From the live afroculturesphere !

After observing a lot how things work around me, these last years (with projects where I was involved as well as others), I am not really satisfied with what I see.

Here are some of my feelings:

• I spend a lot of my time listening to and interacting with people/projects without a pragmatic approach to getting things done. Fortunately, I also have some examples of great stuff having been accomplished with pragmatism in mind.
• My agenda has many items, and it is difficult to complete an item, in a smart way, so I can reuse or leverage that completed item for the others.
• We don’t reuse enough what already exists. This is important ! I think, by reusing, you can learn from others, and progress more quickly.

I want to do something about those concerns. My idea is reusing the best tools and techniques available to do something useful for me and others. (Being productive also means that !)

Being in the computing world, I have re-learned some interesting ways of thinking about problems, and solutions that work. The main idea, related to the so-called “Unix philosophy“, is in using small tools that allow you to get more productive, since you use the right tool for a given problem, instead of one big tool for many different problems.

Now let’s move on and start applying these ideas… “Act instead of talking too much, and then show something”!

So I am putting a challenge for me and other people interested:

• Building something useful, if possible collaboratively (ideas could be a website, a web service, a piece of sofware, a video, etc…)
• Doing that in 30 days.

Why 30 days ? Because I think it gives you the time to think about your project, build a team with the people you could collaborate with - for more impact, and organize yourself to meet the deadline. It also forces you to keep with that pattern of “doing small things that can have big impact”.

At the end of the day, it is a learning practice. It’s about learning how to move quicker in our projects and personal lives !

If you are interested, contact me so we can team together, or take this challenge with your own team, see how it goes and share your experiences.

More importantly, let’s start that kind of conversation !