Fortnight notes
Fortnightnotes, mostly because of Mozfest last weekend. It now seems a very long time since the BBC & Mozilla event looking at ideas for a healthy public service internet (which I wrote up separately).
Mozfest was good, even if I mostly was there for the corridor track, and conversations with the diverse collection of people brought together in one place. Oddly a lot of those people seemed there for similar reasons; not because of the open web, or Mozilla, or even the tracks/themes, but just because this is the place you go to meet a certain set of folks now. Good on Mozilla for providing a venue for this, although I can’t imagine it’s a primary goal for the organisers.
I’m still pondering ideas for co-operative experiments around everyday technology, and Mozfest was a good place to talk about this, and like last year, there were lots of folks from co-ops there. Some conversations were about how the tech + co-op ecosystem could be enriched — partly with greater info so that potential co-ops know it’s an option, and partly examples other than the CoTech worker co-op model in the UK. CoTech is great, but it’s only one way co-ops and tech can play together. I still think there are good applications for consumer or multistakeholder co-ops in new tech too… This tweet made me wonder if we should also bring in new programming paradigms to my vague project ideas :)
The Hum ran a super session on coordinating things in decentralised organisations — a useful framework I will definitely use. I was also reminded this week of this article by Alanna on collaborative financial decision-making, which is really a practical toolkit for projects and organisations looking to have more voices, and thought, in financial decisions. Good stuff.
The best session for me though was Jonnie Penn’s on unions and data. I missed the start of it and didn’t take notes, but luckily there will be follow up activities:
October was quite the month for climate news, and related sustainability things such as recycling. It’s hard to get that right. (I only quite recently learned that despite all the local council guidance saying “blue bin for plastic trays, bottles etc” that they actually mean “plastic trays unless they are black”, which is hidden in the small print on another page of the council magazine. I am a diligent recycler, too, and have a whole rant on how different councils use different coloured bins and different combinations of materials for each, making it especially hard to do the right thing when you aren’t at home.)
Mozfest was rather mixed in its messages here. The swag bags contained reusable, collapsible water bottles (amongst other things) although this wasn’t immediately apparent. I tend not to pick up such bags these days as there’s a limit to how much branded tat I can plausibly donate to others or to Makespace. But I wondered if Mozfest could have made more of a thing about the bottles, especially given the water dispensers around the festival site. Maybe folks might have picked one up if they hadn’t got a bottle with them, if they’d known. The dispensers had disposable cups by them too, Mozfest branded, and on Sunday some Mozfest crew putting out more cups were only half joking that we needed to use more cups up because they couldn’t have any leftover. (Were they branded only for this year’s event? Or is storage disproportionately costly, so cups couldn’t be saved for next year? I heard about another annual project this week which finds storing exhibition gear year to year more expensive than having new gear made.) Only a modest proportion of attendees had reusable coffee cups with them, and so the baristas making hot drinks continuously at two stations must have got through a lot of throwaway cups too.
Economics continues to be a thread through many conversations. I’m trying to avoid the angle that we have to overthrow capitalism first, before coming up with better models for technology and for tackling social challenges. I read Diane Coyle’s review of the Future of Capitalism, shortly before she hosted Glen Weyl at a Bennett Institute event about his new book, Radical Markets. Diane is pessimistic about that future; Glen optimistic, I think. Glen’s vision here includes commons ownership, which was appealing, and a more powerful and effective antitrust system. There was a slightly random idea about voting; the idea of having multiple votes which you could allocate to show the importance of different issues seems interesting, and potentially empowering, but Glen seemed to advocate for vote selling too, which doesn’t sound so good to me. I’m not sure that the close ties to the world of blockchain are a selling point either, but perhaps the mysterious solution to identity issues which Glen promised will be revealed at Devcon this week will hold some answers.
The Radical Markets concept seemed interesting to quite a few of us in the audience, although we perhaps need to read the book to understand it properly. As a complete reinvention of the economy it felt like it lacked some human, emotional appreciation (we are not wholly rational, and struggle to value things like our sentimental attachment to a family home). But applied to some early, or specific, application areas, it sounded more appealing — for instance, to oil drilling rights, or to some corporate asset control. Down with the plutocrats was definitely part of the message.
Glen also urged protest — specifically, protest at today’s investors and financiers, to demand better behaviour. Investment may be boring, but as we start to see pension funds divesting from fossil fuels, tobacco and so on, it may be an effective route to change, if we can get the energy to make our voices heard.
I’m still slowly building up a document of resource links for businesses (especially in tech) such as co-ops and zebras.
On a similar note, we’re open for applications at the Impact Union for our January 2019 programme. Startups, nonprofits, co-ops, charities, social enterprises, whatever, tackling challenges in sustainability, social justice, sustainable development goals, and moving past pilot stage, all welcome. Apply: https://www.theimpactunion.com/ You might be the kind of change-making leader we want to support, or you might know some :)
Cassie’s blog this week has a lot in it — I’ll come back to it next week.
It feels more necessary than ever for all of us to think about what needs strengthening and protecting. At Doteveryone, in the context of the work we were doing there, what I meant by it was the things that make up a strong society (as described here) — good and effective systems of justice, care, democracy, work, press freedom, relevant public institutions and social and relational infrastructure in places. It also felt important to focus on society to counterbalance how much we were thinking about tech.
Cassie’s post lead me to Reimagining the Civic Commons. Some of these ideas feel like a blast from the past — ideas of what might be useful in the world, to communities or groups, without necessarily a powerful commercial driver (or, in retrospect, surveillance capitalism) to require or enable large scale. This reminds me of things like Little Printer, similarly developed without a focus on monetisation via data— projects almost which seem of another age, now. Fun, useful, simple ideas, where the internet could join things up and enable new small experiences between people. I particularly liked the question about how clever use of contracts and insurance might help minimise risk for different kinds of project making the most of existing assets for the community.
Conversations around innovation and maintenance continued too. I met Jonathan Coopersmith, whom I first met at the Festival of Maintenance, to chat about his work studying technology “froth and fraud”. Jonathan has previously looked into the history of innovation around fax machines, and is now looking at the early development of bicycles amongst other things. We touched on how we measure success in technology projects, the balance of necessary hype and fraudulent hype and how that plays out in an investor marketplace for emerging technologies, and also responsible technology. Jonathan raised a good question — is there a Doteveryone equivalent in the USA? Or is the responsible tech movement more intrinsically linked to European values?
A busy week in software maintenance and business models. Firstly Flickr, trying to move more people to paid accounts. I’m already on a paid account, but where groups whose photos I care about will have many contributions from users who are not. The pay-to-store/publish model at least means that others can freely benefit from openly licensed content. Hopefully the discussion between Flickr and Creative Commons will prove fruitful. Further good thoughts on Flickr’s move here, thanks to Quentin. Q was in my mind this week after MIT kindly tweeted that it is the anniversary of the Computer Lab coffee cam. Useful and fun innovation, that…
Then there’s Evernote, which I’ve been using without much affection since I needed to for a collaborative project a couple of years ago. I hate the search system. I use it as a sort of write-only store, primarily for caching web page content I might want to find later, and where I think the content might not be the same in the future. Evernote seem to be struggling, so maybe I need to look for an alternative?
I also post on Medium, where you may be reading this. Medium seems a very popular blogging platform and certainly gives a nice layout and friendly comment system, if you are in the ecosystem. But their new membership business model means only members get to read unlimited articles, and a throttle on reading is not really what I’m looking for. I wouldn’t mind paying to post, but as I don’t know exactly who my audience is, and of course one doesn’t know who would benefit from rough thoughts; so paying to read, or limited content access, simply doesn’t work for me. I don’t want to self host, and I’m not sure what more cutting edge platforms (distributed, or even decentralised!) might be worth trying — and I don’t want to have to put time into shopping around for this function. It’s hard to find “export Medium content to move to another platform” help online, because so much stuff is about moving to medium. I may just go back to Blogger and slowly and manually import html posts from my Medium data.
This thread also covers some similar questions — where do you put some data, if you want it to be online for, say, decades, at a single URL, with an upfront payment?
The Trust & Technology Initiative hosted our first lunchtime discussion. We’re trying these out as a way to create more peer to peer and interdisciplinary discussion through a different environment and disciplinary context than a conventional lecture or talk. Alice Hutchings shared her work about trust between cybercriminals online, in dark web forums and markets, and a useful reminder of social dynamics and different communities it’s easy to forget when designing products that aren’t obviously about security. We have the Cybercrime research centre here which does lots of fascinating work on these topics. (Alice also posted her resignation from the University Council last week, after a vote to enable more research staff to take part in University governance was lost. Thank you for standing by important principles!)
It was lovely to catch up briefly with Nathan Matias as he flew through Cambridge a couple of weeks ago. Nathan has carefully considered ideas, built on such rich experience, that conversations with him are always refreshing and inspiring. I left with several good pieces of advice. Thank you, too :)
I like the idea of starting to talk about software-driven cars, rather than autonomous or self-driving ones. I think I will start to use that more — it sets expectations somewhat better, especially whilst the technology is still in development. (I am pretty sure that the naming of Tesla’s Autopilot doesn’t encourage the driver behaviour that it’s designed for…)