Brain Canvas

One Sunday morning several years ago my friend Shaun and I walked a couple of miles from our university campus in Atlanta to a certain 24-hour diner for breakfast. Atlanta, like so many cities in North America, is highly automobile-centric. Most people get places – even places just two miles away – by driving in their glass and metal pods, oblivious to the smaller stitches that bind together the community, infrastructure, economy and aesthetics of their city. I was as guilty of this as anyone, which is why I took such notice of just how run-down and shabby so much of the walk was. Some stretches as short as twenty meters were downright danger-havens, obstructing the healthy and secure flow of what otherwise should have been a routine walking path. Broken and stolen bicycles littered a small clearing in the kudzu between an abandoned building, the busiest interstate highway in the South, and a flimsy mesh-wire fence that separated a one-way four-lane road from the small green buffer to the highway. The litter, organic and non, of homeless people, drunks and troublemakers stank under a small bridge. There stood few to no trees whatsoever to provide shelter or windbreaks, and the sidewalks sat low enough to allow an idling car to jump the curb. When cars turned, they turned extremely close to the junction of the crosswalk and the sidewalk, such that we had to walk well away from the edge of the area specifically designated for pedestrians to avoid grievous injury. That walk opened my eyes to the negative effects of driving everywhere, or perhaps more importantly the expectation of driving everywhere.  In your car you are protected from all manner of the elements, the refuse and the antagonism of the brave new world.  Distances shrink such that you have no reason to focus on anything more than a dangerous intersection or an extended stretch of poorly-paved road.  In this relativity distortion field, an unsightly ten-meter stretch becomes as significant as a discolored brick at the base of a building.  When you see how unpleasant walking can be in many cities, it either turns you off to walking altogether or leads you to take solace in the knowledge that next time, you can drive.  Thus only the committed and specifically interested – mostly those who don’t or can’t afford to drive their own cars – can take stock of the problems and arrange to solve them.  Unfortunately, that usually means going through the bureaucracy of City Hall, and fixing the problem will cost money, which turns everybody off.  Advocates and stakeholders in walkable town development are stuck unless your city is forward-looking, the neighborhood association is educated and influential, or some agents of gentrification like Starbucks and real estate developers decide to make inroads to the area – which usually means that the streets are deserted and dangerous at night when no one is out shopping for $5 ice cream and imported clothing! What if you had to walk everywhere for one month?  Imagine that you wake up tomorrow morning and your car is gone.  Every bus in the city has stopped working, and all other modes of public transportation like light rail and subways no longer function.  Even your bicycle has turned to cast iron.  The entire city is struck with the incapacitation of every form of mechanical transport.  All you can do in this car-free town is walk. You still have to pay the bills by working, and you still have to buy and eat food.  If you are lucky your boss will let you telecommute, but no one is going to deliver any food to you when they would have to walk just like you.  Now you actually have to walk to the grocery store.  You have to walk to friends’ houses, or to bars, or to places of worship or the post office.  This month is probably going to be the most hard-learning month you have faced, if you are a fortunate person.  The size of your front yard will become apparent like never before when every time you return home you have to walk its length rather than zip past it on the driveway.  Your street never seemed this long when you were driving!  And how are there only three houses between yours and the curb?  You never noticed how much space was wasted around you.  Alternatively, you could be pleased to note how many front doors of businesses and residences you can pass in five minutes of walking, and you may have never noticed half of the stores you see now that you have to look. If you need to walk to pick up food or some other commodity, you may be highly disappointed to realize how far away a neighborhood commercial center is.  You could pass one hundred houses with no break for parks or businesses before reaching a marginally diverse commercial zone that offers food, mechanical supplies, fuel, and a service or two like a gym or church.  The parking lot will seem like a flat barren wasteland to you  now.  There are probably no trees, or perhaps only small rows of perfectly-cut shrubs, to offer a micro-climate supporting living things like birds and insects.  Take a look around, and unless you live in a pretty upscale neighborhood you will notice broken glass, plastic and trash, the artifacts of car accidents and human neglect.  If it is hot outside, it will be so twice over on your walk.  You can’t look forward to the air conditioner on your way back, and the blacktop will bake like a river from hell.  It could be cold, and then your survivability comes into question – if it’s too cold to walk far enough to get fuel and food, how are you going to survive?  Your neighborhood is built such that without personal vehicles, an innovation less than one hundred years old, you become a veritable Daniel Boone in your own city.  Hope you’ve stocked up for the winter! Not everything is bad, even though your city is engineered to make walking less efficient than driving.  Places that used to be dangerous to walk around may now be filled with peaceful people whose presence discourages violent crime and theft.  If you are lucky enough to live in a neighborhood which is as walkable as it is drivable, you could discover new amenities and pleasures close to home.  In the process you ought to become closer to your neighbors.  One thing you will likely discuss with them is that you never noticed how bad the sidewalk is on this stretch of Eleventh Street, or how you wish there were more trees to shade the walk.  A neighbor will mention how unsightly this or that building is, which they never noticed until today.  Shame, too, since it would make a great music hall.  Across town a group of neighbors are planning improvements for their area and removing old furniture blocking an alleyway frequented by a gang.  They used to drive right past it, and stopped wondering long ago who put the blockage there. Thirty days later (let’s assume you don’t know when you will regain use of your vehicles), people are walking paths within a quarter mile of their home that four weeks ago they never knew existed.  Crime in most neighborhoods is at its lowest in decades – except for the affluent ones, where bored rich kids vandalize each others’ homes at night.  Although there is a lot of trash that has not been picked up by the sanitation department in the last month, it has been compacted and arranged to ensure that it does not make walking unpleasant.  Among the trash in those piles is all of the urban refuse that littered the sidewalks and underpasses before the Day the Wheels Stopped Moving.  Flowers, and some small herb and vegetable gardens, are planted in every median.  There is a tree fort on every block.  People have learned to stretch their dollars when buying food.  Every business that can incorporate it now knows the value of telecommuting.  People are less stressed.  You have made several new friends and have joined two new community organizations, as well as a community sport.  The team plays the neighborhood across the bridge in three days. When you wake up tomorrow morning and find your car in your garage once more, what will you do?

This month’s Brain Canvas theme on transportation is a bit above my head from a technical standpoint, as I don’t have the benefit of an engineering degree from THE Georgia Institute of Technology like my colleague Preston. So rather than try to write about the future of transportation by speculating about innovative new technologies, I’ll instead talk about some of the exciting outcomes society might realize from alternate transportation regimes and leave how to get from A to B to the engineers. I recently viewed a TED talk by Ellen Dunham-Jones (also of Georgia Tech) on the topic of Retrofitting Suburbia, laying out the argument for reclaiming abandoned strip malls and big box stores that are the hallmark of the suburban landscape. In addition to the reclamation of abandoned existing structures she also points to the importance of building on top of existing structures as well. One community that Durham-Jones holds up as an example is the D.C. suburb of Hyattsville, Maryland (10:25 in video linked above). Hyattsville has experienced over a decade of growth and renewal in its downtown. What was in the early 90′s a suburban office building and not much else, connected to the rest of the world only by conventional highway transportation system, is now a vibrant community featuring a downtown arts district, and a mixed use residential and retail site. Importantly for this month’s topic of transportation, this development coincided with the opening of two DC Metro stations in Hyattsville. In 1993 D.C. Metro extended service connecting Hyattsville with Washington D.C. providing more convenient transportation for commuters living in the city to reach office jobs in the suburbs and for suburban dwellers to enjoy the best parts of the city life. This is one of the indirect benefits of transportation technology like the Maglev trains profiled on Brain Canvas last week by Preston. Trains that can easily reach speeds of 500 mph extend the radius of commutable communities by hundreds of miles, opening up the distant suburbs and exurbs to the exiting outcomes described by Dunham-Jones and realized by Hyattsville, Maryland.

The United States Constitutions provides for Citizen Soldiers in its second amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The concept of Citizen Soldiery is not merely a right for individual citizens to bear arms, but rather a duty that citizens have to arm themselves in defending the country from foreign invasion or domestic misrule. It is a direct result of the revolutionary war experiences of the founders, when foreign soldiers were forcibly quartered with local civilians and incidents like the Boston Massacre created a need to balance the rights of the people against the military. This concept has become somewhat antiquated in the modern era, not least of all because of the practical challenge posed by the modern equipment and armaments that any potential foreign or domestic threat would likely possess. However, today’s National Guard does traces its roots to this idea. The idea of citizens having not only a right but a responsibility to protect the interests of their communities and make them better places to live is a noble concept. NASA already routinely uses the principles of crowdsourcing to help them analyze the mountains of data collected by satellites and observatories that cannot be reliably processed by computers. Their “Be a Martian” project is definitely one of the more innovative and interactive approaches to this sort of work. NASA is on the right track, but why not take things one step further in terms of comprehensiveness and accessibility. How about, for instance, an application that allows different agencies or community organizations to release geotagged science projects for individuals to take on that would improve their communities. Imagine opening the app on your phone and seeing a project from the US Wildlife Fund to photograph endangered birds in the woods near your house, or a project from the EPA to measure groundwater purity in the park down the street.

In case you missed it, our theme for June is to give our own little Brain Canvas preview to an initiative being launched by the General Services Administration in July to crowdsource solutions to the problems faced by different government agencies. Throughout the month of June we’ll be posting different challenges in government, along with our proposed solution. Ironically, the first challenge that the GSA posts might be to ask for solutions on how to promote and market its new project effectively. While the GSA crowdsourcing initiative is a fantastic concept, it can really only work effectively if there is a critical mass of individuals using the platform. Its worth pointing out that this is by no means a given, as Challenge Post currently has just 60 posted challenges, only one of which has been tagged “government”. Most of those only have a handful of people who have actually submitted solutions (with a few notable exceptions for the ones with large cash rewards – an important point which we’ll consider momentarily). Not exactly the kind of numbers that put the “crowd” in crowdsource. So figuring out how to get an appropriate number of people using this thing is certainly a challenge that the GSA at least better consider. But its not just about the volume of people, its also making sure that these people fit a particular kind of profile. They’ll need to make sure that innovative, entrepreneurial and creative people are applying their mental prowess to these challenges. At the same time this is a great chance to get more people participating in government with fresh new ideas, so it also needs to appeal to people who aren’t already lobbying, consulting or otherwise influencing or commenting on policy. So in summary you need bright, entrepreneurial, laypeople. People who are equipped with the right education, experience or genuine creativity who are outside of government. Something of a tall order, but what you ultimately need is a world class marketer to really promote the heck out of this. I am certainly not that marketer, but here are a few ideas I have on how this sort of campaign would have to look. 1. Build a sense of community Peer pressure and a sense of belonging are two pretty powerful motivators. Whatever the final platform looks like, it needs to incorporate specific elements of social networking platforms in order to give users a community to connect with and a personal identity that can exist within that community. I would see this as something akin to Facebook, where you could form groups, send messages, post contact and get updates on different challenges by say, which department they are coming from or which issues they might be trying to tackle. In fact, they might just want to make it a Facebook app, or at least a standalone app that interfaces with Facebook. Its quite possible that this would be enough to do it on its own, provided that the challenge content being posted is good enough to be driven by users over existing channels and platforms. 2. Go Global Nowhere could I find whether the ability to propose solutions to challenges would be restricted by national origin. At first it seems almost stupid to ask whether this would become an issue, but the nativist counter-argument is almost too easy to predict. “Americans are the most innovative people in the world. Why do we need non-residents, or even resident non-citizens, to tell us how to solve our own problems?” Of course, that question would be stupid to ask. The challenges that America faces (e.g. reducing our reliance or hydro-carbons while promoting economic growth) are often ones that ultimately end up impacting other people outside this country as well. The other, simpler, answer is that a good idea can come from anywhere. To reject it out of hand just because “you” didn’t come up with it is the worst kind of self defeating arrogance. Simply put my response to that would be, “grow up”. At any rate, lets hope the GSA isn’t pressured in any way to make this concession. It would kill the entire concept before it even started, in my opinion. Finally… 3. Exploit the incentives There are three major incentives that this concept provides for would be participants. Whomever is writing the guidelines for what challenges should look like, along with whomever is responsible for marketing this, should give ample credence to all three, in no particular order:

• Helping your community, country and world
• Recognition. This is why the community is so key. Who cares if you win something that nobody you respect cares about?
• Money. People should be compensated justly for their solution if its selected. It obviously also attracts more individuals or start-ups to participate. The best part is it would probably still be a fraction of the amount it would cost to get a ‘professional’ consultant

So there you have it. Build a global community motivated by a few monetary and social incentives and you should have a good starting base of users. If we actually see this up on the GSA platform next month, my next step will be to actually propose how to do those things.

I like to think that our theme this month is, in some ways, getting back to our Brain Canvas roots: the delivery of high quality unadulterated “what if” scenarios. This month’s twist comes in response to a recent announcement made by the U.S. General Services Administration, a federal agency responsible for providing support for the basic functioning of other government agencies like the Department of Agriculture, Department of Education and others. Its mission is, “to use expertise to provide innovative solutions for our customers [i.e. government agencies] in support of their missions and by so doing foster an effective, sustainable, and transparent government for the American people.” The GSA, as its known, will launch an app in July hosted by ChallengePost, an online crowd-sourcing platform, that will ask the public submit their ideas for different challenges that will be posted by different government agencies. In June, Brain Canvas will offer a preview of what this innovative approach from the GSA could look like. Since the app won’t launch until July, we’ll be playing the role of both federal agency and innovative citizen, posting the challenges that we would most like to see address along with our proposed solution. We invite you to leave your own solution in the comments section of each post. The best comment from the month will win a T-shirt with the Brain Canvas logo. Look for the first challenge to be posted next week!

It was a Tuesday afternoon when they sealed the borders of the campus. Confusion spread around the place as students and faculty found they could not leave.  Shortly after the police and paramilitary trucks rolled into place to block access, the president of the university administration was heard on all the loudspeakers on campus, calling for all students to go to their dorms and all faculty to their offices; if they live off-campus, then they should stay in their classrooms, he clarified. Twenty minutes later, as the sound of helicopters whisked the air with a steady chopping beat, uniformed teams of administration lackeys strode into the gathering rooms of the old campus.  They carried with them large black bags and cases.  They all wore hard plastic face masks and body armor, giving them the appearance of riot police.  Each team carried a portable radio, which they turned on loudly while they called for the increasingly nervous population to sit down and shut up.  The voice of the president quacked to life: “You are now a part of a vital experiment, in which you must participate at pain of legal action or bodily harm against your person.  These people in black are referees.  You must obey them and you may not harm them.  They are carrying your equipment for the experiment.  The campus has been cordoned off into two base halves, and you are now on a team by virtue of which building you happen to be in right now.  The referees will give you armor with pressure sensation and GPS tracking, and everyone will receive a paintball gun.  West campus is the Red Team, East campus is the Blue Team.  After everyone is issued equipment, the doors will open.  Your team must capture the other team’s beacon and bring it safely back to your citadel, a location which the referees will reveal when they produce each team’s flag.  When you are shot, depending on where you are hit, you will either have to receive in-simulation medical care or you will be out of the simulation and your gun will stop working.  If  you are out of the simulation due to your wounds, there will be a nightly airlift to take the disabled to a holding facility where you will stay until the simulation ends.  The campus will only be unsealed when one team has captured the other’s beacon and returned it to their own citadel, and I personally verify that they have won.  Each side of the campus has one dining hall currently in their possession, which is stocked with enough food to support the needs of half the campus population for seven days.  Enjoy the paintball war.” His voice did not rise or fall, nor were there any hesitations or errant utterances, while he delivered this most unexpected address. Read the rest of this entry »

The predominant trend since the Second Industrial Revolution has been for the young to move to cities, where there is more opportunity and infrastructure; primarily for employment but also for culture and social opportunity. The villages and small towns of the hinterland are left without a strong talent base and slip into a perilous decline on account of brain drain. If the Internet and its applications are able to attract a large suite of industries that require workers to have no particular place to do their job so long as they have high bandwidth, people could voluntarily move out to the country without fear of losing other opportunities. They could even create a sort of new wave of “intentional communities” where people of different backgrounds and skill sets move to certain towns.  Perhaps they migrate because of the weather, recreational opportunities, cultural heritage, or just because they like the name of the town – but always because that town has high bandwidth. These social migrants could formulate a new culture in each community, halting or even reversing the dominant trend of cultural hegemony. Small cities and rural villages which aggressively pursue bandwidth resources, possibly through municipal broadband initiatives, would completely transform their economic and cultural prospects.  Decayed failed industrial towns which gain a critical amount of bandwidth, and are lucky enough to be chosen by a particular social migrant community as their home, could see a boom like that which towns located along the Interstate experienced two generations ago.  Towns that are not on best natural harbor in the world or that lack a massive airport can leverage other benefits they have.  Some of them may have a large number of attractive prewar homes.  They may be picturesquely located along a difficult-to-reach mountain ridge or beach, or be situated next to a sleepy river.  Some small college towns already have the keys to economic and cultural success that could be amplified by a massive injection of bandwidth and smart promotion. “Nice town, but I couldn’t be a (name it) here.  There aren’t enough jobs.” Or, “I love these open spaces.  If only my company’s office could be out here!”  These sad words should deliver no more nightmares to local chambers of commerce.  The wireless worker is not a new phenomenon, but it still takes a certain industry or certain kind of worker to become a digital nomad.  Only huge cities, which are also Internet hubs, have enough bandwidth to be both reliable and affordable to enable telecommuting for the masses.  Not until a critical mass of companies can meet and work nearly 100% virtually will intentional social migration become a possibility.  The United States is notably behind other developed nations in both broadband speed and deployment.  The economic backcountry should take the lead in gaining broadband services and a whole new cultural phenomenon could become easily attainable for most Americans.  Furthermore, this idea of social migration enabled by high bandwidth would not just be limited to the US: any country with high bandwidth and an interested populace could see a new migratory wave – away from the cities. Intentional social migrants, fueled by a hunger for bandwidth, could revitalize the cultural and economic outlook of the developed world.

A dark cloud has rolled over the cultural landscape with the merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation into one massive lord of the overpriced ticketing realm.  Ticketmaster is already infamous for its hefty “convenience fees,” but its clout is such that even when bands like Pearl Jam have tried to take a stand, they always have to come crawling back, because there just was not enough room for them to negotiate.  The merger with their only remotely similar competitor, however, brings the price-gouging juggernaut too far. I am a fan of tunes, and even more of a fan of seeing live music.  I also believe that the apex of artistry comes from live performance, and that musicians ought to make their real earthly treasure from performance, not selling canned music.  This merger unfortunately backs performing artists into a corner: if they grow successful enough to play larger venues, they almost certainly will run into the LiveTicketNationMaster cartel. Those musicians who make their fame and living by touring hard and letting fans tape their shows to trade freely ought to join together in the name of music as a form of cultural expression and do something about this.  What if a critical mass of performing artists said “no way” to performing in venues paying tribute to the ticket giant?  I read an interview with virtuoso guitarist Derek Trucks some years back in which he predicted this exact same problem arising, and said something like “but if we have to play in people’s back yards to keep live music going, then that is exactly what we’ll do.”  Unfortunately Derek has not yet taken a stand on that claim. This must happen.  Content and media conglomerates have already fenced off whole cultural pastimes that used to be a free, shared part of the human experience.  If those artists who truly drive musical innovation and command a large and dedicated fanbase took a stand in partnership with smaller community venues, we could see a serious alternative arise to Ticketmaster.  It could start with actual people with (big) backyards hosting bands for concerts with minimal overhead, while bands refuse to play at “compromised” TicketNation venues.  While that movement takes off, community venues can negotiate together to offer attractive, low-cost packages to sidestep Ticketmaster-LiveNation and provide a space for a new community that celebrates the best part of the old music culture: affordable concerts, good places for artists and fans to develop something together, and ultimately a higher proliferation of musical acts that are able to draw a higher number of fans. Music makers of the world unite!

Given the holiday we in the US celebrate today and the recent tragedy in the Caribbean, I have been torn all weekend whether to write something here today about Martin Luther King, Jr. or Haiti. I’ve decided to forgo the latter until next time, in large part things ot this quotation from King himself which will serve nicely as a springboard into my “What If…” query for this week. From King’s “I have been to the mountaintop” speech. Towards the end of his speech he referenced recent threats against his life saying:

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. So I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

He gave this speech on April 3, 1968. The day before he was assassinated. What is interesting to consider about King, and something I think most people today don’t realize, is just how subversive of a figure he truly was. Being now immortalized in a federally sanctioned national holiday, and his life story memorized by children of all colors (at least in America), its easy to forget that he was in life such a socially and politically subversive figure. What is interesting to consider is if such subversive characters still have the ability to make such a huge positive impact on society in today’s world. Somewhat surprisingly (to myself at any rate), I believe the clear and honest answer to this question to be no. If I think about the people over the last 20 years (about a generation) who have changed the world in some way, most of the people who come to my mind are not people who did it by challenging the status quo outside of the system, but rather people who worked within the system to achieve their ends. Perhaps the perfect foil to the example of King is President Obama. I’m not arguing that they have made equal impacts on the world (although both have won Nobel Peace Prizes), but at the very least both have risen to impeccable heights. The important point here is that they have taken drastically different paths to do so. Now for me, the interesting question is, of course, why is this the case? I think its easy, and also probably true to an extent, to point to the society we live in today to be the primary cause of this. Through political change, technological innovation and economic development, more people in the world have access to the opportunities one needs to influence the issues we face than ever before. A greater number of people have been able to join the conversation. Another important thing to consider is whether a subversive approach would be adequate to tackle the problems our world faces today. Protests in Copenhagen at the COP 15 summit probably did very little to bring about its extremely underwhelming conclusion. The problems our world faces today, whether they be climate change, education or terrorism are more complex and may require the resources that one can leverage “inside” the system to be adequately tackled. The heroes and revolutionaries from our time will be the entrepreneurs, politicians and scientists who worked within the system to start the enterprises, build the coalitions and invent the technologies that saved the world.

I am tired of 90% of my experiences of “going out” to “the bar” (and I HATE how everyone calls multiple establishments “the bar” as if there is one, unbroken mythical bar asserted in varied aspects and avatars through different locations) involving being too cramped, surrounded by people who are too drunk and all look the same, and drowned out by head-against-a-car-door beating and repetitive music.  The reader may call me a damned antisocial fiend for saying that, since so many people apparently either like or say they like those things about going out. Some bars I have been to have pleased me greatly though.  I recall The Echo Tap in Madison, Wisconsin, for its down-played decor, personable tenders, and non-pounding ambiance which allows for plenty of conversation – in that case, high-stakes political wheeling and dealing was undertaken without the need to shout, or any key words garbled in the three feet between my mouth and my blog-colleague’s.  A more recent outing imprinted in memory was in Philadelphia at National Mechanics, which I will confess so impressed me that is is sort of an inspiration for the following. A great public house should not be like a cattle car with alcohol instead of feeding tubes.  Even if the cattle car is swank, dive, themed, local or a veritable meat market, it is still full of too many mammals making the same sounds.  More than ample space is needed to free the customer from claustrophobia.  It could mean high ceilings, a long hallway, or big windows.  The bar itself should be fairly long with good amenities like a round wrist-wrest (much appreciated), a lip at the edge to prevent spillage from having any consequences on your clothes, hooks at knee level for bags and purses, and a footrest at the least.  The barstools should be ergonomically constructed to lend themselves to being sat in for a long time with minimal discomfort.  A large main room is a good idea, with plenty of tables and a space at the front for a performance or speech if required, but the tables should remain on the floor unless there is a special event.  I would like to sit at a bar and talk, not bounce around on my feet, generally. Off from the main room there should be side rooms and stalls, which can either be occupied on a first-come first-serve basis or can be reserved prior.  They should vary in the amount of space offered, from four people in a small stall to up to about twenty people in a larger room, for discussions and meetings of all sort to be permitted to take place.  The bathroom amenities should be designed so that, no matter what, long lines are not the norm – and keep the bathrooms clean! Primarily the public house is a space for people to come together.  It should be like a town hall, except you can drink and swear.  You should be able to do those things at a town hall as well, but failing that, let it be the public house.  The wall decoration should be the product of local artisans, or maybe collections from patrons’ travels.  The music if at all possible should be live and played on real instruments, or spun by a real DJ – but should only be loud when it really needs to be loud.  As for the smell, if the publican can take care to not let any part of the bar smell like Jaegerbomb vomit, then they will probably do a good job with the upkeep of the rest of the olfactory ambiance. Food is key during the day, and some of it at night as well.  The food should not just be common “bar food.”  The establishment should take pride in its menu and not dip everything into the fryer.  Like in Spain, free small snacks should come with every drink someone orders.  Coffee should be available all the time, right up to last call. When I decide to go to a bar, whether at noon or at eleven in the evening, I should expect that I will either see someone there I have met before, or that I will have no trouble meeting someone new, almost without great effort.  Connections should be made constantly, and ideas and stories should be exchanged.  Going with friends, I should expect to be able to have a conversation without screaming in each other’s ear and not have the conversation be limited to how expensive the beer is or how there is no room.  The bar should be a place to talk about cool things, and not just things that some people find cool – the people who want to go to bars all the time.  Businesses should be started from conversations at bars every week.  Political ideas should be hatched.  New romances should be made – not just one-night stands.  Societies should be able to meet in the rooms and meeting-spaces regularly and then get half off drinks for the rest of the night when their meeting is done.  The bar should promote these societies. The bar should also decide to stand for something in the community, beyond just being there for the community to meet and drink.  A political focus? A business focus? A spiritual focus?  A particular activity, like a sport or a hobby or music?   By encouraging people to become active in the community that establishes itself in its space, the bar welcomes these patrons to become participants and shapers of the experience there.  They become stakeholders instead of customers.  Then things can really happen, and these movements and communities become known to many more people than if they had to meet in someone’s residence or another private space. In the end though, I just want a place where I can enjoy one or many drinks and have a few conversations.