Dr Laura James's writings

Data is about the past; imagination and experimentation is about the future.  -- from Peter Bihr's excellent newsletter, Connection Problem. Starting with tech and innovation, broadly. A great thread (thanks to Alex Howard) about how we think about problems and potential solutions with the Silicon Valley way of doing things, and the limited perspectives of so much of the policy response: How artificial intelligence might change our language . The latest Talking Politics podcast asks "Can we innovate out of the mess we're in, and if so, who is going to pay for it?" - mostly about the green new deal, but also considering tech, innovation funding, and the state of the world in general. It has top Cambridge thinkers joining David Runciman, including Diane Coyle and Bill Janeway. Diane wrote a related post about what we measure and what matters :  “Software is frozen organisational and policy discourse” – as we are learning with the burgeoning debate ...

I've been thinking about collectives in technology for a while. Collectives in the sense of organisation, and collective in the sense of shared, social value, distinct from individual benefits. In tech, that simultaneously means products and services which serve shared needs, not just individual ones; Doteveryone's research  into digital attitudes last year showed that people were increasingly feeling that the internet had been generally good for them personally, but much less good for society.  It also means shared ownership and control of technology. Ownership and control matter. This means getting away from services that are withdrawn because of a strategy change at a company in another country, or where a handful of engineers in Silicon Valley get astonishingly rich whilst the millions who use a service and generate that wealth simply get the service, or where an investor drives a business model change that is good for getting a company to an exit, but not good for users....

On communications online... Two articles about online gratitude (thanks to Nathan Matias, whose wisdom around people and communities online will be moving to Cornell later this year):  Wikipedians thanking each other , and gratitude and the dangers of it in social technologies . (reminding me of notes on kindness from November ) Although we have a lot of images to communicate with, sometimes words are clearer. This article talks about common tasks, and the popularity of updating user interfaces for such tasks to follow fashion, at the expense of accessibility. I think digital design needs to be more respectful of our cognitive capacity to learn, understand and adapt to new interfaces; we all use a lot of digital tools and each change is a burden on our minds. It's worse for older people and those who are already under strain of other kinds. We can do better, in maintaining existing systems, or doing more up front work in design and good practice so that tools don't need e...

I've been writing weeknotes for several months. "Weeknotes" partly to force some discipline on myself, to think and reflect before everything falls out of my mind again. Partly to try to indicate that they are just scrappy notes, on a variety of topics, based on what I've read/seen/discussed in the last week (or so) - they are not deeply considered articles with beginning, middle and end. Maybe this is not what others mean by weeknotes . Phil Gyford writes this week about the current era of blogging : So, first, the environment for blogging has undergone several changes over the past couple of decades. The audience is different now. Way, way back I only felt that “people like me, and who are online” would read anything I wrote, and that was a small subset of “all people”. Blogging on a public blog felt more private than it is now, separate from the “real world”. Whereas today I’m well aware that anyone could read this nonsense. and he mentions weeknotes: At the...