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I’ve proposed a talk for SXSW Interactive next March called “Stop Talking, Start Making,” and I would love it you could visit the SXSW PanelPicker and vote for my presentation (along with all the other sessions that interest you). SXSW is unique from other conferences in that the popular vote heavily influences their selection, so your voice definitely counts!

“Stop Talking, Start Making” is about the importance of rolling up your sleeves very early in the creative process, and spending 24 hours getting your hands dirty building something. You can’t just sketch something out or put together a few slides in a PowerPoint presentation, you’ve got to build and demonstrate a working product.

In the tech world, this approach isn’t new. For years, it’s happened at BarCamps and hackathons, and the ethos is a central part in many hacker labs, co-working spaces, and publications.

But this presentation isn’t for developers — it’s for creative types, marketers and brand owners. You’ll learn ways you can incorporate the hackathon model into your creative development process—to rethink a brand, quickly build ideas from scratch, and to incorporate new and emerging technologies into an existing brand.

You’ll also learn how the hackathon can be an invaluable tool for evaluating and nurturing internal talent, as well as for recruiting new talent.

Most importantly, it will be fun and entertaining. I promise.

The Challenge: Build and release an app that required less than 12 hours of work.
The Result: NYC Subway Status for Android

I’ve been beating the drum lately on the need to build things very quickly. I’ve found that despite loads of thinking and planning, often you don’t discover most of the real problems with your idea until you’re knee deep in development. Building something in a brief time period is meant to short circuit the process and avoid analysis paralysis.

Working this way, though, can be very stressful. You’re having to cut corners, to make compromises, and to eliminate functionality in order to meet your deadline. However, working like this also forces you to simplify your ideas and focus on the core user experience which can lead to a simpler, more refined final product. Sometimes it’s better to do one feature well than to cram in three or four features.

The result of this latest personal challenge is the NYC Subway Status app for Android. It was built in a few hours and does one thing very well — tells you if the NYC Subway lines are running smoothly, encountering delays, or scheduling maintenance. Here are some screenshots of the app in action.

You can install the app for free just by searching on the Android Market. Alternatively, you can scan in this barcode on your phone.

Enjoy!

UPDATE: Version 1.0.3 now released!

Last night I attended the In Code We Trust meetup at Eyebeam, which was an excellent gathering of people talking about what they’re currently doing in the Gov 2.0 space.

One of the speakers was Sarah Kaufman from the MTA, highlighting the hard work they’re doing right now to help bring MTA information and data to the developer community. Check out the MTA data sets currently available including the new GIS information about subway entrances and exits.

Sarah’s talk reminded me of something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time — create a simple calculator to figure out how much money to put on a MetroCard. The MTA vending machines make it easy to put an exact dollar amount on a card, but it doesn’t make it easy to figure out how to add 4 rides or 8 rides to a card. It’s not a hard problem, so I took 30 minutes last night and made a simple web page that figures this out for you. It should work on iPhone and Android, so check it out.

http://bit.ly/mtacalc

Finally, I should add that I made this in 30 minutes, so it’s probably got bugs, but who cares? It’s usable. It’s a released product. It’s more important to get something out there and get feedback than to linger in development forever trying to make it “perfect”. Let me know what you think.

I’ve been posting some of my more technically-oriented posts and micro-posts over on http://www.techreative.com/. Here’s the most recent one.

Making Android development designer friendly

So a few weeks ago, I went to The Meat Hook to pick up a beef roast for Christmas dinner. Brent helped me pick out a nice 8 lb. roast (which he then layered with fat and tied nicely — something I don’t think I quite fully appreciated until the roast came out of the oven), and then we got down to business. I’ve been following The Meat Hook on Twitter for a while now, and these guys aren’t just dealing with your ordinary bits. They’re cranking out stuff like chorizo-stuffed duck hearts, goose rillettes, lamb belly and bahn mi dogs. That’s right, they took a Vietnamese sandwich and turned it into a sausage. HOT.

Compared to these guys, I’m clearly Mr. Amateur Newbie, so I gave Brent my 10 second charcuterie resume, and asked him to surprise me with whatever he’s got in the meat locker. He came out first with some pig’s skin, rolled it up, wrapped it up and handed it to me. I thought that might be all, but then he went back in the locker and emerged with a pig’s head.

Yup, a whole head. They had already taken the cheeks out to make guanciale, but there was still plenty of meat left, so I headed for the checkout with a beef roast in one hand and a pig’s head in the other. It was going to be an interesting weekend.

I’d never cooked a pig’s head before, so I figured I’d play it safe and start with the basics, namely head cheese, which isn’t really cheese at all, more like a meat jelly terrine. I used the recipe in my copy of Fergus Henderson’s The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating. And since it’s not every day that you get a whole pig’s head, I also decided to make the Crispy Pig Ear salad from the book. Both the head cheese and the crispy ears turned out pretty good considering it was my first attempt making them, but what really turned out amazing was the recipe I made with the roll of pig’s skin.

Brent told me how you could slow cook thin ribbons of pig skin in a tomato sauce and after a few hours just before the skin completely falls apart, you end up with the most delicious porky ragu you could ever want. So I gave that a shot, and it turned out awesome. Here’s a pic of the final three dishes, and below is the recipe I hacked together for the ragu.

Pigskin Ragu with handmade pappardelle, alongside Crispy Pig Ears and Head Cheese.

Pigskin Ragu (if the name weirds you out, you can also call it Football Ragu)

Ingredients

• 1 fennel bulb
• 2-3 medium sized leeks
• 1 large can (28 oz.) of whole, peeled tomatoes
• 1 roll of pigskin (about 1/2 lb.)
• olive oil
• salt, pepper and whatever other fresh green italian herbs you have on hand (e.g. parsley, thyme, rosemary)

Directions

Thinly slice the pig’s skin into strips about 1/8″ wide and 1″ long. Saute in a pan with a little olive oil over medium heat for a few minutes just to heat them through and to brown the outside a little. Now open the can of tomatoes and strain off all of the tomato juice into the pan with the pig’s skin. Add a little bit more water if the pigskin isn’t fully covered. Turn the heat down to low and let this simmer for about an hour.

Meanwhile, thinly slice the fennel bulb and leeks. Saute in a stock pot with a little bit of olive oil on medium heat for about 5 minutes until they’ve sweated some. Coarsely chop the canned tomatoes, and then add them to the pot. Turn the heat down to very low and let simmer. You don’t want the pigskin or the tomato mixture to boil, so just keep them low and slow for the next hour.

After an hour of simmering, pour the pigskin/tomato juice mixture into the pot with the leeks, fennel and tomato. Add whatever fresh herbs you want and stir everything together. Continue to simmer for another hour, tasting and seasoning as you like, just be careful that if you simmer the sauce much longer the pig skin will start to completely melt. Personally, I stopped cooking the ragu just before this melting point so that there was still some texture to the finished ragu. But if you don’t like that, just keep simmering and the texture will melt away, but the flavor will remain.

Once the ragu is done, serve with your favorite pasta. In my case, I just threw together some handmade pappardelle using the 3:2 Pasta Dough from the Ratio iPhone App. Delicious.

So for the past few months, I’ve been working with food writer Michael Ruhlman on the iPhone adaptation of his cookbook “Ratio”. Well pop some bubbly, cause the app is now live in iTunes!

Purchase Ratio for iPhone and iPod Touch

Dear American Airlines and Japan Airlines.

This week I flew in business class from JFK to Singapore and you lost my luggage. The luggage was not delayed or misrouted, it was completely LOST.

Twelve hours after I landed in Singapore, there was still no sign of my bag, so I had to go out at my own expense and buy new business attire for my three days of client meetings.

For the next several days, I called both Japan Airlines and American Airlines twice a day to determine what happened, and neither airline could locate my bag. All they could tell me is that my bag tag number (403648) was cancelled at JFK before the plane took off and no one has seen the bag since. I find it hard to believe that in this age of heightened security, a bag can just be cancelled after check-in and disappear that easily, but this is what you’re telling me happened.

One week has passed, I’m now back in NYC from my business trip, and no progress has been made. The bag is probably gone for good, but what upsets me even more is that neither airline is taking responsibility for this and are pointing fingers at each other. Japan Airlines says that American Airlines never put the bag on my flight from JFK to Narita, so it’s American’s problem and I need to follow up with American. American Airlines says that since my final destination in Singapore was on Japan Airlines (apparently it doesn’t matter that it was an AA flight number), then I have to resolve this myself with Japan Airlines. I’ve talked to representatives at both airlines in their company wide 800 numbers, at the local offices in JFK and Singapore, and even to the Executive Platinum desk at American, and no one has an answer, just another number for me to call that eventually circles back around to where I started.

I’ve spent enough time calling people and filling out forms. I’m done. This needs to be resolved immediately. And I’m going to give you one last chance.

I’ve tried going through your channels, but that’s not working so I’m challenging you to resolve this here online. I’m giving you the chance to show the world your commitment to customer service. I fly your airline a lot (100K miles this year, 1.1 million in my lifetime), and I know the airline industry has taken a beating in this economy. I’m not here to berate you more. I want you to succeed. That’s why I’m giving you this opportunity. Don’t let me down,

-Will

UPDATE #1: The automated email system from American Airlines notified me that a file number was created. I2009/12-05761-00011-001-00. No contact from a real person though.

UPDATE #2: American Airlines has responded! They took the time to write me a long letter from their customer service department saying that Japan Airlines is responsible and that I need to follow up with them. Yes they did….

A lot of people find this blog because of my articles on mobile bar codes, so I thought I would mention Google’s spotlight today celebrating the 57th birthday of the bar code. In case you miss Google.com today, here’s a screenshot.

Pretty sweet.

May 30-31 is BarCampNYC4. Register now as slots are disappearing quickly.

I’m putting together something to talk about RepresentedBy and its future development roadmap. Will anyone else be working on something around open government, or technology for change? Would love to assemble a group session on this.

For the past two months, I’ve been developing RepresentedBy, a Facebook application created for the Sunlight Labs Apps For America competition. During the two months of development, I’ve immersed myself in the online government world and while I’ve been exposed to quite a lot of great work by passionate individuals, I’ve also realized how little of Congress is digitally transparent.

Digitally transparent can mean a lot of things to different people, so in an attempt to quantify that, I’ve developed what I’m calling the DTI, or Digital Transparency Index. This is a number between 0 and 115 that gives you a rough idea of how engaged a legislator is in the digital world. Legislators are scored on the following criteria:

• 25 points if they have a public facing email address
• 20 points if their website has a valid RSS feed
• 10 bonus points if they’ve posted a news item to their RSS feed in the past week, 5 bonus points if they’ve posted a news item to their RSS feed in the past month
• 20 points if they have an active Twitter account
• 10 bonus points if all of the tweets on their home page are from the past week, 5 bonus points if all of the tweets on their home page are from the past month
• 20 points if they have an active YouTube account
• 10 bonus points if they’ve posted a YouTube video in the past week, 5 bonus points if they’ve posted a YouTube video in the past month

The sad truth is that Congress isn’t as digitally immersed as a lot of us. Out of 115 possible points, the highest score anyone received was an 85. Worst of all, out of 451 active legislators, 209 of them scored a big fat zero, 161 legislators scored low (meaning an index of 35 or less), and only 81 legislators scored 40 or higher.

My first assumption was that this gap was an age related issue. The average age of Congress is around 60 years old which isn’t exactly the average age of of your cutting edge Internet user. However, I compared the results of the Digital Transparency Index with the number of years that someone has been in Congress and didn’t notice any obvious trends implying a difference based on age. Here’s a graph showing the results.

The far right of this graph indicates highly engaged digital legislators, and the far left of the graph indicates poorly engaged digital legislators. Aside from the large number of legislators who are not digitally engaged, when you start looking closely at highly engaged digital legislators, there’s not a huge disparity between the number of new, younger legislators engaging digitally and older, veteran legislators engaging digitally.

Next, I wondered if there was a connection between digital transparency and earmarks. Taxpayer.net recently released information about active legislators and the earmarks they have included in the 2009 stimulus package so I compared the amount of solo earmarks included by each legislator with their Digital Transparency Index, and graphed the results:

While there is a disproportionately large number of legislators who are not digitally engaged and who have not sponsored large earmarks, you’ll notice that as digital engagement increases, there becomes fewer and fewer legislators who are sponsoring extremely large earmarks. The only exception to this rule is Nancy Pelosi who has a very large Digital Transparency Index (80), but has also sponsored a large number of solo earmarks ($15,667,000).

Is this a trend? Does being digitally engaged and having real-time communication with your constituents discourage legislators from sponsoring earmarks? Or is it the opposite and legislators who don’t support earmarks on principle are more likely to take that message directly to the people and engage with them digitally?

Here’s a table summarizing my findings.

If you want to see where your legislator falls on either of these graphs, then check out RepresentedBy, a Facebook application I’m creating which includes this information and personalizes it to your specific district.

Finally, I hope to develop the Digital Transparency Index some more, so if you have any comments or suggestions on how to improve it, then please include them in the comments.