{"id":1280,"date":"2014-04-23T07:11:13","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T15:11:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/?p=1280"},"modified":"2014-04-23T07:11:34","modified_gmt":"2014-04-23T15:11:34","slug":"maximizing-collisionability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2014\/04\/23\/maximizing-collisionability\/","title":{"rendered":"Maximizing collisionability"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last night, Tony Hsieh of zappos.com<\/a> spoke at the Long Now on the topic of Helping Revitalize a City<\/a>. He described Downtown Project<\/a>, which is the company he designed to create a thriving community (tech, art, fashion, family) in downtown Las Vegas.<\/p>\n

As he discussed the project, he brought up a great concept that I want to apply to my own life, which is the idea of “collisionable hours”. The idea is that a community is built by maximizing the number of times that community members might run into each other: at the bar, at a cafe, on the street, etc. Suburbs have low collisionable hours since residents go into their garage, hop in their car, drive to the store, drive straight back home, and therefore spend little time in public spaces where they might have unplanned collisions. City neighborhoods can have high collisionable hours, when everybody is out walking around to get their errands done (shades of Jane Jacobs). So for the Downtown Project, they now evaluate projects based on maximizing collisionable hours. <\/p>\n

This made me think about maximizing my own personal collisionability. How do I put myself into more situations where I have unplanned interactions that can spur new thoughts? I made some effort at that in my Year of Yes last year<\/a> by going to new conferences and trying new things, but how can I build on that? One thing I’ve started is a monthly SF Salon<\/a>, which is a great excuse for me to see SF friends and talk about ideas. I also need to start posting more here, as I think that increases the chance of random people on the Internet finding me and interacting with my ideas. <\/p>\n

That points out a difference I have with Tony Hsieh – he’s focused on unplanned physical interactions, which I think are valuable and interesting (I depend on them for parts of my job at Google). But I’m interested in building a community of ideas as well, which I think can be done online. We’ll see if I make progress on that.<\/p>\n

Two other vignettes that I think are relevant to the collisionability discussion:<\/p>\n