Quaker
As the blog name implies, I am a mem­ber of the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends, known col­lo­qui­al­ly as Quak­ers. Many of my blog posts deal with issues of our soci­ety and its inter­ac­tions with the larg­er world. I gen­er­al­ly only include my own posts in this list.

Nonviolence
From 1995 – 2008 I was the pub­lish­er of Non​vi​o​lence​.org, a ground-breaking por­tal and blog about peace. Many of the­se arti­cles are archived from that peri­od.

Media & Tech
Sometimes I feel like I’ve been reinventing the wheel since I started my first zine back in college. Here’s some highlights from this category:

Design
Thoughts on design in general and my freelance work as as MartinKelley.com in particular.

Family
Personal posts about the family–wife Julie and kids Theo, Francis, Gregory and Laura.

Culture
A general topic for timely posts.

South Jersey/Philly
Local field trips, etc.

Religion
More generic religious writing.

Photos
Mostly artsy iPhone photography.

Steve Jobs on his major mistake during Apple’s troubled years: “Letting profitability outweigh passion” http://huff.to/nNHjGY #ditto (a tweet by @stevecase) struck home for me, because in the aftermath of Jobs’ death I’ve been thinking a lot about O’Reilly, wanting to make sure that we streamline and focus on the stuff that matters most.

Here’s the money quote from the article:

“My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products,” Jobs told Isaacson. “[T]he products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It’s a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything.”

Jobs went on to describe the legacy he hoped he would leave behind, “a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now.”

“That’s what Walt Disney did,” said Jobs, “and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.“
All of our greatest work at O’Reilly has been driven by passion and idealism. That includes our early forays into publishing, when we were a documentation consulting company to pay the bills but wrote documentation on the side for programs we used that didn’t have any good manuals. It was those manuals, on topics that no existing tech publisher thought were important, that turned us into a tech publisher “who came out of nowhere.”

In the early days of the web, we were so excited about it that +Dale Dougherty wanted to create an online magazine to celebrate the people behind it. That morphed into GNN, the Global Network Navigator, the web’s first portal and first commercial ad-supported site.

In the mid-90s, realizing that no one was talking about the programs that were behind all our most successful books, I brought together a collection of free software leaders (many of whom had never met each other) to brainstorm a common story. That story redefined free software as open source, and the world hasn’t been the same since. It also led to a new business for O’Reilly, as we launched our conference business to help bring visibility to these projects, which had no company marketing behind them.

Thinking deeply about open source and the internet got me thinking big ideas about the internet as operating system, and the shift of influence from software to network effects in data as the key to future applications. I was following people who at the time seemed “crazy” — but they were just living in a future that hadn’t arrived for the rest of the world yet. It was around this time that I formulated our company mission of “changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.”

In 2003, in the dark days after the dot com bust, our company goal for the year was to reignite enthusiasm in the computer business. Two outcomes of that effort did just that: +Sara Winge ‘s creation of Foo Camp spawned a worldwide, grassroots movement of self-organizing “unconferences,” and our Web 2.0 Conference told a big story about where the net was going and what distinguished the companies that survived the dotcom bust from those that preceded it.

In 2005, seeing the passion that was driving garage inventors to a new kind of hardware innovation, Dale once again wanted to launch a magazine to celebrate the passionate people behind the movement. This time, it was a magazine: Make: (http://makezine.com), and a year later, we launched Maker Faire (http://makerfaire.com) as a companion event. 150,000 people attended Maker Faires last year, and the next generation of startups is emerging from the ferment of the movement that Dale named.

Meanwhile, through those dark years after the dotcom bust, we also did a lot of publishing just to keep the company afloat. (With a small data science team at O’Reilly, we built a set of analytical tools that helped us understand the untapped opportunities in computer book publishing. We realized that we were playing in only about 2/5 of the market; moving into other areas that we had never been drawn to helped pay the bills, but never sparked the kind of creativity as the areas that we’d found by following our passion.)

It was at this time that I formulated an image that I’ve used many times since: profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don’t want to run out of gas, but neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations.

When I think about the great persistence of Steve Jobs, there’s a lesson for all of us in it.

What’s so great about the Apple story is that Steve ended up making enormous amounts of money without making it a primary goal of the company. (Ditto Larry and Sergey at Google.) Contrast that with the folks who brought us the 2008 financial crisis, who were focused only on making money for themselves, while taking advantage of others in the process.

Making money through true value creation driven by the desire to make great things that last, and make the world a better place — that’s the heart of what is best in capitalism. (See also the wonderful HBR blog post, Steve Jobs and the Purpose of the Corporation. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/10/steve_jobs_and_the_purpose_of.html I also got a lot of perspective on this topic from +Leander Kahney’s book, Inside Steve’s Brain http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Steves-Brain-Leander-Kahney/dp/1591841984 )

Embedded Link

What Steve Jobs Learned From His Biggest Failure
Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Steve Jobs traces the Apple co-founder’s career in Silicon Valley–from its soaring highs to its crushing lows. Jobs has been hailed as a tech visionary, but …

Google+: View post on Google+

From 2006:

The past eleven years have seen countless internet projects burst on the scene only to wither away. Yet Nonviolence.org continues without any funding, attracting a larger audience every year. As the years have gone by and I’ve found the strength to continue it, I’ve realized more and more that this is a ministry. As a member of the Religious Society of Friends I’m committed to spreading the good news that war is unnecessary. In my personal life this is a matter of faith in the “power that takes away occassion for all war.” In my work with Nonviolence.org I also draw on all the practical and pragmatic reasons why war is wrong. For more personal motivations you can see at QuakerRanter.org, my personal blog.

A Nonviolence.org Timeline

In 1995 I was editor at an activist publisher struggling to adapt to a rapidly changing book world. Many of the independent bookstores that had always supported us were closing just as printing costs were rising. The need to re-invent activist organizing and publishing for the 1990’s became obvious and I saw the internet as a place to do that. One of the earliest manifestos and introductions to the Nonviolence Web was an essay called The Revolution Will be Online.

I began by approached leading U.S. peace groups with a crazy proposal: if they gave me their material I would put it up on the web for them for free. My goal was to live off of savings until I could raise the operating funds from foundations. “Free typesetting for the movement by the movement” was the rallying cry and I quickly brought a who’s-who of American peace groups over to Nonviolence.org. I knew that there was lots of great peace writing that wasn’t getting the distribution it deserved and with the internet I could get it out faster and more widely than with traditional media. For three years I lived off of savings, very part-time jobs and occasional small grants.

Nonviolence.org developed into a web portal for nonviolence. We would feature the most provocative and timely pieces from the NVWeb member groups on the newly-redesigned homepage, dubbed “Nonviolence Web Upfront.” A online magazine format loosely modeled on Slate and the now-defunct Feed magazine, it also contained original material and links to interesting threads on the integrated discussion board. With these popular features, Nonviolence.org attracted a growing number of regular visitors. The combined visibility for member groups was much greater than anyone could obtain alone and we earned plenty of awards and links. Some media highlights of the era included a New York Times tech profile, a featured guest Op/Ed in USA Today, and an interview on Oliver North’s nationally syndicated radio show.

But this model couldn’t last. A big problem was money: there’s were too few philanthropists for this sort of work, and established foundations didn’t even know the right questions to ask in evaluating an internet project. Nonviolence.org was kept afloat by my own dwindling personal savings, and I never did find the sort of money that could pay even poverty wages. I took more and more part-time jobs till they became the full-time ones I have today. At the same time, internet publishing was also changing. With the addition of blogging features and open-source bulletin board software, Nonviolence.org continued to evolve and stay relevant.

Through the early 2000s, Nonviolence.org continued to be one of the most highly-visible and visited peace websites, being highly ranked through the first Gulf War II, the biggest U.S. military action since the web began. This model of independent activist web publishing was still critical. The Nonviolence.org mission of featuring the best writing and analysis continued until 2008 when Martin finally mothballed the Nonviolence.org project and sold the domain.