Dr Laura James's writings

Earlier in September I was in Stroud, for the first Festival of Commoning . It was a lovely event, full of people working on commons projects in different ways. What is a commons? It's infrastructure for a basic, decent existence, operated and owned outside the market, locally governed and managed by multiple stakeholders.  (we also heard a 'more modern' definition from the work of David Bollier and others - "a pervasive, generative, and neglected social lifeform... complex, adaptive living processes that generate wealth (both tengible and intangible) through which people address their shared needs with minimal or no reliance on markets or states.") Diana Finch set out differences between co-ops and commons. Coops are businesses, in the market, based on trade or exchange, mediated by money, democratic in operation, and benefit their members. Commons are not businesses, and are based on sharing, with no money required; they are collaborative, and benefit both

In August I wrote that I was looking for work . I shared my blog post on a variety of social media, without doing any reminders or reposts. It was surprisingly popular, and the blog post got nearly 7000 views. Thank you to everyone who shared it or shared job ideas with me. It wasn't an easy post to write, possibly because I had to figure out how to explain what I can do, and what I'd like to do, as I went along. I was very pleased to find that people found the end result was both clear and interesting. In response, 30 people got in touch with me with different opportunities. Thirteen of them were people I knew reasonably well; 3 I didn't know at all; 2 were recruiters. I got 4 introductions to people who might be hiring for roles that might be suitable for me. I've had a lot of fascinating conversations and learned about businesses and organisations I hadn't met before. (I did read job listings in newsletters, on websites, and on Linkedin and so on, but there was

I’m looking for work.  My experience doesn't neatly fit standard job titles or sectors, and I've got an eclectic set of criteria for what I want to do, so maybe you can help me find a job which brings them together. I've got a broad set of management, tech and sustainability skills. I've experience with products, operations, organisations; with open stuff and non-profit stuff and systems engineering and shared infrastructure and communities. I'm great at coordinating and supporting people and projects, especially across different specialisms or sectors. I can figure out how to explore and make progress on complex challenges. My work is usually with newer technologies and ideas, before they become mainstream, so the path is not clear. Maybe you've got a problem to solve that I could help with?  Or do you know someone who has? Then get in touch . I’m an empathetic interdisciplinary engineering leader and I’m looking for work. Specifically, paid w

The metaphors we use change how we think about things. Benjamin Santos Genta writes for Aeon about this, and in particular how many of our metaphors relate to war. Might an argument be better as a dance than a battle? (I've been trying to demilitarise my work language for a while; it's not always easy. You can, though, feed two birds with one scone, but that works less well with international colleagues.) ReliefWeb reports on research into the value for money of recent humanitarian innovations . It was good to see my old colleagues at Field Ready featured. Field Ready piloted a new model of localized medical product manufacturing in Syria, involving healthcare worker training, enhanced digital technology, and partnership-building between local medical device suppliers and medical facilities. Their pilot significantly reduced the time, costs, and carbon emissions of medical device production and repair without compromising product quality. TripleLine found that the aggreg

Thanks Luis Villa for this write up of the current Vizio case (GPL enforcement).  The head of the National Audit Office, Gareth Davies, gave a thoughtful speech to Parliament on why good governance matters, especially for the UK's public sector, now.  Trust and AI was the topic of Bruce Schneier 's September talk at the Harvard Kennedy School: Trust is essential to society. Humans as a species are trusting. We are all sitting here, mostly strangers, confident that nobody will attack us. If we were a roomful of chimpanzees, this would be impossible. We trust many thousands of times a day. Society can’t function without it. And that we don’t even think about it is a measure of how well it all works. In this talk, I am going to make several arguments. One, that there are two different kinds of trust—interpersonal trust and social trust—and that we regularly confuse them. Two, that the confusion will increase with artificial intelligence. We will make a fundamental category

The wise Alex Deschamps-Sonsino organised a climate unconference to coincide with COP28. It was a lovely thought-provoking event with a lot of rich conversations, of which more below. What with this, and Barcamp London a couple of weeks ago, it feels like the indie/punk/grassroots approach to convening is reviving, and about time too. There is a lot going on in the world - on so many fronts - and connecting different folks to explore more radical ideas and catalyse new thinking and work is a great way to bring some positive energy and hope - and hopefully action, too.  The unconference started off wondering whether we actually need more data. We were hosted in a UCL building - very new, packed with 4000+ sensors, but is collecting all this data worthwhile? Even with BMS (building management system) access the occupants couldn't tell how the building works, and so couldn't make good choices around the heating and ventilation controls for instance. It wasn't clear whether