Systems Thanking

You’ve probably heard by now that, over the weekend, The BBSC hosted our first ever community-building event. There are so many contributors to this event worthy of recognition that it’s almost impossible to name them all. Nonetheless, we’re going to try. And, because we’re big-brained superheroes, we’re going to try hard.

First, our corporate and non-profit sponsors.

Look at just some of what these folks contributed!

And the sponsors are…

-> Judkins St. Cafe
-> Somali Community Services of Seattle
-> 4 Fun Dog Training
-> ITSPHUN
-> Ada’s Technical Books
-> GeekGirlCon
-> Seattle Bouldering Project
-> Cellar Door Mercantile
-> SparkFun
-> Elliott Bay Books
-> Renton Computers
-> Lisa Arnold Consulting.

Whew! That’s a lot of love! And we’re not even done yet. Next up, the people who devoted their time and energy (and often money) to making this event a success:

-> Danielle Henderson—our amazing emcee
-> Volunteers from Judkins St. Cafe (including Ed the printer)
-> Volunteers from Somali Community Services
-> The Big-Brained Superheroes who volunteered
-> All the event attendees (aka the adventurers)
-> All the folks who couldn’t make it but bought tickets anyway!

Whew! That’s a lot more love! And yet there’s still more. The BBSC is big on making the invisible visible. And doing so means that, while we might not go all the way to back to Nikola Tesla and Charles Babbage, we still have a lot of thanking to do.

For instance, our digital logic and circuit board activities wouldn’t exist without:

-> All the Big-Brained Superhackers
-> The City of Seattle Technology Matching Fund (including taxpayers like you!)
-> Somali Community Services (again)
-> Xbot Robotics
-> Sparkfun (again)
-> The Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio where we got the great circuit board platform idea
-> And even the folks at REStore who cut our wood for us.

Plus, there are those who contribute the basic stuff that rarely gets the love and attention it deserves, such as:

-> Yesler Community Center—where we hold our meetings and build much of our cool stuff
-> Julianna from SPACE who so long ago donated the paper products we’re still using today
-> And all the Big-Brained Superhero volunteers (past and present) and friends who are often thinking of us and joining in to lend many hands when needed most.

And the list goes on…

What we’re getting at is that, while we Big-Brained Superheroes work incredibly hard every day to make cool things happen, we recognize that we’re just a tiny pale blue dot in a vast universe of amazingness that expands around us all the time. Stepping back and appreciating this universe every so often underscores our responsibility to deal kindly with each other and to preserve and cherish our own place in it.