Once a year, there is an art celebration that takes place between midnight and six AM in towns all over France. It’s called Nuit Blanche–the French term for all-nighter. Artists set up installations all over the city, and you never know what you’ll run into.

I met up with some architects from Georgia Tech that were just starting an exchange program here in Paris as well as a handful of guys from Georgia Tech Lorraine. It made for a pretty big group: around 10 people in all. They were all still starry-eyed.

I was expecting to bump into installations splayed onto the street while moving through the part of town where the event was centered. However, it turned out that it was very much more organized that that: you had to wait in queues to get into places with art. Almost every one of them we found took about half an hour. This was sort of disappointing, but not at all surprising: remember that we’re in France.

Les Oeuvres

One exhibit we saw was a ring of speakers in church. Each of the speakers played the part of one singer in a choir. You stood in the middle of the ring. Cathedrals render me cynical. I can’t help but think of the hunger and sweat that went into their construction: a construction at the whims of a priestly ruling class. I found myself thinking of Marcus Aurelius in Meditations:

“To acquire indifference to pretty singing, to dancing, to the martial arts: Analyze the melody into the notes that form it, and as you hear each one, ask yourself whether you’re powerless against that. That should be enough to deter you.

The same with dancing: individual movement and tableaux. And the same with the martial arts.

And with everything—except virtue and what springs from it. Look at the individual parts and move from analysis to indifference.

Apply this to life as a whole.”

Another piece we saw was a laser bouncing off of a mirror. The laser started from the top of a clock tower, slid just past the wall of the open roof of the mosque we were in, and rebounded into the night sky. A voice track was playing in the background. I picked out most of the words, but I couldn’t come up with a cohesive theme. “Il y a trois cent quatre…Il y a trois mille ans…J’étais le boi…J’étais le fer…Je suis mort en Egypte.”

The most fun work of the night was a giant disco ball. That’s it really. We guesstimated that is was forty feet in diameter. Here is Quinn describing what it would be like if such an installation took place in Atlanta, Georgia: (click the link to watch it)

Interview with Quinn at Nuit Blanche

Transcript: “Whar my damn tax dollers goin to a friggin gah darn disco ball-I mean-I could just go out there with my gosh darn truck and turn on my high beams and get the same damn effect.”
(Not to poke too much fun at the South: I really do miss Southern hospitality, fried chicken, and ACC football.)

An ode to Vélib

Vélib: a municipal bike-sharing program. Automated stands are found throughout the city and anyone with the right kind of card can rent one of the bikes.

Vélib: how you get home from anywhere in the city after midnight.

Two of the architects from Georgia Tech (Rex and Quinn) and I live in the same part of town. Neither Rex nor Quinn had had the pleasure of taking Vélib back home after a late night. It turned out to be difficult to find bikes since everyone else in the city had left from where we were. We eventually found a stand with three bikes left. We mounted our steeds and pedaled into the night, only to realize that all three of our bikes were broken. Quinn’s couldn’t get out of first gear. My chain would pop on and off at random. Rex’s brakes were always on. We made it back eventually, orienting ourselves each time we passed one of the glowing maps on the street. At one point Rex almost swerved into some girls passing on a narrow street, they proceeded to make fun of us from riding Vélibs.

Of course, Vélib is one of my favorite parts of life in Paris.

J’ai finit Fahrenheit 451 il y a un mois. Dedans, j’ai trouvé une page qui était étonnant. Chacun a son thème : une façon d’organiser le monde, ses actions. Voilà le mien :

—Écoutez », dit Granger, et il le prit par le bras, écartant les branches de sa main libre pour le laisser passer. « Je n’étais encore qu’un gamin quand mon grand-père est mort. Il était sculpteur. C’était aussi un très brave homme qui avait une masse d’amour à donner au monde. Il a contribué à supprimer les taudis dans notre ville ; il nous fabriquait des jouets, et il a fait un million de choses au cours de son existence ; ses mains étaient toujours occupées. Et quand il est mort, je me suis aperçu que ce n’était pas lui que je pleurais, mais les choses qu’il faisait. J’ai pleuré parce qu’il ne les referait jamais ; jamais plus il ne sculpterait de morceaux de bois, ni ne nous aiderait à élever des tourterelles et des pigeons dans l’arrière-cour, ni nous raconterait des blagues. Il faisait partie de nous, et quand il est mort, tout ça est mort avec lui sans qu’il y ait personne pour le remplacer. C’était un être à part. Un homme important. Je ne me suis jamais remis de sa mort. Souvent je me dis : Quelle merveilleuses sculptures n’ont jamais vu le jour parce qu’il est mort ! De combien de bonnes blagues le monde est privé, et combien de pigeons voyageurs ne connaîtront jamais le contact de ses mains ! Il façonnait le monde. Il le modifiait. Le monde a été refait de dix millions de belles actions la nuit où il est mort. »

This is the story of how I ended up giving a talk about one of my geekiest hobbies to a bunch of Parisian and Silicon Valley software entrepreneurs.

can you find me? hint: front row

I was doing research for the Wiser Tuesday event that I am helping organize (I mentioned it before on this blog) a few weeks ago, and I reached out to an entrepreneur in Paris that has organized a similar event in the past. That event was an Ignite conference—a series of talks given by local geeks about anything that they find to be thought provoking. The gimmick of Ignite conferences is that presentations are exactly 20 slides long and the slides are auto-advanced every 15 seconds. I asked Phil Jeudy on Twitter what had happened to Ignite events in Paris since it looked like there hadn’t been one in a while. He responded,

Next one is September 29th. wanna do a prez?!

Yes!

To top it off, there would be a group of American entrepreneurs there from the Geeks on a Plane trip.

The setting

The talks were scheduled to start at 9:45pm, so I grabbed an apéro at a next door café, while I finished Richard Feynman’s The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. I ended up helping an Australian couple sitting next to me order wine (they couldn’t get the waiter to understand the word “dry”). At 9:30, I stepped into the Hard Rock Café, where the event was being held. I looked around, didn’t see any geeks, and asked a woman standing in front of some roped off stairs,

Je suis ici pour un truc qui s’appelle Ignite
(I’m here for a thing called Ignite)

She gave me a curt nod and ushered me up the stairs.

Wide-eyed

At the top of the stairs was a bar, a projector/chair setup, and a few dozen French folk. The geeks gave themselves away: while some were dressed well (remember that we’re in Paris), there was a good smattering of t-shirts and iPhones. I recognize Phil Jeudy. I shake his hand. I order a beer. I mill about. I pop in a few conversations in English, a few others in French. Phil Jeudy ushers the presenters to get ready.

And it’s real. There are about a hundred people here by now. Rock music is blaring underneath us. Brady Forrest, the global organizer for Ignite talks, takes the mic.

And the fun begins

Brady introduces Ignite to the audience. He launches into a talk about Burning Man. Here, I think is a good time to break from the narrative and point out some of the most interesting talks I heard.

(Note: If you know the names of who I forgot, let me know in the comments. Also, if you want me to link your name to something, let me know.)

Brady Forrest // Burning Man: Burning Man is a yearly, week-long event that loosely revolves around the construction and demolition of a city in the middle of the Nevada desert. It’s about a lot more than that, though: survival, art, geek culture, anti-culture, the list goes on. The most interesting thing to me is that people will demo technologies there that are not possible to demo in existing cities (think of things like ad-hoc cell phone networks).

// HADOPI: This talk was brilliant. HADOPI is a French copyright law that risks imposing seriously misguided restrictions on Internet use. The story around it involves bumbling ministers of technology, huge online backlash, and all kinds of French stereotypes. I don’t think that I’ve ever laughed so hard at a story about legislation.

Benjamin Joffe // Myths of Innovation: The presenter was returning from 10 years in Asia, learning about business innovation. He had some substantial insight into the difference between ideas, inventors, and entrepreneurs. The gist of it: there are way more ideas out there than we think; innovation comes from being able to pull them off. Reminds me of the 99 percent

Mike Butcher // European Startups: Just an all around fun talk from a passionate presenter. I asked him more about his talk later, and he regaled me with tales of wonderfully quirky startups: “Oh German startups are so organized. And the Dutch _never _talk. They’re, like, psychic.”

Dave McClure // StartUps 2.0: The Internet has changed thinking about business models. Dave ran through some his on ways to model business interactions to complement the Internet medium. Basically, in the software sphere, it has become viable to try a lot of ideas on a small scale, allowing investors to micro-fund a lot of ventures, only needing a few of them to make it big.

// Geeks in Africa: This speaker’s talk was drowned out by some mic trouble, but his slides were actually really thought provoking. He took us through some ideas for using technology successfully in Africa. He asked the crowd, what would it take to get technology “Made in Africa” recognized on a global scale? That is, what would it take to turn Africa into a viable contributor to the technology ecosystem, rather than just a consumer.

// Using WoW to find leaders: High level World of Warcraft requires some serious leadership to organize raids and deal with team conflicts. Recruiters might consider using it as a tool to find people suited to leadership. A lot has been written about this already, and it was kind of interesting to see a proponent in person. I was skeptical, though (especially considering that I played WoW for a while a few years ago), so I asked the presenter about it at dinner. He mentioned that he used is especially to connect with remote teammates. That was kind of cool (kind of like playing paintball from 1000 miles away), but it also reminds me of The Office episode about Call of Duty.

// Choice: Vietnamese Restaurants vs. Chinese Restaurants: I wish I remembered the details of this talk. I involved something about egg rolls and the long tail.

My talk (back to the narrative)

I was about the seventh talk up. Most people had had trouble being loud enough with the music in the background and an underpowered mic. I was scared because I’m not that great at being loud. Phil Jeudy hands me the microphone. I take of my jacket, taking one last moment before facing the crowd, then I turn around. A hundred faces look back at me.

Can you all hear me in the back?
No!

HOW ABOUT NOW? and so it started.

I gave a talk about pen spinning—the wonderful geek hobby that I was introduced to on my high school debate team. I started by asking the audience to get a pen, for those that didn’t have one, I threw some from a box that I had brought. I taught two tricks, and introduced the spinning community. I closed it up with some thoughts on the international, cross-cultural connections that pen spinning encourages.

I had a lot fun with the talk. I walked into the audience and gave quick pointers. One guy spun a pen and it flew out of his hand and landed on somebody’s table on the level below us. I knew the timing of my slides really well, so I was able to ad-lib some of them based on the reactions of the audience. At one point I was planning to say,

Spinners from around the world compete against one another in the World Cup of Pen Spinning. This is a picture of its most recent champion.

Instead, I think I said,

And this spinnerpeem, the best fuckin spinner in the world. (people cheered)

I heard there’s about a 10 second clip of my presentation floating around somewhere…I really that I can find it.

One evening a few weeks ago, I caught a metro to Parc de la Villette for an outdoor screening of Fitzcarraldo. The result was surprisingly rich.

The Parc

I was expecting a bunch of tree and benches at Parc de la Villette. Instead, I found a huge kid’s playground, an arts and science center, and dozens of strange red sculptures that I would find out are called “follies”.

Also surprising were the people at Parc de la Villette. I have noticed incredible ethnic diversity in Paris before, and here was a particularly telling scene. I saw cricket games as well as capoeira practices. There was an African tribal band playing to the delight of the crowd.

As the sun went down, a giant inflatable screen took shape. People crammed onto the lawn in front of it to see the screening of the film. An announcer started with an explanation that it was difficult to find copies of Fitzcarraldo, and the version that we were watching was in bad shape—what a privilege. I was in the mood for a slow, artistic film, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Well Confused

A recurring theme in being an exchange student is confusion and feeling out of place. As I walked past red metal edifices and watched traditional South American martial arts being practiced at Parc de la Villette, I couldn’t help but feel those feelings. At first, I was scared of them: shouldn’t being confused be a sign that you are doing something that doesn’t fit you? But, no, that isn’t the case.

You start everything as a beginner. You can try to game that by sticking to things that you know, but then you’re stuck in a tiny subset of reality because you’re too scared to be lost and embarrassed while you find your footing in a new place. So, it seems to me that the key to being competent isn’t to look for opportunities to be an expert, but it is to jump head first into the unfamiliar. That must mean that in order to be interesting and successful, you should spend most of your time feeling exactly the opposite.

“We’re a group that wants to use technology for social change”

That was the description that I read on meetup.com for a newly formed group. I signed up right away.

With my Imagine Cup project winding down after the world finals, I was wondering where to take my interest in using the web for social good. There were certainly a lot of directions in which it could go, from social media campaigns to building platforms for NGOs. To be honest, though, nothing really compelling caught my eye. Even after a week in Cairo seeing the projects from some of the brightest students in world, I still wasn’t convinced that the web was as powerful of a platform for change as I had hoped. Or rather, I have become more aware of just how challenging changing the world really is.

Changing the world is hard (no kidding)

Vaguely, the Internet is about connecting and spreading information quickly. From that perspective, the possibilities for doing good seem endless: helping coordinate search and rescue efforts, getting crop disease information in the hands of 3rd world farmers, or microfinancing entrepreneurs from halfway across the world. Twitter saw some really interesting activity during the recent Iranian elections and subsequent protests. Despite this smattering of success stories, I still feel that there is a lot more power to be tapped from the Internet medium.

I should back these next thoughts with some evidence, but unfortunately I haven’t done the hard research to back them up. They are general observations as I have explored the medium of the Internet as a device for social change in the last year.

Technology isn’t the challenge using it well is. Reading Steven Levy’s Hackers convinced me of this point. In it, the MIT model railroad club, who would later become the worlds first hardcore programmers, were writing code in the 60s to do things that I didn’t even think were possible with today’s hardware. Cleverness goes a long way, and I don’t think sufficient energy has been put in tailoring solutions to the problems that change makers face. Rather, most efforts that I have encountered seem to consist of throwing up a database behind some dataset, hoping that magic will happen simply because data is catalogued. I have also noticed the disappointing trend of mediocre social networks cropping up with little more inspiration than the vague desire to do “good”.

Going hand in hand with that point is this: we need more people that understand the world’s problems. We geeks need to start embracing our social side and start talking to people on the front lines of the battle against malaria, hunger, and AIDs. It’s easy to get caught up in the technology. For instance, I got called out by a Microsoft ADE at Imagine Cup, trying to impress him with the code underlying our application. He told me, “look, the judges aren’t going to care about the complexity of your code. They’re only going to care if it works.” To make real impact, it is going to take a deep marriage between engineering competence and startling insight. Interestingly, though, that might mean that the solutions are neither elegant nor complex, but instead slightly ugly, like IDEO’s MoneyMaker Deep Lift Pump, a micro-irrigation pump that helps boost the profits of 3rd world farmers.

Stepping into the beehive

All that being said, I am very excited the chance to meet groups in Paris that are working for social good and that are interested in incorporating technology to serve their goals. I sat down with WiserTuesday’s organizer–Camilla Burg–a few Fridays ago and discussed the direction for the event over some sushi. She had great insight into the ecosystem of groups in Paris doing charitable work right now. I was able to offer some perspective from the technical perspective on the issues these groups faced. Now, I am an assistant organizer for the event.

The next step is an informal meetup, which will take place in a cool space called La Ruche. The name is French for “beehive,” since it is a space dedicated to providing resources and networking for aspiring social entrepreneurs.

There’s no telling who will show up to Wiser Tuesday–entrepreneurs, programmers, engineers, or artists. I can’t wait to see what problems can be solved with smart application of technology. This, I think, is the start of an answer to the misgivings I voiced earlier. Technology, especially web technology, brings something to the table, but it requires insight and competence to use it successfully. The words “conversation”, “engagement”, and “discussion” don’t really mean much unless they’re placed in the context of a meaningful problem. Perhaps at the global crossroads that is Paris, we’ll find that context.