Technology Archives

Buster Keaton and Kathryn McGuire in The Navigator

A few months ago, my ArtsPool colleague Sarah Maxfield and I were invited to give a presentation about ArtsPool at the All-Ireland Performing Arts Conference, after which we also gave a brief demo of a free online tool we were building to help New York arts organizations cut through the mental clutter created by the various compliance tasks required of nonprofits. We confidently zipped through the demo, but when we clicked the submit button and the computer dutifully produced a to-do list of 40+ compliance tasks, the room erupted in laughter. A month later we gave a nearly identical presentation to the A.R.T./New York Board of Directors, and the same thing happened. In fact, the single biggest laugh line of this very unfunnily-named Compliance Toolkit is the sheer number of tasks it spits out.

After a year working on the ArtsPool project and several months focused on building this tool, Sarah, Guy, David, and I can assure you that there is nothing fun or funny about compliance. There is also nothing easy about getting a laugh, so when a computer makes a room of 200 people laugh, the first thing the former clown in me wants to know — even before “why are you programming a computer?” or “why are you thinking about nonprofit compliance?” — is why is that so funny? Read More…

A few years ago I was at the home of an artist friend who also works as a high-level software developer for a small but well-regarded software company. As I was leaving, I noticed that the wall behind his computer was covered with a well-organized grid of multicolored sticky notes, each scrawled with a cryptic instruction. I asked him what it was and he said “That’s my ‘kanban.’” Kanban, I learned, was a simple productivity tool that he and his developer buddies used to get things done: to-dos on the left column, work-in-progress in the middle column, completed work in the right column, color coding to separate categories of tasks. I chalked it up as alpha-geek life hacking and filed it under Curiosities.

In the spring of 2013 I encountered a much larger kanban on a whiteboard in the basement offices of New York Public Library Digital Labs, where another artist-cum-technologist friend works. As he described his team’s development process, he referenced a number of odd-sounding words and concepts like “scrum,” “sprints,” “stand-ups,” and (my favorite) “planning poker.” All of these, he explained, were tools that made up a larger concept known as agile software development, or agile for short. Creating software is a complex undertaking, and the agile methodology allowed his team to break their work into manageable pieces, work iteratively, empower team members, and incorporate feedback on the fly. It sounded a lot like how devised theater gets made, and I wondered whether this alien technology (management methods are really a form of social technology) could be used in worlds outside of software development. Read More…