So, #Tuttle turned 7 years old, six months ago.  There have been times when I’ve walked away from it and let others carry the show, but for most of those seven years, I’ve been showing up every week and helping something beautiful happen.

The conversations these days are not so much about social media, they’re more about how work is changing right now and how technology is affecting that.  And just like when we started in 2008, growth in our technological capacity is outstripping our social capacity to understand and deal with it.  We don’t know how it’s all going to work out.  And free-form conversation like you get at #Tuttle is the best way I know to address that situation.

During the last seven years, many of you have supported my projects through crowd-funding and by participating directly in them.  I’m grateful for all of that.  I thought that #Tuttle would lead to new stuff and it has done, but the thing itself, the Friday morning meetups haven’t gone away.  Now I’m asking you to support the ongoing work of keeping #Tuttle useful and expanding the range of activities  I can do.

Patreon has been around for a while now as a platform.  It does all the bits that are difficult for me to do on my own and lets me get on with making cool stuff happen.  I’m hoping that it will also help me to do more to hold the community together – that’s what the Goals in the left-hand sidebar are about.  The process has also helped me to get clear about what I want to do – summarised in this video.

It’s not make or break.  I’m going to keep doing this stuff because it’s my calling, it’s become who I am and every time someone comes back or turns up for the first time and I see that look in their eye, that says “Thank you for making a space for me to be nourished in today”, I know that I’ve just got to keep doing it.

You can contribute as little as one US dollar per month (there’s no choice on currency unfortunately) but there’s a scale of rewards for more generous contributions.  If you can’t or don’t want to commit to a monthly payment, you can cancel at any time or there’s a range of options for a one-off donation here.

Most importantly of all, if you can’t afford to give anything, the best thing you can do is send me a note of solidarity and maybe come and see me on a Friday morning, I need you much more than I need your money.

There’s (at least) one question in every important relationship, whether it’s your lover, your mother, your best mate or your favourite client, which can trigger the most almighty meltdown of communication. Something that seems to be taking a lifetime to resolve. Something that presses her buttons and presses yours just as hard. You know what it is. He knows what it is. You both know not to touch it, but every now and then one of you forgets and drifts into this dangerous territory.

Whatever it is you are unlikely to resolve it by talking it out just one more time. It represents something important that needs to be worked out through your experience of relating to each other, not through words. So, no matter how tempting it seems when they say “I know we’ve been over this, but could we just…” Smile, remind them (and yourself) that you love them and get on with being the solution not trying to explain it.

It’s a bit slow to start and despite my protestations that “It’s really quiet for a Friday” there’s plenty of background traffic noise, but I’m really quite proud of ten years ago me, stepping out and doing what was normal for me (but seemed bonkers to most), walking around London talking into a recording machine and publishing what I’d said on the internet.

We had no Twitter that day, or Facebook. YouTube was a couple of months old and video still seemed out of reach to me. Most of us had phones whose only non-voice function was SMS. The photos that I took and put on flickr were taken with my Pentax Optio compact. All I had was my blog and a podcast.

The day before I’d been at home waiting in for an engineer to come and install my broadband and TV. And so when I could I got back into town and carried on and tried to talk about forgiveness and peace.

Here’s the flickr set

I’ve put a proposal to write an article for Contributoria on the possibility of city workers being hit hard by the next round of FinTech development – Bitcoin brought us programmable money, Ethereum brings us programmable companies.

From the pitch: “is it reasonable to expect Financial and Professional Services to undergo the same kinds of disruption and rejigging that the web brought to film, TV, newspapers and music? And if so what happens to all the people who ‘do something in the City’?”

Contributoria is a journalism site where the articles are written, chosen and collaborated on by members of the community.  In my opinion, it’s managing to inspire and curate some really good writing on subjects that you won’t necessarily see in more mainstream media.  The choosing function is like crowd-funding but you allocate points that you get through membership rather than your own actual cash, but if enough of you give me your points, I get to write the article and I get paid.  You may remember that I was interviewed for one of Jon Hickman’s pieces there about a year ago.

So it’s like all those other crowd-funding things I’ve asked you to support, but this one won’t cost you anything, instead you get to play with the Guardian Media Group’s money – yay!

Here’s what you do:

1.  Sign up at contributoria.com – you’ll see that there are paid options (including one that gets you a print copy, if that floats your boat) but you get 50 points to play with if you go for FREE.

2.  Find my proposal page

3.  Pledge as many of your points to me as you like (obviously I would like all 50 please!)

4.  Tell all your friends to do the same (there are handy social share buttons for FB & Twitter)

5.  If you’ve any left over do have a browse of the other articles being proposed and pledge for them too.

6.  Sit back and wait till the end of the month when you can start to read my drafts and guide my writing if you like, or wait until it’s published on 1st September.

7.  Also, probably get ready for me to ask you to ask all your friends again toward the end of the month, when I’m frustratingly close but not quite at the target!

Thanks my lovelies!