Fortnight notes: definition of done, funding social sector tech, open data, dreaming devices
Doteveryone has published our "definition of done". What does it mean to finish a piece of work? What does good advocacy, protest or resistance work look like now? It turns out clear communication is important.
Don Norman on replacing "Yes, and" with "Yes, but, and" -
Research from the Collective Impact Forum on funding for 'backbone' work which enables collective social action.
A thoughtful piece about the need for basic, secure, private digital infrastructure for civil society (especially in oppressive regimes), and the challenges of getting this funded today:
Useful services save people money and time but that doesn't flow back (to help maintain them), says research by Becky Hogge looking at TheyWorkForYou.
The big money in tech goes to other things. Via Society in the loop - thoughts from Evan Selinger and Clive Thompson -
I still know next to nothing about economics. This piece on how capitalism is meant to work - as a means to enable cooperative problem solving - was a new idea to me.
What happens to the internet as sea levels rise?
A thread from Jon Copley on media communication of risk.
Chav solidarity - via Adrian McEwen.
I've had conversations with people in tech (and civic tech) who simply couldn't grasp this sort of thing:
Kin Lane reflects on the open data movement and what it has achieved (or failed to achieve). (HT Sean McDonald)
Open Knowledge Austria is dissolving (HT Ton Zijlstra),
August sees the world's first online hackathon to help fix the climate. Teams can work on projects to raise awareness of climate issues, enable people to take action, or make other climate projects easier in the future. I'm really interested to see how this works out. Hackathons are all too often glossy but ineffectual means to tackle challenges, with intensive antisocial hours to complete projects (not very inclusive), or too short a time to do anything other than create a shiny demo (which is rarely taken any further). The fixathon runs over a longer time and is remote, so much easier to take part in, and stands a good chance of creating meaningful outputs. Registration is open now.
Why the US is so fixated on cars. Via Future of Transportation newsletter, I learned how the insurance setup favours drivers, both in cover, and implicitly in pricing.
Open source software remains an interesting area in the world of maintenance. On one hand, it's sometimes held up as a rare example where maintainers are venerated and even rewarded; on the other, it's a troubled space where maintenance is especially burdensome, and a labour of coordination often in 'spare time' with a never-ending list of requests.
New offerings of peer support for open source maintainers.
Perhaps this goes along with the rise of "few maintainer" projects.
How do you run a modern census and still protect privacy? Interesting report from PETS - Ross Anderson's notes - a few paragraphs in.
There's also a great bit about Facebook and phone numbers from PETS -
Another example of bad internet of things design - how to reset your lightbulb by Bruce Schneier.
I prefer my basic infrastructure to be less digital to avoid this sort of thing.
And finally - dream time from Jon Crowcroft. "James was worried that his 40 year-old digital clock was dreaming."
(Having added this to my draft weeknotes thinking it was a nice closing story, three more related articles appeared in the following days...)
Smart meters have recently been waking up Welsh.
But smart meters are also not working very well writes Nick Hunn. Another example of the focus on individual rather than collective benefits (and a failure to address plausible threat models, of which there are too many in tech products).
Here's a small example of that weak thinking - Octopus Energy had persistent issues installing new meters, and it turns out to be due to manufacturer tests rendering some units useless. A horrible mess to debug that issue, too.
If only digital devices were just dreaming.
Don Norman on replacing "Yes, and" with "Yes, but, and" -
Note that the “but” anticipating the “and” is essential. In order to build on your idea, your colleague does not just add a new improved proposal. First, she provides a critique, which enables you to receive precious and specific information, see weaknesses in your half-backed idea you couldn’t spot yourself, and therefore learn. You and the entire team will then be ready to dive deeper into the next iteration. It is the combination of “but” and “and” that creates real progress, enabling the team to see both positive and negative components and allowing each iteration to go even deeper into the analysis.
Research from the Collective Impact Forum on funding for 'backbone' work which enables collective social action.
A thoughtful piece about the need for basic, secure, private digital infrastructure for civil society (especially in oppressive regimes), and the challenges of getting this funded today:
The unfortunate trend of discounting technology has disfigured the funding landscape. Foundations often refrain from supporting software initiatives, and if they do support them, they fail to consider technological and infrastructural needs as “program” expenses, leaving digital infrastructure to fend for itself.New Ushahidi spinout Dispatcher, to help coordinate and incentivise giving and getting help within local communities:
This renders current models of technology funding woefully incomplete and unsustainable: even if a platform is built with the help of foundation dollars, costs such as server maintenance and security upgrades aren’t considered vital to the safety and functionality of the platform.
...
So, many important projects have been forced offline because they can’t find the funders willing to invest in their uptime. We celebrate open source but don’t support the creations it brings about. We encourage organizations to innovate but don’t give them the resources to do so. We prize security but don’t provide the funding necessary for fixes, documentation, and iteration. Leaving them in constant survival mode, we prevent many communities from thriving.
Dispatcher makes it easy for people to get help and give help to each other, improving trust and relationships that carry over seamlessly from everyday situations to crisis preparedness and resilience. Whether you’re part of local neighborhood, University, or workplace, Dispatcher can help you strengthen community cohesion and resilience.
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| https://twitter.com/harryharrold/status/1149258215672168448 |
Useful services save people money and time but that doesn't flow back (to help maintain them), says research by Becky Hogge looking at TheyWorkForYou.
The big money in tech goes to other things. Via Society in the loop - thoughts from Evan Selinger and Clive Thompson -
One thing we know from looking at the last 15 or so years of software development and the rise of software that scales quickly and becomes woven into everyday life, is that it’s all the ad supported “free stuff” tends to go off the rails. Why? Because anything that’s supported by ads wants you to do more and more and more of it because that’s how you get ad impressions. And that just creates enormous hazards in design that encourages people to overuse a service.I'll be keeping an eye on this new initiative - the Catalyst, a "UK collaborative to bring a social purpose to the digital revolution"
This is a subset of a larger problem in the marketplace. There’s a reason why so much money in venture capital goes towards startups that have an idea that will marginally speed up or automate something or make something that’s more efficient. It’s because the great trick of capitalism is to find something being done, make it so it’s easier to do, and skim off the excess that you’ve created as profit. Capitalism has so loved software for the last 50 years because it’s extremely good at reaching into every nook and cranny of our activity.
The Catalyst sets out to revolutionise how we tackle social and environmental issues in the UK: reshaping organisations to be more responsive to the communities they serve; more resilient; and more collaborative in the creation and scaling of solutions.
We are a coalition of major foundations, digital design agencies, civil society bodies and the UK government, seeking to massively accelerate the use of digital in the UK's voluntary and charity sector.
I still know next to nothing about economics. This piece on how capitalism is meant to work - as a means to enable cooperative problem solving - was a new idea to me.
What happens to the internet as sea levels rise?
A thread from Jon Copley on media communication of risk.
Chav solidarity - via Adrian McEwen.
I've had conversations with people in tech (and civic tech) who simply couldn't grasp this sort of thing:
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| https://twitter.com/TimirahJ/status/1151009168335233024 |
Kin Lane reflects on the open data movement and what it has achieved (or failed to achieve). (HT Sean McDonald)
Open data primarily was about getting waves of open data enthusiasts to do the heavy lifting when it came to identifying where the most value raw data sources exist.Sean McDonald also links to his 2016 piece with Valerie Oliphant - I can't recall if I saw this before, but knowing what I know now, it perhaps resonates more. Did all the effort at the Open Knowledge Foundation around unlocking data really fail to think through the business models that were essential either to realise the hoped-for public benefits, or which other companies would build on the back of opened information? Are we still in the same place, unsure how to get to the future we want because of a lack of detailed thinking through on the business strategy side? (I'm not the only one frustrated by Rufus Pollock's Open Revolution book, which posits future business models for a couple of sectors based on open information, but doesn't play out either side effects, or how we might go about achieving this change. Radical Markets seems to do better, on this - but also posits a different future, albeit one with potentially more common goods.)
I feel pretty strong that we were all used to initiate a movement where government and institutions opened up their digital resources, right as this latest wave of information economy was peaking. Triggering institutions, organizations, and government agencies to bare fruit, that could be picked by technology companies, and used to enrich their proprietary datasets, and machine learning models. Open doesn’t mean democracy, it mostly means for business. This is the genius of the Internet evolution, is that it gets us all working in the service of opening things up for the “community”. Democratizing everything. Then once everything is on the table, companies grab what they want, and show very little interest in giving anything back to the movement. I know I have fallen for several waves of this over the last decade.
Open Knowledge Austria is dissolving (HT Ton Zijlstra),
With Open Knowledge Austria ceasing to exist, a chapter ends. I suspect the community substrate on which it could exist will endure, even if events, individual members lives and contexts are always in flux around us. It is laudable that OK Austria is actively deciding to dissolve. Organisations all too easily stumble into the pitfall that continued existence becomes the organisation’s primary goal. By dissolving, as Stefan Kasberger, OK Austria’s chair, wrote, one releases its hold on specific topics and niches in an ecosystem, and it becomes possible for new things to emerge over time.
August sees the world's first online hackathon to help fix the climate. Teams can work on projects to raise awareness of climate issues, enable people to take action, or make other climate projects easier in the future. I'm really interested to see how this works out. Hackathons are all too often glossy but ineffectual means to tackle challenges, with intensive antisocial hours to complete projects (not very inclusive), or too short a time to do anything other than create a shiny demo (which is rarely taken any further). The fixathon runs over a longer time and is remote, so much easier to take part in, and stands a good chance of creating meaningful outputs. Registration is open now.
Why the US is so fixated on cars. Via Future of Transportation newsletter, I learned how the insurance setup favours drivers, both in cover, and implicitly in pricing.
'States don’t require drivers to carry enough insurance to fully compensate people they hit. The most common amount of required bodily-injury coverage is just $25,000; in some states, it's zero. A number of states also employ no-fault systems associated with increased fatality risks. This all lowers the up-front cost of driving, but those who lack the protection of a vehicle suffer disproportionately.'
Open source software remains an interesting area in the world of maintenance. On one hand, it's sometimes held up as a rare example where maintainers are venerated and even rewarded; on the other, it's a troubled space where maintenance is especially burdensome, and a labour of coordination often in 'spare time' with a never-ending list of requests.
New offerings of peer support for open source maintainers.
Perhaps this goes along with the rise of "few maintainer" projects.
How do you run a modern census and still protect privacy? Interesting report from PETS - Ross Anderson's notes - a few paragraphs in.
There's also a great bit about Facebook and phone numbers from PETS -
Giridhari Venkatadri has been Investigating sources of PII used in Facebook’s targeted advertising. Facebook advertisers can choose up to 15 attributes for the ad engine to match; it returns size estimates for each audience. Can these mechanisms leak personal information, or be used to discriminate? Well, transparency is limited, so Giridhari set out to identify Facebook’s sources. He uploaded all 2,800 landline numbers from Northeastern University and found that 58% matched Facebook users. Some subtlety is needed as the minimum size estimate Facebook will give out is 20; he circumvents rounding by finding the rounding threshold empirically, deleting one number and then adding the number he’s investigating. He uses other techniques to test for and circumvent noise addition. They disclosed this responsibly to Facebook, who responded that the ability to check whether a single phone number was targetable was not considered to be a vulnerability. One author provided a mobile number to Facebook Messenger for two-factor authentication, and found that this was used for ad targeting (though when it was supplied as a WhatsApp identifier, it wasn’t). They also deduced that Facebook matches PII, e.g. when others upload it as contact information, and they didn’t deny it; they said that the phone numbers were owned by whoever had uploaded them.
Another example of bad internet of things design - how to reset your lightbulb by Bruce Schneier.
I prefer my basic infrastructure to be less digital to avoid this sort of thing.
And finally - dream time from Jon Crowcroft. "James was worried that his 40 year-old digital clock was dreaming."
(Having added this to my draft weeknotes thinking it was a nice closing story, three more related articles appeared in the following days...)
Smart meters have recently been waking up Welsh.
But smart meters are also not working very well writes Nick Hunn. Another example of the focus on individual rather than collective benefits (and a failure to address plausible threat models, of which there are too many in tech products).
Here's a small example of that weak thinking - Octopus Energy had persistent issues installing new meters, and it turns out to be due to manufacturer tests rendering some units useless. A horrible mess to debug that issue, too.
If only digital devices were just dreaming.