Back (and looking forwards)

Gosh, is it 2009 already? As you might have noticed, this blog went a bit Trappist for the last few months. I've been busy with School of Everything, as well as editing magazines and generally dealing with life stuff. But I'm back - and looking forward to a year which I suspect will be less about changing the world, more about keeping up with the speed at which the world is changing...

If so, yesterday was a good start. I spent a fascinating evening hanging out with Josef Davies-Coates, a one-man serendipity machine and digital Johnny Appleseed (planting world-changing videos and PDFs from his portable hard drive), and Vinay Gupta, the inventor of the Hexayurt, who advises the Pentagon and anarchist squatters alike on how to build autonomous, open source infrastructures. (Last night was inspiring on plenty of levels - not least, it inspired me to make more use of my Twitter, since that was how our meet-up came about.)

Vinay's blogged a bit more about our conversation. If you're in London and free on Wednesday afternoon, I highly recommend coming down to the workshops he's running at the Temporary School of Thought, a week-long Free School event at the most palatial squat I've ever visited. (Think gilded mirrors, hand-painted Chinese wallpaper and a Sound of Music staircase, then add dry rot and a gang of enthusiastic artists and activists.) I'll be there on Wednesday - and also on Saturday afternoon, when I'm giving a talk about Ivan Illich and 'Deschooling Society'. (There's a full timetable here.)

Plenty of other exciting things coming up - not least, the publication of Collaborative Cultures: COMMONSense, which I gather should be out later this month. (Oh, and if you read Spanish, there's an interview with me in the New Media section of this Mexican magazine.)