Fortnightnotes: secret sustainability, remote conferences, words
The latest and third edition of the Fairphone was announced. Looks like another solid Android phone, as Fairphone 2 was. Nothing fancy in terms of 'conventional' specs - screen resolution, camera, some processors - although the dual SIM and replaceable battery are nice features. You buy Fairphones for other specs - fairly traded minerals, decent working conditions, repairability - and in this edition, recycled materials, too. I plan to replace my Fairphone 2 - it's given good service, but has also seen heavy use and is starting to show some signs that it may be wearing out. A lifetime of 3.5 years seems quite respectable, for all that it's far less than one might hope for. Fairphone 3 should be maintainable for 5-7 years - if this seems short, you'll be horrified by how electronics manufacturing works.
There are positive effects to going green - it's not about what you give up, but what you get, as a person. It's not so clear cut for companies - some are practicing secret sustainability!
With the community at ClimateAction.Tech I helped draft a climate pledge for tech workers. The idea is to leverage the power of tech workers at some of our most significant companies in particular, to demonstrate interest in recognising and tackling the climate crisis. There are many plans underway for action of different kinds on Friday 20th September.
How can you create change as part of a network or system? Cassie Robinson has written up a terrific overview of different ways of working - from field-building to experimental portfolios and ecosystem strengthening and more. This is an incredibly helpful framework which should help people describe how they are acting (and to help work out what others are doing too). So often it seems like organisations are 'part of a network' without being able to say what this means for what they do, or what others might do. Cassie's leadership in this area really helped Doteveryone through its formative period, too.
The 2019 UK co-operative economy report is out. No big changes over previous reports; newer co-ops continue to have good survival rates compared to companies over 5 years.
It's very tough being a new political party, but the need for new ideas seems clear. Nesta have written up findings on what it takes to succeed. Raising funds for such frequent elections as we seem to have these days is exhausting for startup efforts too. If you are looking for something new, try Something New.
Money has to come from somewhere, especially when you have lots of researchers and toys to fund. There's been plenty of coverage of the issues with Epstein and the MIT Media Lab this week - I felt this Slate piece captured the bigger picture well.
"Keeping money at the margins" - a few tweets from Clare Reddington of Watershed, linking to a fascinating (PDF) report on how they do creative innovation, including how they think about value, being in an ecosystem, and innovation horizons.
Eighty years of Citizens Advice helping people. Access to support with problems - especially things that don't nicely fall into boxes where it's clear who to go for help - is more important than ever in a complex world.
A nice long read about Participatory Cities, by Tessy Britton, on the Liminal blog.
How should we treat robots? It depends on whose robots they are and what role they are playing: maybe we should kick private surveillance robots.
From Matt Stoller's "Big" newsletter, thoughts on European funding efforts to compete with tech companies from America and China.
Emergence Magazine talks to Robert Macfarlane about language as we use it today, lost words and new words.
There are positive effects to going green - it's not about what you give up, but what you get, as a person. It's not so clear cut for companies - some are practicing secret sustainability!
[Evans] and others at the institute have now found that even with the examples they have been able to share, companies and consumers seem unable to accept that sustainability does not have to cost more to create an equally good product. Apparently, we simply cannot believe that a business can be equally or more profitable while reducing its environmental harm. This is despite an increase in evidence that actively investing in sustainable practices helps business thrive.Tips on running a remote conference from Emily Webber - this has got to be something we all continue to work at and improve, for climate reasons plus supporting more diverse participants who can't always travel. Having one camera/remote set up per participant is so effective - you don't realise this until you spend time in video conferences with multiple people in each of multiple rooms...
With the community at ClimateAction.Tech I helped draft a climate pledge for tech workers. The idea is to leverage the power of tech workers at some of our most significant companies in particular, to demonstrate interest in recognising and tackling the climate crisis. There are many plans underway for action of different kinds on Friday 20th September.
On Friday, September 20th, just days ahead of an emergency UN Climate Action Summit, millions of people will walk out of their workplaces and homes to join young climate strikers in a Global Climate Strike, demanding an end to the age of fossil fuels.
This pledge is your opportunity as a tech worker to show that you care deeply about the climate crisis; to expand the impact of the Global Climate Strike by drawing press coverage to tech workers’ position on it; and to let company leaders and senior executives know that tech workers do not intend to stand idly by as the world burns.
How can you create change as part of a network or system? Cassie Robinson has written up a terrific overview of different ways of working - from field-building to experimental portfolios and ecosystem strengthening and more. This is an incredibly helpful framework which should help people describe how they are acting (and to help work out what others are doing too). So often it seems like organisations are 'part of a network' without being able to say what this means for what they do, or what others might do. Cassie's leadership in this area really helped Doteveryone through its formative period, too.
The 2019 UK co-operative economy report is out. No big changes over previous reports; newer co-ops continue to have good survival rates compared to companies over 5 years.
Money has to come from somewhere, especially when you have lots of researchers and toys to fund. There's been plenty of coverage of the issues with Epstein and the MIT Media Lab this week - I felt this Slate piece captured the bigger picture well.
Over the course of the past century, MIT became one of the best brands in the world, a name that confers instant credibility and stature on all who are associated with it. Rather than protect the inherent specialness of this brand, the Media Lab soiled it again and again by selling its prestige to banks, drug companies, petroleum companies, carmakers, multinational retailers, at least one serial sexual predator, and others who hoped to camouflage their avarice with the sheen of innovation.It's not easy to know what money to take, or not take. Donors, sovereign wealth funds, corporates, they all have some sort of moral quality. Much easier to make judgements from the sidelines than when in the hot seat (to mix metaphors) facing alternatives of cutting staff or not doing the work.
"Keeping money at the margins" - a few tweets from Clare Reddington of Watershed, linking to a fascinating (PDF) report on how they do creative innovation, including how they think about value, being in an ecosystem, and innovation horizons.
Eighty years of Citizens Advice helping people. Access to support with problems - especially things that don't nicely fall into boxes where it's clear who to go for help - is more important than ever in a complex world.
A nice long read about Participatory Cities, by Tessy Britton, on the Liminal blog.
In every city in the world we urgently need practical tools to enable us do something to shape our collective future. We need to be given the practical tools to act, not miles away from home, not through extraordinary heroic individual effort.This sort of thing is something Cambridge Community farm hopes to achieve. The results of the community consultation are now out.
So where do we start to build systems?
Currently there are small fragmented projects in neighbourhoods, which are not adding up to the scale or speed of change we need. Some projects are particularly special. They achieve something incredibly difficult: they attract diverse people together to the same spaces, of different ages, cultures and religions. They show us that it is possible to attract people from all walks of life together, in social creative settings and on an equal footing. This is highly unusual in many places today. Segmenting and targeting over decades, whether for consumer products or government services, has left many of us living in siloed clusters of culture or income.
What kind of activity manages to achieve this inclusive participation? Things that we need to do every day: cook, eat, read stories to our children, grow food, repair things, share things, learn and play. These are the things we all have in common, and because they appeal to everyone these projects offer us the potential to create the friendship and trust we need by getting to know one another in the same space. Some of these projects are innovative, some are not, but all are useful and beneficial.
How should we treat robots? It depends on whose robots they are and what role they are playing: maybe we should kick private surveillance robots.
From Matt Stoller's "Big" newsletter, thoughts on European funding efforts to compete with tech companies from America and China.
Another example of this philosophy is the just leaked documents of plans to create a $100 billion European sovereign wealth fund to build European competitors to American and Chinese big tech.
The officials identify Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent among the companies Europe needs to rival. “Europe has no such companies,” their document notes.
Europeans are embarrassed they don’t have large tech companies, instead of recognizing the leverage this gives them. Financing competitors to monopolists isn’t likely to work, and it will also violate trade commitments. And conceptually it’s problematic because it mis-frames the problem as Europeans not being innovative enough to compete. But Europeans are just as innovative as anyone else. The problem is that European markets, like markets dominated everyone by big tech, are monopolized by centralized institutions.
.....
The reason these officials do not want to break up big tech monopolies is that they don’t fear concentrated power, they just believe that only European leaders should be able to concentrate it. Similarly, some on the left in the U.S. just do not care that Google and Facebook have monopolized advertising, thinking as they do that advertising is a dirty business. They prefer publicly financed media, a sort of ‘we like centralized power but the people in charge have to be nice people.’ ...
Jeff Bezos’s almost casual ability to ward off France’s digital tax shows, however, that the philosophy of ‘concentrate power but in nice peoples’ hands’ is conceptually flawed. The only way to deal with big tech is by going at their monopoly power directly.
Emergence Magazine talks to Robert Macfarlane about language as we use it today, lost words and new words.