Major announcement about TopFloorStudio

Dear friends,

After 10 years of working with some of the most creative and talented folks I’m happy to say that we are continuing that tradition into the future.  Greenstone Media, an Asheville company, has acquired TopFloorStudio and has my full confidence in disrupting the regional tech scene.  They will work with the utmost of integrity and innovation.  I met Greenstone Media when I asked a friend for the name of the person who did his beautiful App and Website and he told me about Nathan Silsbee, CEO of Greenstone; and he couldn’t say enough good things about Nathan.   Since then I’ve been solidly behind this firm.  Greenstone has treated many of my past clients well with nothing but good feedback. 

5 Posts that you may enjoy from Ty's 2014 writings

Trusted Sharing was very honored to sponsor a series of events that happened in Asheville in October around Dynamic Facilitation and Wisdom Councils. We had many great people including the founders of these modalities, several authors and some renowned filmmakers. Here are 2 articles that I organized and edited that you can read.


Asheville Wisdom Councils Declare our Social Contract is Broken (on System of Abundance Blog) Wisdom Council Intends to Bring Participation to Asheville’s Government ( on Asheville Grit blog)

In March we partnered with the fine folks at Peppermint, an open source operating system built using the Ubuntu (Linux) codebase. In the process of writing the story we reached out to Peppermint's partner in Africa, Marc Stephan Nkouly, and heard some wild stories. The article was picked up by OpenSource.com, they are an online publication focused on how open source is applied to different areas including business, education, government, health, law and other disciplines of life. Read the article here: Peppermint introduces cloud-based open source desktop to Africa (on OpenSource.com)

One of the realizations I had after our podcast, Spark Tech Talk, interviewed Steve Wozniak, was that connecting with your heroes in meaningful ways was possible. Most folks who have "made it" and are thought leaders want to give back and help spread there ideas even further. So one day I reached out to Harrison Owen, a personal hero of mine and the founder of Open Space (tech folks may know unconferences or barcamps) and asked him if we could do an interview. To make it a truly collaborative experience I partnered with my friends over at Mycelium project, Matt and Ashley, and they ran with the interview. Here is the article: Harrison Owen Interview: Inviting Flow and Self Organization

An on-going theme for me and my life is to work in the social enterprise space. Someone I've worked with and connected with over the last couple of years is Paul Polack. An amazing mind, a leading social entrepreneur and to say just an author would be an understatement. He is like Bill Clinton in my book. One thing that stood out to me was Paul Polack's amazing energy. At 80 years old his mind is more active than most 30 years olds I know. Read the article from January here:  Paul Polak interview about his new book The Business Solution to Poverty

Agile Manifesto

The Agile Manifesto reads, in its entirety, as follows:

We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it
and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over Processes and tools
Working software over Comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over Contract negotiation
Responding to change over Following a plan
That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the 
items on the left more. 

Picture found (like most of the pictures I use) from using http://search.creativecommons.org/

Ty's High Trust Connections of April

I've been spending some time thinking about the relationships I have with mentors, those wiser than myself and the ones that I really listen to and rely on regularly.  I would like to give a regular shout-out to these folks so that you can learn from them.  My intent is to tighten up my network so that there are more interconnection.

Duncan Work / 100 Trillion Connections

http://100trillion.wordpress.com/

Ed Brenegar / Leading Questions

http://edbrenegar.typepad.com/

Glenn Geffcken / New book out called SHIFT

http://www.amazon.com/Shift-Glenn-Geffcken/dp/149172661X

Mycelium Project

http://mycelium.is/

The Open Source Way

The open source way is...

Open exchange

We can learn more from each other when information is open. A free exchange of ideas is critical to creating an environment where people are allowed to learn and use existing information toward creating new ideas.

Participation

When we are free to collaborate, we create. We can solve problems that no one person may be able to solve on their own.

Rapid prototyping

Rapid prototypes can lead to rapid failures, but that leads to better solutions found faster. When you're free to experiment, you can look at problems in new ways and look for answers in new places. You can learn by doing.

Meritocracy

In a meritocracy, the best ideas win. In a meritocracy, everyone has access to the same information. Successful work determines which projects rise and gather effort from the community.

Community

Communities are formed around a common purpose. They bring together diverse ideas and share work. Together, a global community can create beyond the capabilities of any one individual. It multiplies effort and shares the work. Together, we can do more.

Source >> http://opensource.com/open-source-way

The open source way is...

System of Abundance tries to live the Open Source Way in our work-life and in our life-life.  I try to read it every month at least.  You can see where I pulled it and read a lot of other content about applying open source in life (less geeky, more real-life) here http://opensource.com/open-source-way

~Ty Hallock

Open exchange

We can learn more from each other when information is open. A free exchange of ideas is critical to creating an environment where people are allowed to learn and use existing information toward creating new ideas.

Ideas, collaboration and short posts

In order to feel comfortable in a blogging space I had to spend many hours de-programming myself around the worry I have with blogging.  People will judge me.  I won't be able to communicate the essence of my real ideas so people will think my ideas are not good enough.  So with that being said I plan to put ideas up on this blog in an early state.  I plan to say something and later change my mind and I plan to iterate through these blog posts, adding and changing what I had earlier as my ideas change course.   I'm taking it easy on myself to have a more open environment where I can actually innovate in the same way I do at TopFloorStudio.

I reserve the right to put up a short post, a weird post or something that doesn't fit my SOA Manifesto.  And I hope you will join me by collaborating with us and joining the community.  By inviting strangers to be community and inviting the community to blog and build on our ideas and getting the best in the world on here I hope to be much more than Ty Hallock could do on his own.  

This is a platform of a blog.  

There will be ideas worth spreading and ideas that I would like to get feedback on and aren't worth spreading... until after we iterate through it a couple of times.

The Systems Of Abundance Manifesto

Human doing human stuff

As a human I wanted to make my intentions for this blog clear.  It is my hopes that this blog will be fun for me, that I will be able to put my ideas and other peoples idea on it and that they too will have fun.  The things that interest me are what is working well, what are the patterns that we can share and pull in from elsewhere in Technology, Group Management, Start-ups and Business Strategy .  I will hopefully come back later and add a link to the Patterns Library that TopFloor is working on, but that is not finished so more on that later.  To get at the roots you can read A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander and here is the Wikipedia page.

What the blog is going to cover

• Social Dynamics
• Social Entrepreneurship
• Open Source
• User Experience
• Group Process and Group Dynamics
• Innovative Ideas on Tech, Education 
• How to build healthy systems]
• Patterns, Cases Studies and Best Practices
• Organizational Strategy
• Big Ideas
• My Ideas
• A lot of collaboration with others (thats how I roll)

Collaboration

The most important reason for me to blog is to get others involved with the ideas and projects we are working with and to be introduced to new ideas and projects.  This site will be successful if I can have daily interactions around the ideas that I'm passionate about.

What I'd like you to do

• Read my blog, subscribe to it
• Give me constructive feedback and help me form my ideas and do better on my projects
• Learn about some of the awesome stuff that I pick up along the way and add to it
• Reach out to me, lets connect :)

Who I am

I'm the CEO of TopFloorStudio and as of this post, also working on a startup SAAS (software) called Wharf.