Government innovation with TREES

Hello!

It has been a few weeks of writing at work, so I’m a bit word-ed out. I’m also happily tired after a pretty full weekend, so will just move ahead to some links:

• Learned about Camp Small this week, a public-benefit log and lumber yard selling products from City of Baltimore trees that have to come down.
  • Shannon Rogers interviewed Shaun Preston, Camp Small’s director, and got into the backstory: Camp Small was started with a mayor’s office loan, to rent equipment and work through the large log yard that had built up over the years; within a year, they’d paid off the five-year startup loan, and were quickly recouping other costs for the city (e.g., supplying material for a new city construction, saving $75,000 of the spec’d price).
  • Super cool—a great example of internal-to-government innovation funding, and of being entrepreneurial within a government. (Though, as Preston pointed out, this was only possible because Baltimore bylaws permit selling public goods for market rates!)
  • The most heartwarming part, for me, was Preston describing the time they take for any customer who comes in their doors, and the effort they put into educating folks who maybe only have a slight idea of what they want, but not the tools or ability to fully realize it. The idea of the “public service woodworker”, ah—lovely!
• xd5 [Arthur typed that as he stepped onto the keyboard, stet]
• It can be tempting at times, when learning a new philosophy or technique, to try to apply a new way of thinking wholesale, to sit down and really ponder out its implications for your work (or life or whatever). But maybe the better path is to take just one idea from it, using it to shift your thinking somewhat. Dan Davies offers a core nugget of cybernetics for management theory: keep in mind “the principle of variety – the idea that you have to match the complexity of the system to the capacity of the management to regulate it” and that “management is fundamentally an information processing task”.
• Nicola Griffiths with her own link varia: “tiny cats, massive lakes, women ruling Iron Age Britain”. (The massive lake one is wild.) (Also, reading Menewood and thoroughly enjoying it! As ever, Griffith’s historical research and projection is superbly done.)
• You’d think taking the shiny new train to Ottawa’s airport from downtown would be a speedy way to go. In reality, it’s the slowest option available (compared even to taking a bus part of the way!), assuming you make the first connection and don’t have to wait twelve minutes til the next train, and also it’s not a shiny new train to the airport, it’s only the second of the three trains you’ll take that’s shiny and new, and my goodness we only get the barest minimum of nice and good service around here. Sigh. (Looking forward to riding it at some point! To rely on it, though? I don’t know.)

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas