Dr Laura James's writings

A great analysis from Apache, of the Apache open source way to reach sustainable open source success - breaking down the mission statement and looking at each piece in depth. A really important and useful clarifying piece, which also highlights how much it matters to be clear about what you are doing, for which community. The mission of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is to provide software for the public good. ....Investopedia defines a public good as "a product that one individual can consume without reducing its availability to another individual, and from which no one is excluded." On the surface, this is a good definition for our use of the term. However, there is a nuance in our use. Our mission is not to produce "public goods" but to "provide software for the public good".  A lovely article from Ingrid Burrington on how the internet acquires the trappings of the nation state , with borders and mapping, and also on mapping the internet. Bu...

On older things: A great article about what happens to old (or older) coders . Where do they go? (Thanks to  Garry Bodsworth ) I am committed to a lifetime as a programmer, but my career path for the decades to come is not well-marked. I know disturbingly few engineers older than me whose examples I can follow. Where have all the older coders gone, and what are the career prospects for those of us who remain? Having had some little insight into the world of archive libraries a decade ago, I was fascinated by this article about "data hoarders" - the more informal digital archiving community. (HT Peter Bihr) Many people active in the data hoarding community take pride in tracking down esoteric files of the kind that often quietly disappear from the internet—manuals for older technologies that get taken down when manufacturers redesign their websites, obscure punk show flyers whose only physical copies have long since been pulled from telephone poles and thrown in the t...

A real highlight this week was a talk by Luke Church and Sharath Srinivasan of Africa's Voices Foundation . It is a rare delight to see a genuinely interdisciplinary presentation, combining computer science  and social science perspectives - and to have speakers recognise that the audience likely understood terms such as 'integrity' very differently. Both speakers brought critical reflections on their own fields. Luke spoke of the moral toxicity of the tech industry; Sharath of how, to scale social research, practitioners shift the interpretive burden to others, 'instrument' research subjects, or abstract away the inescapable role of interpretation, and take data as fact. Social science methods are political, material, self-interested and pragmatic. On the other hand, tech and data methods (at least as practised by most of the tech industry) are covertly political, essentialist, capitalist. Such methods seek to reduce or clean reality into formalisms; and then rei...

Professor Diane Coyle spoke at a recent Trust & Technology Initiative lunchtime event, about regulating the tech industry. It was great to get a thoughtful outline of some key issues which so rarely get discussed in the excitement over what to do about Big Tech, from someone who actually has deep experience of the economics and regulatory space. I'm writing these overdue notes about Diane's talk on the day when the Lords Communications Committee published its report on regulating in a digital world . It's nice that some of Doteveryone's i deas for an Office of Responsible Technology  to help empower regulators seem to have been picked up in the report. Still,  Heather Burns's thoughts seem particularly pertinent: https://twitter.com/WebDevLaw/status/1104307527095894016 Tech is more than "big tech." Some of it is made in the UK (and Heather's afterbrexit.tech  is a super resource for working out what might change for UK tech...). Anyway....

Why you probably don't need blockchain for your use case - a nice summary, highlighting the critical point that the physical world, even with sensors, is not as tamper-proof as blockchains. An FT(paywall) article suggesting "data dividends" as a potential policy tool in California makes me think I might need to actually read Radical Markets properly to understand the data-related ideas, rather than just the highlights from  Glen Weyl's talk last year . I enjoyed the Internet Society's report on the state of consolidation in the internet - well, the executive summary anyway, which is a genuinely useful summary of the underlying architectural issues (actual topology, and deep dependencies) so often neglected in the (many) responses to consumer-level concerns today.   ...interoperability, and standard development and deployment are increasingly becoming a function of scale. In this case, open, collaborative, and interoperable Internet is influenced by a smal...