Dr Laura James's writings

A rough write up of the BBC and Mozilla event at Mozfest House on 23rd October 2018. Wendy Grossman also  wrote up the event . A lot of similar issues are touched on in  Katja Bego’s post on the ten challenges facing the internet , which is a useful illustration of the breadth of issues under consideration; in a stack concept, from networking and censorship, access, digital infrastructure like identity, applications and services; or networking vs compute vs data and information; or by function — gaming, finance, government services, social, education, civil freedoms, transport, internet of things… Other interesting links: thoughts from the Public Stack Summit earlier this year BBC R&D vision PublicSpaces manifesto BBC R&D and Mozilla brought together a group of folks to explore what a healthy public service internet might look like, plus whether this is the right question or an idea worth pursuing. One of the sessions discussed the idea of ‘public service...

Today sees the launch of the  Impact Union  and you can  read all about it here . We are  the Impact Union . We stand for meaningful practical impact on the challenges of our age, delivered by a community of diverse, committed, change-making entrepreneurs, who share values of fairness and the importance of purpose, working in our own ways to make a real and positive difference in the world. I’m really excited about this, because: We need new ideas to make progress on tough challenges like climate change and social justice. It’s very, very hard to go from an initial pilot to a viable and effective larger scale activity if you are really tackling the hard, complex problems encapsulated by the  sustainable development goals . Supporting entrepreneurs through this phase is critical, and a gap in the current ecosystem. It’s always struck me as strange how so many startup and venture support programmes are defined by the organisational types they accept. Of co...

All my three big successes this week were to do with media. The  Festival of Maintenance  was featured on  Click on the BBC World Service  (from 14min25sec) and then in the  Economist , which coins a great phrase:  In a disposable society, to repair is to rebel . My other success was for my actual paid work at the  Computer Lab  — regaining control of our long-dormant  Twitter account . Limited progress on figuring out how to support more social entrepreneurship within the University context, but signs that this is needed and that others want to see it happen too. I started a  doc  for resources(almost empty so far), heard reflections from one College employee about the skills of today’s student activists, and got  some useful feedback from Graham Mitchell  on my previous post, about the capabilities for co-operative and other change-making in the UK.  “The number of effective cooperative development people tha...

Thanks particularly to  Nathan Schneider  and  Oliver Sylvester-Bradley  for conversations about these ideas, which are very rough… I still believe the idea some of us had for the  Digital Life Collective  is an important one: to experiment with new business and ownership/governance models for everyday internet services, because today’s aren’t working. The focus on business model, ownership and control is because these are the root causes of the problems with today’s systems, and so must be the place to look for change: if we don’t want businesses to hold hordes of data about us, with the attendant loss of control, and security and privacy risks, we need to pay for services in ways other than advertising and attention if we want less addictive technologies, they both need to not depend on our attention for monetisation, and to not require ever more attention for the growth investors demand if we want a voice in how services are run, what is permitt...