Tech island2014

CURATING
COLLABORATIVE
COLLISIONS
CONSCIOUSLY
Paul Pajo @pageman
http://developer.smart.com.ph
appspartner@smart.com.ph

CURATE
• To apply selectivity and taste to, as a collection
of fashion items or web pages
• to act as curator of <curate a museum> <an
exhibitcurated by the museum's director>

WHAT IF?
• WE CAN CURATE SERENDIPITY?
• WE CAN CURATE COLLABORATIVE
COLLISIONS?

SERENDIPITY
• The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by
accident.
• n. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
• n. An instance of making such a discovery.

ACCIDENTS?
• Excellent work is an accident. Practice makes
you more accident prone to excellence.
– Jim Paderes, APO Hiking Society,
Elements Camp 2014

ACCIDENTS?
“There’s a temptation in our networked age to
think that ideas can be developed by email and
iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from
spontaneous meetings, from random
discussions. You run into someone, you ask what
they’re doing, you say ‘wow,’ and soon you’re
cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
-Steve Jobs

PRACTICE+ACCIDENT=?
“Research has shown that most innovation
actually happens from something outside your
industry being applied to your own. And those
are the results of random conversations at bars
or coffee shops or just when you have collisions
with other people,”
- Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO
citing a book called “Triumph
of The City”

PLACE vs. CITIES
“Place is supplanting the industrial corporation
as the key economic and social organizing unit
of capitalism. Density, the clustering of creative
people – in cities, regions, and neighborhoods –
provides a key spur to innovation and
competitiveness.” - Richard Florida

PLACE vs. CITIES
“Despite all the predictions that technology—from
the telephone and the automobile to the computer
and the Internet—would lead to the death of cities,
the creative economy is taking shape around them.
Urban density, the clustering of people and firms, is
a basic engine of economic life. Place is the factor
that organically brings together the economic
opportunity and talent, the jobs and the people
required for creativity, innovation, and growth.”
- Richard Florida

SPONTANEOUS MEETINGS?
“Florida calls this place, but it’s really more about how a
location can support and encourage social density, a
critical mass of interactions and connections between
people to create a cocktail of creativity, intelligence and
courage. From the studios of Florence, to the coffee
houses of Paris and the skunkworks at Google [x], vibrant
environments in which people from wide and varied
backgrounds have spontaneous meetings and explore
interesting problems have been the engines of economic
growth, innovative ideas and human wonder from the
dawn of humanity. “
- Boundlss.com on Richard Florida

ONE ENTRANCE ONLY
“(Tony Hsieh’s) already trying to cultivate
serendipity at the Zappos headquarters. The
office has only one entrance, so employees from
all departments run into each other. And Hsieh
has reduced the square footage per employee to
around 120, less than average.”
- Tech.co on Tony Hsieh

ZAPPOS SERENDIPITY
“At Zappos’s interim office downtown, evidence of
planned serendipity is everywhere. Employees have to
walk several blocks – ample time for conversation – to get
from the parking garage to the office, and everyone
clocks in on the sixth floor. Big couches line the windows,
perfect for impromptu meetings. Wires with outlets hang
from the ceilings, rather than being rooted to the floor, so
desks can be moved around at will. And the food options
are different on different floors: seventh-floor dwellers
have to come down to the sixth floor for salad, and sixth-
floor dwellers have to head upstairs to store their brown-
bag.” – Kira Newmannches in a communal fridge.

SERENDIPITY EQUATION
“Research has shown that when someone sits
twice as far away from you in an office
environment, you don’t see them half as often.
You see them … a quarter as often”
- Tony Hsieh

RESEARCH
• Festinger, Schachter, and Back found that
space, or more specifically the density of
social interaction, facilitated by a particular
environment, was the key to friendship
formation: “friendships are likely to develop on
the basis of brief and passive contacts made
going to and from home or walking about the
neighborhood.” – Boundlss.com

RESEARCH
• They found that it wasn’t so much that people
with similar attitudes become friends, but
rather that people who pass each other each
day tended to become friends and later adopt
similar attitudes (their findings have since
been replicated with fancier tech by more
recent MIT dons – see Alex Pentland’s new
book Social Physics). – Boundlss.com

PROMOTED ENCOUNTERS &
UNPLANNED COLLABORATIONS
“If a building doesn’t encourage [collaboration],
you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic
that’s sparked by serendipity. So we designed
the building to make people get out of their
offices and mingle in the central atrium with
people they might not otherwise see.” - Steve
Jobs

PROMOTED ENCOUNTERS &
UNPLANNED COLLABORATIONS
“Casual collisions are what we try and create in
the work environment. You can’t schedule
innovation, you can’t schedule idea generation
and so when we think about our facilities around
the world we’re really looking for little
opportunities for engineers or for creative
people to come together.” – David Radcliffe,
Google

(NOT A GAME) BUT PRACTICE
“If I can't practice, I can't practice man. If I'm hurt, I'm hurt. I mean … simple as that. It
ain't about that... I mean it's... It's not about that... At all. You know what I'm saying I
mean... But it's...it's easy … to, to talk about... It's easy to sum it up when you're just
talking about practice. We're sitting in here, and I'm supposed to be the franchise
player, and we in here talking about practice. I mean, listen, we're talking
about practice, not a game, not a game, not a game, we talking about practice. Not a
game. Not, not … Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game
like it's my last. Not the game, but we're talking about practice, man. I mean, how
silly is that? … And we talking about practice. I know I supposed to be there. I know
I'm supposed to lead by example... I know that... And i'm not.. I'm not shoving it aside,
you know, like it don't mean anything. I know it's important, I do. I honestly do... But
we're talking about practice man. What are we talking about? Practice? We're talking
aboutpractice, man. [laughter from the media crowd] We're talking about practice.
We're talking about practice. We ain't talking about the game. [more laughter] We're
talking about practice, man. When you come to the arena, and you see me play, you
see me play don't you? You've seen me give everything I've got, right? But we're
talking aboutpractice right now. We talking about pr... [Interrupted]” – Allen Iverson

SOCIAL PHYSICS
“The largest factor in predicting group
intelligence was the equality of conversational
turn taking; groups where a few people
dominated the conversation were less
collectively intelligent than those with a more
equal distribution of conversational turn
taking.” - Alex Pentland

SOCIAL PHYSICS
“Unexpectedly, we found that the factors most people
usually think of as driving group performance—i.e.,
cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction—were not
statistically significant. The largest factor in predicting
group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn
taking; groups where a few people dominated the
conversation were less collectively intelligent than those
with a more equal distribution of conversational turn
taking. The second most important factor was the social
intelligence of a group’s members, as measured by their
ability to read each other’s social signals. Women tend to
do better at reading social signals, so groups with more
women tended to do better ”- Alex Pentland

FROM WALKS to CARS to
WALKS/BIKES
• CITIES WERE ORIGINALLY BUILT FOR WALKING
• WALKING CITIES
• THEN AUTOMOBILES HAPPENED
• “SPRAWL” / BAD “WALKING SCORE”
• CARMAGGEDON / PAYDAY FRIDAY
• BACK TO WALKING / BIKING
• COMMUNITY TABLES

The inaugural event last year brought together key people from around the world -
investors met founders, newly-formed friendships blossomed into new startups
and the feedback we got - where attendees rated the event a whopping 9.5/10 -
clearly sent a message that Geeks On A Beach was a resounding success!

WHERE ARE YOU ON WEEKENDS?
• STARTUP WEEKEND
• LEAN STARTUP MACHINE
• STARTUP GRIND
• HACKER NEST
• COMMUNE AND CULTIVATE
• CO.LAB GELLYS
• TEDx MANILA
• ANGELHACK HACKATHON
• ASPACEMANILA EVENTS

LAST YEAR I WAS …
• IN or INVOLVED IN 47 DEVELOPER EVENTS
• 5 HACKATHONS
• TECHNOLOGY IS THE GOOD NEWS
• BUT … THE COMMUNITY AROUND THE
TECHNOLOGY IS THE BETTER NEWS
• BE A TECHNOLOGY EVANGELIST TODAY and
HELP US BUILD THE PHILIPPINE TECHNOLOGY
ECOSYSTEM

SOCIAL PHYSICS
“It is not simply the brightest who have the best
ideas; it is those who are best at harvesting
ideas from others. It is not only the most
determined who drive change; it is those who
most fully engage with like-minded people. And
it is not wealth or prestige that best motivates
people; it is respect and help from peers ”- Alex
Pentland

THANK YOU!
• Facebook.com/groups/SMARTDEVNET
• Facebook.com/SMARTDEVNET
• Twitter.com/SMARTDEVNET
• http://developer.smart.com.ph
• @pageman
• appspartner@smart.com.ph
• Or say hello to me! Practice Serendipity! 

Tech island2014

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