weeknotes — natural capital, digital pollution, intellectual humility
A couple of conversations this week touched on natural capital and community goods, and a few relevant links came up too. Thanks to Richard Pope for the reminder about https://www.keepitinthecommunity.org/ — I wonder how this sort of idea can relate to slightly more abstract things like green spaces or even individual trees. Could tracking urban green spaces like this play a role in helping preserve them, either through council action or something else? (An example being the controversial felling of valued trees in Sheffield.)
Libraries are a useful community good, as illustrated by this crowdsourced selection of libraries around the world (via Sentiers). At Doteveryone we’ve explored ways libraries could be part of local information infrastructure. So it was good to see this proposal for Toronto libraries to play a role in data governance for the (troubling) Sidewalk Labs venture there.
I was glad to find this clear Conversation article, which explains fairly well how issues of privacy online include information which goes beyond just what you have proactively shared yourself. I still have too many conversations where people think that if only you don’t post on Facebook, you’ll have no privacy issues online. All these concepts — data, information, privacy, sharing/selling data — are so abstract. Maybe talking about digital pollution could be a useful way of describing the various indirect effects of internet stuff, giving people a more relatable concept?
Tangentially, this 2015 talk about website obesity (via The Prepared) is both entertaining, and depressing (and it makes me wonder how big this post will be when published on Medium and on Blogger). Good to be reminded of the side effects of the way the web has worked out — and the web is the good bit of the internet, built (mostly) with open standards like HTML and available to everyone.
Data obesity comes up in this piece about automation in all its forms, from Near Future Laboratory, which is more nuanced and thoughtful than most. What are the frictions we are all adapting to already in how we use the technologies that are supposed to help us? Which of these are unavoidable or at least rare, and which are actually designed in?
For instance, a paradigm that promotes respectful (over efficient), legible (over calm) and honest (over smart) technologies. Those are the types of values that emerge when professionals (e.g. engineers, data scientists, designers, decision-makers, executives) wander outside their practice, apply critical thinking to uncover dishonest behaviors, and use fictions to take decisions that consider implications beyond the scope of the “user” and the “task” to automate.
Cassie wrote up some thoughts on the history of the “tech for good” space over the last decade, the differences between the UK and US communities, and how the early movement might have been strengthened with better communications. My conception of this area is a blurry mess of civic tech and tech applied to social challenges here, and a seemingly distinct set of “tech for development” initiatives with a more global focus; so I like the idea of asking slightly different questions to map out the movement:
Are you helping the dominant system be more responsible with their tech? Are you helping organisations transition to be fit for purpose in a digital society? Are you building new alternatives?
A history of cafes and civil society, and the social dynamics of cafe spaces in the past, and today.
Satellite imagery is something we don’t talk about as much as personal data, but it’s getting more high resolution, more real time, and more affordable all the time. Hence — what might cubesats do for economics?
Planning for the 2019 Festival of Maintenance is well underway. It was lovely to speak with Andy Russell and Lee Vinsel from The Maintainers in the US, who are working on building communities of practice around maintenance in different ‘verticals.’ This will be shaping The Maintainers 3 conference, which I hope I’ll find a way to get to.
A great example of the ordinary, everyday, invisible work of safety regulation is some of the history of car crash testing enforcement.
Via Richard Pope, an article about a BECTU pilot of new ways to join the union. What about starting new unions? This came up in conversation with Nicolas Colin, and also has been on my mind as I would love to have a union in the first Impact Union [not an actual union] cohort. We’ve pushed the first Impact Union programme out for a couple of months — it was originally scheduled for this weekend. This is so we can do the idea justice (and to respond to the applications and expressions of interest which came out after the original deadline).
In case you missed it, important thoughts from my colleague Lydia Nicholas on why, if care is priceless, we treat it as worthless.
Finally, a great Vox feature on the idea of intellectual humility, knowing that you might be wrong. From the importance of academics being able to acknowledge when their previous work turns out to be wrong, through perception and cognitive bias, to politics.
“It’s bad to think of problems like this like a Rubik’s cube: a puzzle that has a neat and satisfying solution that you can put on your desk,” says Michael Lynch, a University of Connecticut philosophy professor. Instead, it’s a problem “you can make progress at a moment in time, and make things better. And that we can do — that we can definitely do.”
For a democracy to flourish, Lynch argues, we need a balance between convictions — our firmly held beliefs — and humility. We need convictions, because “an apathetic electorate is no electorate at all,” he says. And we need humility because we need to listen to one another. Those two things will always be in tension.