A Frog in the Valley

Seb sent me a link this weekend about the new bedouins…

A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. Roaming from cafe to cafe and borrowing a name from the nomadic Arabs who wandered freely in the desert, they’ve come to be known as “bedouins.”

San Francisco’s modern-day bedouins are typically armed with laptops and cell phones, paying for their office space and Internet access by buying coffee and muffins.

What’s even more interesting, as the wikipedia entry on bedouins highlights, is that Bedouins have a tribe culture, as well as strong community ethics:

Disputes are settled, interests are pursued, and justice and order are maintained by means of this organizational framework, according to an ethic of self-help and collective responsibility (…) Bedouins traditionally had strong honor codes, and traditional systems of justice dispensation in Bedouin society typically revolved around such codes.

I smiled at how appropriate the word really is, as I hit the post to blog keyboard shortcut, from la Brûlerie St-Denis, my Treo to my left, my Latte to the right… and with so much ironic extra-double-appropriateness, my iTune shuffling right into “Taking Care of Business” from BTO.

Tags: culture, identity, montreal, social, startup