domain!
<Bouddha> Yay !!!
<Zeph> Yay open source
<MeLoveMe> fast…
<ustreamer-66034> you can’t say “happy” on this?
<Hammy> AWESOME
<Dmitri> someone had some coffee
<Fort> haha
<Kyle_vdk> hahaha
<Hammy> shes fast
<SuperPC> Yay
<McAppleMan> wow talks really fast
<MeLoveMe> i only understood a few words,lol
* Elk likes Ms. Davis already.
<eggy> yeah, lol
<Elk> “Geeks FTW!” lol
<Kyle_vdk> haha!
<MeLoveMe> yay for drawings
<SuperPC> lol
<Hammy> thats a drawing of chris i think
<Bouddha> lolll
<Bouddha> hahahah
<Kyle_vdk> hahahah
<Kyle_vdk> hahah!
* Elk doesn’t see anything on Arizona..
<Dmitri> sadly, I can’t even draw that well free hand
<Kyle_vdk> this is good.
<Hammy> d’oh!
<Kyle_vdk> hah!
<Bouddha> east coast and west coast must conquer Texas !!! XD
<Fort> woohoo
<SuperPC> D’OH
<Fort> She’s got my vote.
<Hammy> o.O
<Dmitri> humans..pfft
<Elk> This is being recorded, correct?
<Kyle_vdk> haha! she should go for president.
<SuperPC> She’s good
<Fort> Awesome, Lego robots!
<Hammy> nenotech
<McAppleMan> lol
<ustreamer-66034> (”’\(o;.;@)/”’)
<Bouddha> *Xkcd*
<moyoy> The uprising! Finally!
<Kyle_vdk> It is recorded.
<Fort> Go, Mighty Voltron!
<Hammy> haha
<Zeph> Kat, please upload this video first when you get home >.>
<Bouddha> this is so cool
<ustreamer-77144> what is this ?
<Bouddha> this is awsome
<Hammy> I want this to happen!
<Dmitri> this is Gnomedex
<moyoy> Oh, no!
<Kyle_vdk> Hahahah!
<Bouddha> yes
<MeLoveMe> Aplha squad form up and waypoint charley
<ustreamer-77144> Is this live ?
<Elk> lol, internet slang
<iConnor3G> she is really funny lol
<Bouddha> lets start a group on facebook
<Elk> ustreamer, yes
<Hammy> ROFL
<Bouddha> XD
<ustreamer-59963> yes ustreamer
<moyoy> I wouldn’t live
<Fort> Oh, that’s harsh!
<Kyle_vdk> hahha~
<Fort> 24 hours from GMail!
<Dmitri> I’m down for that
<iConnor3G> omg 24 hour suspension
<Elk> “Infinite High-Bandwidth Internet”?
<Bouddha> hehe
<ustreamer-59963> <censored>, why am i not logged in?
<Elle> When the chat is moderated only trusted (voiced) users may chat. Please see this link to learn how to become a voiced user: http://www.wyldryde.org/a/001217.php
<CCMike> ustreamer-59963 please stop that
<Hammy> people would kill themselves if they cant twitter for 24hrs
<iConnor3G> password = alpine
<Hammy> lol
<iConnor3G> lol
<SkyForce6> low volume…
<moyoy> rofl
<Elk> Woo! Cosplayers
<Hammy> YAAY
<Bouddha> i’m still not getting what Twitter is
<Hammy> hahahahaha
<Dmitri> I love this woman’s spunk
<ACE> What?!?!?
<Bouddha> hahaha
<Elk> Dang!
<Hammy> ouch!
<drisley> she’s awesome
<Elk> I flippin’ love Sarah
<Dmitri> yes she is
<Kyle_vdk> shes awesome!!!
<MeLoveMe> lol
<Hammy> yuppers
<Fort> <giggle>
<MeLoveMe> i like her idea
<JimBo>
<Bouddha> ghfa
<JimBo> kool
<MeLoveMe> lol
<Hammy> i wouldnt XD
<Fort> What about other people’s family members?
<Hammy> woot
<Bouddha> Yay !!
<Dmitri> amen sista!
<Bouddha> nice
<moyoy> yea!
<Elk> Sarah Davis for President!
* Hammy claps and cheers
<Kyle_vdk> Yes!
<Fort> Vote early, vote often!
* Kyle_vdk claps
<Elk> [Emphesis on 'Often']
<urmom> hi
<iConnor3G> lol
<urmom> hehe

“Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility”

- Attention & Ambiguity: The Non-Paradox of Creative Work | 43 Folders

I will be giving a playful geeky talk called “The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth”. It will be a lightning talk, which means I will have five minutes on stage and my slides will autoforward every 15 seconds. It will involve a lot of me talking very quickly and trying not to laugh.

Here’s a video of my first Ignite Seattle talk in February 2007:

I will be posting my slides and a transcript of the presentation directly afterward.