The Swan Factory was founded on 9/11/2014 — what I call “Interdependence Day” — because I wanted it to become a symbol of hope to a divided world. The Swan Factory ceased business operations on 8/15/2018, four weeks shy of its fourth birthday. This is our final post.
PassionGroups: The Pitch
I. Objective Networking Christian leaders to nurture innovative ministries II. Opportunity The Holy Spirit is doing a new thing in the San Francisco Bay Area. Unprecedented numbers of Christian men and women, both inside and outside of the church, are “seeing visions and dreaming dreams” of innovative ways to spread the Kingdom of God. They want to launch, reform and…
SP/CD: Social Product/Character Development
At The Swan Factory, we believe that collaborative design is the capstone skill of education in the third millennium. Learning how to come together and work through differences to bring something new into the world is essential: Professionally, so students can continually reinvent themselves and their careers as the twentieth-century “job” becomes increasingly irrelevant Personally, as the foundation for healthy marriages, parenting,…
Montessori for Startups: Announcing The Swan Factory Incubator
May 27, 2016 – Santa Clara, CA. The Swan Factory is excited to pre-announce a radical reimagining of school and work for the 21st century: The Swan Factory Incubator (TSFI). TSFI is a multi-generational micro-school for entrepreneurs, built on the Triversity model. TSFI extends self-directed Montessori education, which optimizes for student engagement, to subsume both secondary and tertiary education by incorporating Challenge-Based Learning and…
Homoiconic C: A Universal Language for Code and Data
Draft Abstract Submission for Onward! 2017 Homoiconic C attempts to define the minimal set of abstractions necessary to support our most powerful programming idioms (i.e., Lisp, C, shell) as well as common data formats (e.g., CSV, JSON, HTML). The key is a novel data structure we call a Frame, which combines aspects of a function, dictionary, and array.
Introducing PassionChats: An #intellectualfaith Podcast
Update: Our pilot episode went live on Thursday, November 10th. The PassionChats podcast is an outgrowth of the #intellectualfaith movement and PassionTalks. Our goal is to provide a welcoming space for people at the intersection of innovation with Christian belief.
Introducing MAML: A Modest Proposal for HTML6
Update: Get involved on GitHub or Slack. MAML is the Multipurpose Abstract Markup Language. It is simple, easy-to-parse data format that is still sufficiently rich to simultaneously replace HTTP, HTML, JavaScript and CSS. As a declarative language MAML is not Turing complete, but is circuit universal (able to represent any Boolean circuit). In fact, because is it is based on the Presburger arithmetic of…
SPHT: The Software-Programmable Hardware Trainer
The Swan Factory is excited to pre-announce our first Kickstarter: SPHT. SPHT (“sift”) is a Software-Programmable Hardware Trainer. The goal is to introduce a radically different concept in processor design tightly coupled with a novel anti -functional programming language called Hexon.
Like Uber for Projects: Volunteer Empowerment Systems
Executive Summary Traditional project management thinking and systems, designed for hierarchies of paid employees, are a poor fit for today’s decentralized marketplaces and volunteer-led communities. Instead, we need something more like Uber: a network that enables autonomous agents to quickly identify opportunities and organize to address them. As the Internet continues to disaggregate closed firms and industries into open marketplaces, this kind of…
How to Disrupt Facebook
Hands-on Experience (HOX) is the world’s first open platform for building empowerment networks, a purpose-driven alternative to traditional social networks: Social networks inspire attention around what matters now. Empowerment networks (a la Joe Edelman) inspire action around what matters most. HOX helps individuals and organizations rally around what matters most to them. By leveraging the power of mobile, social, and design,…
