Dr Laura James's writings

Labour was a theme cutting across sessions at Maintainers III. There was one specific session exploring it, which turned out to be quite data-driven (but also US-specific).  Data about labour is often missing, for various reasons. Half the workers in the US are paid by the hour, so their overall wage is unknown and with unpredictable work schedules statistics struggle to paint a realistic picture. Many people have two or three or more jobs; perhaps 40% have some sort of 'side hustle'.  Some forms of intangible labour, such as that of graduate students in universities, are hard to track (that's on top of the unpaid labour in care, in the home and so on). This is perhaps unsurprising given people are generally happy not to know about the poverty and precarity of others. Quite a few sessions discussed unions and labour organising, including mention of the Tech Worker Coalition as well as more traditional unionisation. In the US, collective bargaining was developed in a w...

It’s been two weeks of intensive thinking about maintenance. First we held the second Festival of Maintenance in Liverpool on the 28th September; then I travelled to Washington DC for Maintainers III last week. You can find a summary of the 2019 Festival (and where it came from) over on the Maker Assembly blog . Many thanks for the support over the last two years, Maker Assembly! 2019 was my first Maintainers event, made possible by a Fellowship from the Software Sustainability Institute . Sitting down to write up MIII is quite an intimidating task, as there was so much material covered and a great richness to the ideas we explored. Both events brought together diverse people and communities around a sense of a shared ideal - that there is great value in maintenance that we are not recognising sufficiently today. It was good to be at an event with clear goals. Andy Russell managed to pull together three themes for his closing summary at MIII - a tough task, with two and a ...

Starting with a perceptive and interesting idea from incredible women: https://twitter.com/CassieRobinson/status/1181139137212174336 Doteveryone released a report on Better care in the age of automation . It's a stonker - lots of really insightful points (and worth reading the detail)  Superflux produced an accompanying video which illustrates one possible care future. It doesn't go where you'd expect the story to end up.  Recommended. ( Find out more about the film. ) There's a short video featuring some of the experts involved in the report - including carers and those receiving care. Dan Hon looks into StreetScore as an example of machine learning, the way papers are published and new projects started. His title says it all: Streetscore, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love machine learning. I am just not sure that it is responsible to create a dataset for 21 cities, based on 3,000 images from two cities, while simultaneously admitting that t...