Hey, I’m Chad Moore. You’re getting this email because you signed up for Where Light Gathers, a campfire you can sit at to talk about creativity, and the highs and lows of being someone who makes things. If this isn’t working for you, simply unsubscribe.

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A quick note before we begin - I’m not tracking you in any way, other than seeing your email address when you subscribed. I’m starting this newsletter to get things out of my head and into the world, not to monetize you. If I can build relationships with readers, that would be great. Because relationships are what inspire and challenge us all. I’d like to know more about you, so hit reply and let me know if anything in this email resonates with you.

Where Light Gathers

I was planning on sending these emails out every two weeks or so. The murder of George Floyd, and the resulting protests, rioting and my own feelings about all this has delayed the schedule.

This wonderful illustration sums up my thinking regarding ideas on how we might fix a terrible system. There’s been a lot of articles and such with white people can be better allys. Last issue I wrote about the website builder called carrd. Tools like this partially address the “evenly distributed tools and assistance” issue above.

https://blacklivesmatter.carrd.co is an example of something important, helpful, and built with a tool that helps level the playing field, not tilt it in one direction.

It isn’t a zero sum game. When people say “make a seat at the table for everyone” it doesn’t mean others have to give up their seat. It means we need to work together to build a bigger fucking table.

If you want to reply with “yes but, All Lives Matter!” here is how to unsubscribe.

Campfires

Some of the things I’ve sat around the digital campfire and talked about with folks.

Small Agile

I’m working on a service for solo independent people or small teams who develop products and / or services.

Basically I’m looking to share what large companies are doing to find ideas and problems and how they develop tools and processes to address them. These two practices are Design Thinking and Agile Development (or Mindset).

I think there are things from these processes that can and should be applied to all kinds of teams and their projects.

It’s still early as I am tinkering with the service, the site, and the language that I’m using (I don’t think it’s clear enough yet). But feel free to check it out at smallAgile.

I plan on writing a “how I did this” article for next issue by the way. I’m currently using carrd, stripe, Calendy, and micro.blog for this.

Master Mind Failure Club

A good friend brought the idea of a Master Mind Failure Club to my attention.

Peer strategy and support with failure as the goal

I immediately gravitated towards it. It’s something I think I’ve needed for a while. We both committed to starting this and together we put together a team. We start Tuesday June 9th. I can’t wait!

I’ll be asking the team about the smallAgile project I mentioned above for sure.

Streams

Some of the things that I’ve found when dipping my toes into the digital streams.

Get in the van

This is an absolute must read for anyone thinking of indie projects. Fuck the gatekeepers. I sent it to my (almost) sixteen year old daughter and suggested she added “Influencers” to the list of gatekeepers.

You don’t have to quit your day job, but maybe having your eggs in more than one basket is a good idea. Stretch your limits a bit. Do something you might fail at, so you can learn and grow. Repeat. Generate a little income based on your own thoughts and efforts.

“You can do more than you think”

-Chris Guillebeau The Money Tree

Gardens

Planting seeds, and helping them grow into ideas.

I’m still looking at building a personal wiki / note taking hive mind thingy for myself.

Check this out, it’s a better explanation of what this is.

I setup a tiddlywiki on glitch, and that’s a nice option. But I’m not sold on it yet. Looks like there’s something coming called mymind. I’m going to wait for that to see which I like best. There’s also an app called Drafts which is amazing, and now has some of the functionality needed. I need to do a deeper dive with that.