Thanks for visiting. This is just a (really) quick list of a handful of some things I've worked on and thought other people might enjoy. Got a question? An idea? Contact me: alex@komoroske.com

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I publish content regularly on different channels: Medium, The Compendium, Bits and bobs, and am regularly in podcasts. It's hard to keep track!

Every time I publish content in any channel, I send an update to the Komoroske Updates Google Group. That's a great way to subscribe to make sure you never miss anything!

Slime Mold

An approachable presentation, done in an emoji style, showing why even when everyone is competent and collaborative, you can still get hurricane-force headwinds.

I've developed various versions of the argument in various contexts and forms over the years. The ideas started when I was studying the emergent power dynamics of Wikipedia's user community in undergrad, and were also informed by participating in web standards. I believe they are not specific to any one context, but rather emerge inherently any time there are individuals with autonomy who care deeply. Instead of ignoring these dynamics, I think it's important to acknowledge and embrace them with a sense of compassion and openness.

Gardening Platforms

A ~200 slide flip book style presentation about how to garden platforms, including the fundamental emergent power dynamics of platforms, how to evolve an existing platform to continuously improve it, and how to create a new platform from scratch.

https://thecompendium.cards

A bespoke "knowledge garden" of interlinked cards of insights. This is where I currently spend most of my time writing. It can be a bit overwhelming to know where to start. Here are a few tips:

• @cardscompendium Twitter Bot Tweets out a few cards a day. If you use twitter, this is a great way to dip your toes into the content.
• How to use thecompendium.cards A Medium post about how to engage with the content best.
• Rational platforms A collection of cards about the properties of rational platforms
• Growing Communities A collection of cards about growing communities

@komorama on Medium

I occassionally write a longer form post on Medium.com. A few of my favorites:

• On schelling points in organizations An essay that builds a model of what schelling points are and how they influence organizations, including interactive agent based models.
• The meaning of open A collection of pithy assertions about what makes an ecosystem open.
• The energy of human-scale systems A bit of an abstract omnibus, but lays out how I reason about power and strategies within human systems.
• The self-sustaining flame A metaphor for the property that successful ecosystems have and how to find it and grow it
• Debate should be collaborative, not combative About why a positive-sum stance in debate can unlock deeper insights
• Doorbell in the Jungle A pattern for cultivating positive exposure to miracles in product and platform development
• The Wanderer and the Seeds A story for its own sake about two brothers, some seeds, and the power of wandering
• A Dangerous Addiction A short essay about an addiction the tech industry doesn't often grapple with
• Surfing through trade-offs A short essay on the basics of why everything is a trade-off and how to continuously balance them
• The Iterative Adjacent Possible An essay about an alternative way of approaching large problems that leads to much better outcomes with much lower risk
• The Live Oak Playbook Describes a playbook for resilient and enduring growth in harsh environments.
• The Sarumans and the Radagasts Describes two archetypes of deep magic that make the world go round.
• The Magic of Acorns A short strategy parable about the magic of finding and nurturing acorns.
• Bits and Bobs Each week I take a few hours to review my notes from the week before and distill them into little stand-alone bits and bobs, a personal ritual of meaning-making.

Open source projects on GitHub

One of the ways I relax is by working on over-engineered, always-halfway-done open source projects.

• card-web The content management system behind https://thecompendium.cards
• boardgame A boardgame framework where you express your logic in Go and then it builds a progressive web app for you
• sudoku A sudoku generator and solver that scores puzzles based on how real humans judge their difficulty
• CASsim A simple harness for tinkering with agent based models and generating gifs of them
• Prompt Garden A tool to allow tinkering with and remixing prompts for LLMs.
• Code Sprouts A simple tool for creating and sharing LLM-powered bots that manage their state more explicitly and are more on rails than typical GPTs.

Podcasts / Videos

If video and audio are more your speed, here are some podcasts I've recorded.

• Be a Gardener, not a Builder A discussion with Isaace Morehouse of PartnerHacker about platforms, ecosystems, and complexity
• Do organizations have to get slower as they grow? A discussion with Spencer Greenberg on the Clearer Thinking podcast.
• Gardening Platforms and the Future of Open Ecosystems A discussion with Simone Cicero about power dynnamics in ecosystems and organizations.
• Infinite Loops - Complex Adaptivity All The Way Down A wide-ranging, open-ended 90 minute conversation with Jim O'Shaugnessy.
• Systems Thinking, Builders vs Gardeners, and Working In Large Organizations A discussion with Eric Jorgensen about a number of my favorite topics.
• The Orthogonal Bet: How to Navigate Complexity Within a Large Organization I recorded a podcast with my friend Sam Arbesman about navigating complexity.
• Thinking like a gardener not a builder, organizing teams like slime mold, the adjacent possible, and other unconventional product advice A wide-ranging podcast with Lenny Rachitsky.

The FLUX Collective

A collective I participate in that produces a weekly newsletter about systems thinking.

Blast from the past

Back to a previous version of this page, including a link to my Online Sudoku game as well as a few other hobby projects from 2008 or so.

Some of my favorite books

Here are some of the books I've read that have had the biggest impact on me and the way I see the world:

• The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker
• Why Information Grows by Cesar Hidalgo
• Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
• Conscious Business by Fred Kofman
• The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander
• Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch
• Seeing Like a State by James Scott
• Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
• Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman

Get in touch

I absolutely love to have conversations with people I don't (yet) know well—especially if they have experiences or perspectives that are different from mine. I also occasionally do speaking engagements and faciliate discussions. You can also proactively grab time available on https://komoroske.com/office-hours without even reaching out to me first. If you're reading this and wondering, "surely he doesn't mean me. Should I reach out?", the answer is yes, you should reach out!