My name is Ryan Boren. I am a lead developer of WordPress and a co-conspirator at Automattic. I live in Dripping Springs Texas at the Irie Smial Preserve amidst a familial motley of non-compliant, neurodivergent garage hobbits.
Check Twitter and Refind for my heartbeat.
Where I’m at
- Normalize cannabis and cryptography.
- Embrace neurodiversity and the social model of disability.
- Champion the open, mobile web.
- Open all source.
- Design for real life.
Some things about me
- autistic
- atheist
- vegan
- transhumanist
- civil libertarian
- skeptic
Heal our systems
Champion agency & transparency. Reject compliance & cronyism. Humanize flow in the systems we inhabit. Use these rules of thumb when building systems and culture.
- projects > lectures
- agency > compliance
- inclusive model > deficit model
- social model > medical model
- rights based > needs based
- acceptance > awareness
- spectrums > binaries
- promethean > pastoralist
Everyone should read
Intersectionality (continuously updated linklogs)
- neurodiversity
- disability
- social model of disability
- open source
- education
- distributed work
- empathy
- accessibility
- design thinking
- humane tech
- design for real life
- restorative practices, discipline, justice
- restorative justice
- compliance
- project-based learning
- structural ideology
- hacker ethos
- agency, goal-directed choice, goal orienting
- identity-first language
- autistic burnout
- harm reduction
- use of force
- imposter syndrome
- toolbelt theory
- drug war origins
- inspiration porn
- interaction badges
- inclusive education
- classroom ux
- future of work
- rights-based model
- recess
- wordpress
Spectrums
There are many ways to be human. We’re multiple traits in a color space.
Source: Understanding The Spectrum
Human cognitive diversity exists for a reason; our differences are the genius – and the conscience – of our species.
Source: A Thousand Rivers
Hacker Ethos
It’s a software-eaten world; get hip to coding and the hacker ethos.
- What is code? Code has been my life, and it has been your life, too. It is time to understand how it all works.
- Scratching itches: hacker ethos & project-based learning
- Strong Opinions, Weakly Held
- Loosely Coupled, Tightly Aligned
- Eat Your Own Dogfood
- Release Early, Release Often
- Rough Consenus and Running Code
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
- Break Smart
The credentialist social order has been waning since peak centralization in the 1970s. Work and the world are shifting from credentialist to hacker modes of social organization. Agile teams, distributed collaboration, and the hacker ethos of flexible improvisation and rapid iteration are important cultural literacy. The edtech cronyism of the past 15 years, driven by greed and bad metrics, is a culture ill-suited to collaboration. Software eats industries, bringing collaborative hacker culture along with it. Education’s turn to be consumed is now. Educate for massive software-driven change.To navigate the society transforming tidal wave of automation, we must be fluent in the hacker ethos, distributed collaboration, and loosely coupled, tightly aligned teams.
On education
Change the culture and user experience of schools. Culture doesn’t come from a box. It’s not proprietary and rented from a corporation. Culture doesn’t have someone else’s trademark on it. Culture must be made from within with grassroots involvement.
Create a culture of neurodiverse teams of project-based learners using technology and design thinking to communicate, collaborate, iterate, and launch to authentic audiences of fellow humans. Tech won’t find its place in education until project-based inclusion replaces the lecture and deficit models.
Agile teams, distributed collaboration, and the hacker ethos of flexible improvisation and rapid iteration are powerful artifacts of the disruptive rise of software. They are life and industry changing. When informed with neurodiversity and the social model of disability in an open by default culture, they are a future for education and work where we collaborate and iterate our way through massive software-driven change. We will navigate disruption with compassion, finding opportunity and inspiration in the diversity of our shared humanity. We are humans making things for and with other humans, helping each other cope with sentience and senescence on our pale blue dot. Communicate, collaborate, iterate, launch. With these tools we’ll make it through.
There is thoughtlessness all around us, in all human systems. In this thoughtlessness is opportunity. Engage project-based learners in designing for real life. Start by designing a shared, grassroots culture together with students.
Culture can be the foundation for all future innovation, or it can be the single biggest resistance to innovation. Don’t fuck up culture.
Communication is oxygen
Build a school district wide collaboration infrastructure and an open by default culture.
