I promised a few weeks back to join Katrin on the Mukodu Blog. This is my first Mukodu post, co-authored with Katrin, and cross-posted on MyOwnPirateRadio. Sorry, no pictures.

People have been asking what we’re up to with Mukodu. While we can’t talk in detail yet on the specifics of what we’re doing, we are ready to share with you our vision, our motivation, and the company culture we intend to build.

Over the past ten years Katrin and I have lived in two countries, three different cities, and five different homes. We’ve also had the good fortune of travelling broadly. In doing so, we’ve recognized a common challenge: more and more people live in and move between urban areas, where they seek new opportunities, new friendships, and increased quality of life. Yet newcomers often don’t know where to begin, or how to get connected in a city, despite being surrounded by people. At the same time, "old-timers" often get so caught up in the routine of daily life — working, commuting, connecting with friends and family — that they fall out of touch with the changes going on around them, and with the people and resources right outside their front doors. It’s a great irony: despite living in populous, thriving, dynamic cities, we are so often disconnected. Thus the inspiration for the Mukodu blog, and for our first product, 5 Blocks Out.

5 Blocks Out is about connecting people with local life and culture. If you’re new to an area and trying to figure out which neighbourhood to call home, 5 Blocks Out will help you. If you want to learn what’s happening in the nooks and crannies of the city around you, 5 Blocks Out will keep you informed and up to date. If you want to hear what real people like you have to say about local places, events, and issues, 5 Blocks Out will help you to tap into urban word of mouth. And if you’re interested in helping others find “nearby good stuff”, thereby supporting local communities (yay!) and reducing environmental footprint (yay!), 5 Blocks Out plans to help you there too. 

Why work on a challenge like this? Because we love the places we’ve lived, and the friendships we’ve made there, and we want more of the same for everyone. We believe cities whose people engage in neighbourhood life, local culture, and civic discourse have unlimited potential as places to live. We believe healthy connections between people within neighbourhoods are essential. We believe the collective voice and wisdom of a city’s inhabitants is more interesting and, indeed, more personally relevant, than the voice of popular media. And so we’re setting out to create a community powered by the people, for the people, with the goal of making cities great places to live.

Mukodu is just getting going: for roughly the past year it’s been Katrin and myself, working together in true startup fashion: 25 hour days, 8 days a week, 1 to 2 minor miracles per day. We’re learning how to bootstrap a business on a shoestring, design and build products together, and leap tall buildings in a single bound. We’ve spent a great deal of time analyzing, debating strategy, and thinking through minute design and implementation details. We’ve learned a lot, and built the beginnings of something we think you’ll love. It’s been thrilling, and terrifying, and the most fun we’ve ever had "working". We count ourselves very fortunate to be doing something we’re passionate about, day in and day out. We owe huge thanks to all of you who have supported us thus far.

Mukodu is also growing, and we’re looking forward to growing further. We’ve recently had a great boost with part-time help from Katy, Aaron, and Troy. We’re plugged in to a wonderful community and office space at the Centre for Social Innovation. And we’re starting to bring on some trusted advisors to kick the tires on our product and provide more guidance as we near public release.

While we aren’t in a position to hire people yet, we soon hope to be. We’ll need help: in particular, more software engineering and operations talent to build and run a kick-ass software service; advisors and board members to guide us; and angels to help prime the pump. We’re looking for these folks, starting now. We want people who share our values, passion, and hunger to change the world. We want people who are smart, scrappy, and get things done. We want people with creativity and a love for data analysis and problem-solving. We want people who understand that "going live on the web" is just the beginning; we must also have the humility to continually seek feedback and iteratively build something that actually works for customers and solves their needs. We want people who can handle the uncertainty and risk inherent in a startup environment, and whose instinctive response to a challenge is, "Can do!". If that sounds like you, or someone you know, let’s talk. 

We’re excited. We are getting great feedback. And with your help, we will make a real change.

Fire it up!

Osh and Katrin

Hello readers. I have two exciting announcements to make today.

First, Osh, my partner in crime, is going to join me in writing on the Mukodu Blog. He normally blogs over at MyOwnPirateRadio.com, covering, shall we say, “geekier” topics. Moving forward Osh will be contributing to Mukodu, and occasionally cross-posting both here and on his personal blog. You’ll see his first post in short order.

Second, as some of you know, Osh and I are collaborating on putting together a web startup under the “Mukodu” umbrella. We want to build on the core idea I’ve been exploring here: discovering local “good stuff” by tapping into the knowledge of your friends and neighours. So… [drum roll]… moving forward, we will be blogging about our brand new startup — Mukodu Inc. — and the projects we’re working on together.

We’re calling our first project “5 Blocks Out”. The web site is currently under development, and all going well, we’ll begin opening it up for public trial later this summer. If you’d like an invitation to participate in the Beta release, drop us your email at www.5BlocksOut.com and we’ll let you know when we’re ready to go.

Stay tuned for more!

Technorati Tags: handmade, homemade, Toronto

Saving Grace is an old favourite place for lunch/brunch on Dundas near Trinity Bellwoods Park. The delicious food is homemade, and the menu is always changing. It feels as though you are at your grandmother’s house eating food made with love. This is a true neighbourhood cafe, with quaint, unpretentious decor and the food served on vintage dishes. The outside looks a little run down, but that’s OK… it keeps certain types of people out, and since there are only about 8 tables, that’s a good thing.

Technorati Tags: brunch, homemade, Dundas Street , cozy, Toronto

The city is under a beautiful snow attack.
Again… but even better.

Technorati Tags:
streets, Toronto

Walking around outside today I noticed a few houses have hung ornaments on the trees growing in their front yards.  I think it’s a brilliant idea as you are able to admire them all day rather than having to wait till after dusk. 

This is a nice alternative to having a tree in your house… why go to all that trouble when you can just decorate a growing and thriving tree in your yard? 

Have you seen this phenomenon? Gigantic Santa in a snow globe. I don’t quite get it… but perhaps I’m not the target audience.

Although for this one I feel I probably am the target audience.  SC seems to be sponsored by Harley, very funny indeed.

Happy Holidays!  May you have a festive, humorous , fun-filled celebration.

Many of you, Mukodu’s fine, upstanding, and tasteful blog readers, have asked for a way to get blog articles delivered to you by email. If you are one of this erstwhile crowd, please read on.

Thanks to the miracle of Internet technology, you can now choose from two shiny new email delivery options:

Option 1, a.k.a. “The Full Meal Deal”: You receive an email in HTML format with the full article text and images whenever a new article is posted.

Option 2, a.k.a. “Lite ‘n Easy”: You receive a brief email notification whenever a new article is posted. The email contains a short excerpt of the article (text-only… boring!) and a link to the full post on the web site.

You can find out more and sign up on the blog. Please let us know by emailing mukodublog at mukodu dot com if you run into trouble. (With the site, that is.)

And of course, if you are suffering from email overload, the old standbys still work just fine: visiting the web site, or RSS updates.

Osh, a.k.a. “The Tech Department”

The Toronto Zombie Walk is tomorrow, Sunday October 21st, starting at 3:30pm.  The parade begins at Trinity Bellwoods Park and ends at Bloor Cinema.  It’s time to get your ghoul on.

Ontario’s next provincial election and an important referendum are happening tomorrow, Wednesday Oct 10. I’m writing this to encourage you to get out and vote, especially on the referendum.

To summarize the new system (MMP) compared to the existing system I would say the following:

The old system forces you to compromise between the quality of your local candidate and the party who you believe will do the best job for the province, because you can only have one vote.  Votes cast for the second best and third best riding candidates are not tallied in the electoral results for provincial leadership. 

The newly proposed MMP allows you to separate those judgements by voting for a candidate and then also voting for the party  you believe in.  Often people interested in representation from smaller parties do not actually vote for them because they have a preference between the two frontrunning political parties and therefore vote to block the party they like least.  Due to this process small parties (such as the green party) have less representation.  The second ballot for political party will reflect the true proportions of peoples’ political party preferences.

MMP needs a 60% majority to pass, so high voter turnout is particularly important. BC recently had a referendum on the same topic and fell just short with 58% approval.

Here are a few links that you can also refer to: wikipedia, the official referendum site and hitched.ca.

Hi All,

Quick technical nerd note:

Up until now the Mukodu blog has been running on blog software called “Typo”. We hit a number of technical problems with Typo, and so today we made the switch to a different software package: WordPress.

From what I can tell the transition went smoothly, so hopefully you don’t notice any glitches. But if you do see something wonky, please let me know by commenting on this blog post, or by sending an email to mukodublog at mukodu.com.

If you were subscribing via RSS, please change your RSS feed to the URL “blog.mukodu.com/feed“.

Welcome to the Mukodu Blog: a whimsical exploration of Toronto’s random nooks and quirky crannies, its many unique neighbourhoods, and the lives of its citizens. Mukodu is about culture, places, people, and goings-on around the city.

What’s the motivation? Well, I’m interested in city life on the local and personal scale: ideas just starting to blossom, secrets just starting to unfold, things you hear about through the grapevine. That’s part of why I like Toronto so much: there’s so much good stuff going on – more than meets the eye or any one person can possibly keep pace with. My adventures are those of finding a handful of these good nuggets, which I plan to share with you, and I hope you will do the same in return.

If you have ideas that you think are worth talking about, please send me a note via mukodublog at mukodu.com!