Mobile Ministry Magazine

This post follows the meme of many of the other thoughts posted this week, and at the same time, it plays on its own. The meme is that innovation requires space, freedom (in Christ), and a good bit of tinkering.

Tinkering? Yes. The ability to play with something for the desired effect of creating something new, but protracted over an extended period of time. If you will, using that inventor's juice and crafting a world around you that is (hopefully) better than it was the day before.

Now, I like to tinker. And if you've been around MMM since its inception (or for just the past two weeks), you might notice that I tinker all over the place. Sometimes its web design, sometimes it content, sometimes it something else entirely that points back and through here. All in all, its that "innovator's juice" that keeps me tweaking and looking for something that sparks others (to Him).

I think that is where this comment came into play best for me:

...These are problems that cannot be entrusted to technocrats or elites: complex problems have to be solved collectively. In such a world, the only way to make a better future is to have people learn to create their own futures: to develop the capacity to solve problems, to see the consequences of their actions, and to be able to act now in ways that help them reach a better future. In other words, people have to learn how to tinker with the future. Not only that, but tinkering's lack of respect for intellectual boundaries, its willingness to experiment, its emphasis on solutions and goals, and its social openness, make it a match for wicked problems...

This is from a post titled Tinkering to the Future. This author makes the statement that we have to continue to allow people to tweak and tinker with whatever we are doing now in cyberspace to create something next.

I want to take that a bit further. We should create spaces to tinker. Whether that is something as simple as learning workshops where all you do is play, or something less structured like meetups and tech-play-dates where coders, developers, parents, leaders, all galvanize around a common aim - play and see what happens.

There's a young teen that I mentor. The past few weeks has seen him playing with my phones and asking me questions about how/why I got into writing about mobile. The conversations almost seem to go nowhere, and at the same time, its a time for him to play within himself to something that might or might not be what's next for him. To me, fostering that kind of environment for him is just as important as keeping him on task about his grades. I wonder. Can the Body become a place where tinkering is not just allowed, but fostered into something new?

Labels: community, innovation