Weeknotes: optimism, business and community, agathonicity, greening homes
Somehow I ended up at Alex Steffen's 2008 piece about optimism (this link is to a lightly edited 2016 version).
ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine investigated where climate refugees will go. They've modelled a variety of scenarios for Central America for this feature. Indeed, many people are already moving as crops fail, rivers dry up, floods devastate.
Optimism is a political act.A reminder that back in March 2008 things seemed grim - even though the financial crisis was far from played out -
Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change.
... Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful — cynicism is obedience.
... Optimism, by contrast, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary. Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act out of their highest principles.
Recently, though, I’ve been getting asked a lot how it’s possible to remain optimistic when the news is so bad, and progress on problems like climate change or global poverty seems hopelessly slow.
... I’ve come more and more to think that the particular dynamic of cynicism and despair we see in today’s media and political debates, in both North America and Europe, springs also from politics. Its political nature goes largely unrecognized.
Here’s what I see that politics being:
1) An explicit statement that we are incapable of actually solving the planet’s most pressing problems, and that to consider doing so is “unrealistic.”
2) A mostly unstated assumption that the reason embracing bold solutions is unrealistic is because those solutions involve unbearable costs — often with a faux-populist rhetoric about elites imposing those costs on regular people.
3) A rarely voiced belief that “realism” ought best to be defined as “in the interests of those doing well today,” and that “unbearable costs” ought best to be defined as “any meaningful change in circumstances whatsoever.” A realism, one might say, that’s unconcerned with physical reality.
4) A widely practiced stance that, therefore, expressions of concern and extremely modest, almost symbolic, small steps and half measures are the appropriate course of action.
Though often combined with the politics of fear, this political stance might better be thought of as “the politics of despair.” (It’s as if Eeyore were running the public debate.)
... Nothing about the politics of optimism needs to be naive. We can understand that people are fallible, mostly self-motivated and sometimes even mistaken about what’s in their own best interests. We can stress the importance of informed decision-making, demand rigor and note uncertainty. We can recognize the massive differentials in power and wealth in our society and be clear-headed about the difficulty of opposing those whose power and wealth is tied to planetary destruction. We can anticipate setbacks and failures, disappointments and betrayals. We can expect corruption and demand transparency. We can freely admit the profound difficulty of the work yet to be done — even admit the likelihood of massive failures — and still fight on.
Cofarm Cambridge is doing well despite the challenges of being a community initiative during social distancing. Over 80 people have been involved in setting the site up, planting, tending and harvesting, and it feels like one of the things they appreciate is being able to do something and have a sense of agency at this time. Here's one of the harvests from last week before it went to the local emergency food hub:
The National Food Strategy consultation website appeared last night. As noted by Paul Clarke and Rachel Coldicutt, it's not a conventional gov.uk one, weirdly.
A bit late to finish reading this article by Sam Brown (sorry, Sam!) about community businesses.
Expectations of businesses are changing — people want to see how businesses support their communities and contribute to making the world a better place.A really interesting question is what community looks like if it's not local people visiting a local business.
... Community businesses and the people who work and volunteer for them have been building ties within their localities and discovering how to make a difference for years. But as they are often small, operate with hybrid models, and are busy figuring out how to do their work; their knowledge of creating positive community impact hasn’t quite translated into the commercial business landscape — to the detriment of everyone.
... The questions many community businesses are grappling with in COVID-19 are: What is a community? How do you define your ties to it and role within it? How do you create a vision of positive local impact regardless of how your activities are delivered?
... Building genuine ties with a community creates vested interest on both sides — where the community’s issues become the business’s issues and the other way around.
What successful community businesses do to build ties with their community that commercial businesses can learn from:
- Intentionally get to know the people in the community and find out about other organisations in the area
- Set out how and what you contribute to the community and find ways to communicate activities in an open and inviting way
- Involve the local community in planning and creating products and services
- Encourage local residents to be part of the offer and part of creating positive change locally
- Actively look for opportunities to collaborate and be generous with time and resources
- Critically challenge the norm — disruptive, but for the common good
- Generally, be open and supportive players in the community
... If not post codes, then how do you define community? In COVID-19, many community businesses had to ask themselves this question. Community becomes based on people with shared interests and a shared vision of how the world could be.The story of Silicon Roundabout - then and now. Did Cameron's backing help tech businesses grow? Was it even a tech cluster? (highlight mine)
In most communities, you can have any manner of people of varying circumstance and demographics who will want or need your services and fit into that definition.
Traditional business advice, especially for marketing, is to ‘narrow and clearly define your audience’. But in community businesses, in order to survive you need to be creating something that’s for everyone in your community. And this means you need to grapple with how you can be truly inclusive.
... A regular part of the day for anyone operating a community business is to have a conversation with someone in the community. These conversations are not usually profound; they’re not market research, they’re not transactional.
Merely by being available for people and engaging with them on a daily basis, community businesses have a natural and authentic immersion in many parts of the community, and that means they’re able to build a dynamic picture of the needs of the community faster.
This is coupled with the fact that community businesses often have the freedom and autonomy to experiment — which means when they have a sense there’s a need in the community that isn’t being fulfilled, they can respond by finding new ways to fill that need.
It started as a joke. In July 2008, Matt Biddulph, the chief technology officer of Dopplr, a startup headquartered next to the dreary Old Street roundabout in Shoreditch, realised that other startups were also based in the area and fired off a tweet celebrating “‘Silicon Roundabout’: the ever-growing community of fun startups in London's Old Street area”. The formula was amplified by the Evening Standard and, in January 2010, immortalised in a WIRED feature listing 85 startups near Old Street – many of them were, in fact, design studios and marketing consultancies with no obvious connection to silicon. The casual observation had graduated to media shorthand; soon it would make the leap to policy.... The older, bigger companies working in advertising and media – while they were also often priced out of the cluster’s inner ring – appear to have benefitted from the policy all in all.
... Under May, cluster policy was effectively dead. Left to its own devices, the Roundabout’s property scene continued to spiral out of control. There are now eight WeWorks in the area. Google Campus, the original quasi-public space at the centre of the cluster, restricted its access in early 2019 – it is now called Google for Startups, and only vetted members are admitted.
Cassie Robinson [thread] notes that other kinds of tech - less "hot air and boys toys" - could have been supported through the same period. She has a longer reflection on this from 2019.
I watched a LARP in a Google Doc.
It was great, even if the bees had a rough time of it. Frankly I was glad to be an inhabitant of the planet not a demi-god. It seemed a lot of stress. You can watch it on AMAZE's channel.
You are a Demi-God building a new, better, healthier world. Reorder the chaos and create a new Earth alongside your pantheon. Will you succeed or create destruction? Eco-Chambers is a remaking of the world taking place on google docs.
It was great, even if the bees had a rough time of it. Frankly I was glad to be an inhabitant of the planet not a demi-god. It seemed a lot of stress. You can watch it on AMAZE's channel.
I also took part in Coney's The Delegation. I think it's fair to say it was the one where the fourth wall broke, but in a way that was authentic and challenging and educational. And it did take a few of us a while to clock that the wall was actually down. The cultural exchange - half the participants were Russian - was fascinating too.
Martin Weller writes about open source teaching:
It would have been Electromagnetic Field (EMF), but it wasn't. One of the most joyous bots there in 2018 went to the site anyway, and Sophie Garrett shared many photographs to remind us all what it was like.
21TB of GitHub archives were just stored - on film, deep in the Arctic. HT Georgina Voss
Towards the end of the 90s, the viability of the open source approach to software development gained credence. I’ll address the issues with open source later, but at the time it was a significant challenge to conventional, capitalist thinking that software which was as good, if not better, than commercial products could be realised through a community driven model.It's a useful reminder that online teaching isn't at all new. Distance education is very mature indeed, and even internet teaching has been happening at the OU for a very long time.
...The cultural change since then is interesting. At the time the open source approach was seen as almost unassailably positive, set against the evils of corporations such as Microsoft. Since then though, sexism and lack of diversity in open source has come to light as a major issue. It’s too often a tech bro playground. This is not an inevitable outcome of the open source approach... But I do think an element of hero worship is a problem in the open source approach, and how the community starts is very significant, so it needs careful setting up to develop an equitable community.
But to return to our project, at the time what was interesting was a radical new model for creating complex products. Distance education courses are not unlike pieces of software: they require multi-disciplinary teams, testing, iteration, are comprised of different interacting components and are ‘used’ by a wide range of people who will do unpredictable things with them. The OU had developed a robust model for developing these courses which was analogous to the software product development team in a commercial developer such as Microsoft. The open source model offered a different analogy to draw from.If you review and certify apps which are hosted on your platform to protect users, you actually need to make this process work:
Led by John Naughton, Tony Hirst and Stewart Nixon, the Open Source Teaching project at the OU sought to develop a course production model based on this analogy.
... The project never really took hold, for a number of reasons, partly because it was too difficult to overcome existing practice and the rewards for sharing weren’t viable enough. This might be an example where the OU was too cautious, and could have pushed on this, before MIT launched Open CourseWare a couple of years later.
What is interesting, I think, is that a number of different people were independently thinking along the same lines. This found realisation in learning objects and then later OER. But we’ve still not really cracked a community based production model for learning content.
Amazon claims it reviews the software created by third-party developers for its Alexa voice assistant platform, yet US academics were able to create more than 200 policy-violating Alexa Skills and get them certified.How does the W3C do meetings? Unexpectedly, not by recording them, at present, and not by making useful or complete minutes:
... Amazon disputes some of the findings and suggests that the way the research was done skewed the results by removing rule-breaking Skills after certification, but before other systems like post-certification audits might have caught the offending voice assistant code.
The meetings at issue, where W3C groups discuss the web's technical architecture, generally get documented as minutes – a written summary of who said what. But these minutes may be inaccurate or incomplete.
... Edwards's concern is that W3C decisions, because they affect so many businesses, should be as transparent as possible. He argues that W3C should be bound by Sunshine Laws – which impose disclosure requirements on government organizations – because it sees participation and support from governments, some of which takes the form of federal contracts.
There's been excitement about GPT-3 from OpenAI. Wired highlights some of the enthusiasm alongside some of the questions. As OpenAI is now a for-profit entity encouraging commercial use cases, this feels a long way from the original dream. A brief Twitter thread on some of the problematic aspects.
Anna Powell-Smith launched the Centre for Public Data. I was pleased to see one of their first activities is looking at the Agriculture Bill.
Google search often keeps you on Google properties, finds The Markup, in an interesting article including Google's rebuttal and examples of businesses which are struggling to operate online.
Anna Powell-Smith launched the Centre for Public Data. I was pleased to see one of their first activities is looking at the Agriculture Bill.
Google search often keeps you on Google properties, finds The Markup, in an interesting article including Google's rebuttal and examples of businesses which are struggling to operate online.
We examined more than 15,000 recent popular queries and found that Google devoted 41 percent of the first page of search results on mobile devices to its own properties and what it calls “direct answers,” which are populated with information copied from other sources, sometimes without their knowledge or consent.Colin Johnson's tweet struck me as a point about scale which we aren't thinking about much - not waiting for monopoly status, but recognising when a small hobby-style project starts to affect people outside a friends/family circle maybe:
When we examined the top 15 percent of the page, the equivalent of the first screen on an iPhone X, that figure jumped to 63 percent. For one in five searches in our sample, links to external websites did not appear on the first screen at all.
... Other search engines, including DuckDuckGo and Bing, also provide answers on the search results page but attract less criticism because of their small U.S. market share. DuckDuckGo has 1.5 percent, and Bing has 7 percent, according to Statcounter.
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| https://twitter.com/Colin_GJ/status/1288137742459772930 |
It would have been Electromagnetic Field (EMF), but it wasn't. One of the most joyous bots there in 2018 went to the site anyway, and Sophie Garrett shared many photographs to remind us all what it was like.
21TB of GitHub archives were just stored - on film, deep in the Arctic. HT Georgina Voss
There's a new digital infrastructure research RFP from Ford, Sloan, OSF and Mozilla. It's great to see more foundations getting involved to support this work. At the launch event some of the previous projects looking at different aspects of maintenance of open source infrastructure software presented their findings.
Vaughn Tan writes about things (highlights mine):
Vaughn Tan writes about things (highlights mine):
In the 1930s, T. H. White wrote that “few people are interested in things, except the mechanics who like engines. They are more interested in themselves and humanity, and theories, and emotions. I suppose quite a large percentage of people would not be able to name a grain of wheat from a grain of oats, or perhaps even a blackbird from a rook. Our ancestors of the nineteenth century grew up with things, so that they were real to them and had a sort of comfortable companionship now lost. That is why their things are so often more individual than ours. An old hobby-horse, turned up in an attic, will sometimes be so real that it is a piece of art, and clamours to be put on show in the hall downstairs. Not so the mass-produced Dobbin of to-day.”So far so unexceptional. But here's a new word:
These days, the situation seems even more dire. Things increasingly seem worth keeping around only until they break—they’re so junkily made that we discard them and buy new ones instead of repairing them.
... My working theory is that this change in objects and our relation to them has come about as the relative cost of time and materials has changed. We used to spend more time and effort in making and maintaining things when human time was cheaper and materials were more expensive. Throwaway culture emerges when materials began to feel inexpensive relative to time. As materials become cheaper, we become more willing to throw things away rather than invest time in rehabilitating them. After a while we get used to being told that buying something new is better than having something rehabilitated.
... Agathonicity is usually described as the property of objects getting better with use. The paper that introduced the concept of agathonic design illustrated it with a baseball mitt or hiking boots being worn in—which is intuitive. But it isn’t only the process of wearing in that can make something “better.”
Agathonicity is commonly associated with entropy because of the mechanism of wearing in, but thinking more broadly about it (as above) shows how it can also arise through mechanisms that increase local order at the level of object, user, context, or function. From a product design and management perspective, agathonicity thus seems inextricably intertwined with maintenance...
Agathonicity and maintenance can be a mutually reinforcing nexus—but also one that backfires by asking too much of the user...
Fear of such outcomes may be why we seem to default to trying to design products that are easy to use out right of the box: things that don’t demand much are less likely to repel users or become less functional because of user error. So begins a vicious cycle where users unchallenged by demanding products eventually become less sophisticated users for whom only undemanding products will do. The fear of having to depend on unpredictable user responses is how throwaway cultures start and then become entrenched.
One way to break this vicious cycle is for the designers of things—and by this I mean products, services, systems, organizations—to decide unilaterally that the things they design should ask more of their users. Such a decision will run against conventional business wisdom because it will almost always make things more expensive, harder to make at scale, or harder to learn to use.
Designing things this way may mean lower initial adoption. It requires possibly unfounded faith in users. It thus exposes the designer to uncertainty. But it also gives them the potential both to get better with use and to be used in ways that make them better.
Christian Payne notes apps often don't last:
Consultancy work is everywhere; personally I've never found it quite as fulfilling as being part of the team or organisation that will continue the activity. So this from the Helsinki Design Lab Recipes for Systemic Change [PDF] was a useful framing:New app alert: I haven’t checked out Swell. Sounds a little like audio into Twitter. Remember. Follow the money and ask them if they will look after your content for at least 10 years.
It is common these days for one group to be involved in analysis of a problem and designing the solution (consultants) while a different group executes these ideas (contractors). But this disconnects an essential feedback loop...Their solution? Strategy and stewardship:
We invoke stewardship in place of words like “implement” and “execute” out of recognition that the latter imply a cleanliness or linear progression which is rarely found when working on a shared proposition in a complex environment. Inside a factory plans can be executed, orders implemented, and outcomes delivered, but innovations that engage with the messy reality of the social sphere do not happen so neatly. What we describe also goes well beyond “facilitation,” which suggests that others do the important work. Stewardship shapes the course of innovation; it is not a neutral role. Think of stewardship as a form of leadership. One that acknowledges things will change along the way for better or for worse, therefore demanding agility over adherence to a predetermined plan. Many individuals who work in alliances or collaborative endeavors act as stewards almost naturally. If you are used to continually calibrating the goals of a project with the constraints of your context, you are practicing stewardship. If you maintain a constant state of opportunism and a willingness to pivot when progress on the current path is diminishing, you’re a natural steward...
A good outline of the state of testing and contact tracing in the UK in this BMJ paper "Getting back on track: control of covid-19 outbreaks in the community" by Peter Roderick, Alison Macfarlane, and Allyson M Pollock.
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| https://twitter.com/DrPaulDWilliams/status/1286369739791630337 |
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| https://twitter.com/iotwatch/status/1286649818782236672 |
What will the £2 billion Green Home Grants mean for consumer protection? Retrofitting new heating and insulation and power systems is going to be essential in the UK, but it's nontrivial - big, in some cases disruptive works, and a need to tailor to the property.
Citizens Advice is concerned about the potential for poor quality work — or works that are completely inappropriate for the home. We’re also worried it could lead to scams and mis-selling, which is all too common in the home energy improvements market.Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino has also been noting the significance/complexity of greening our homes.
That’s why we’re calling for this new programme (and any subsequent energy efficiency and low carbon heat schemes) to be accompanied by a net zero homes guarantee that’ll give consumers information, protection and support.
... In 2019, 4031 people contacted our Citizens Advice consumer helpline about all sorts of home energy technology issues. ... Solar panels and home insulation are the top 2 technologies people contact us about, with 1,907 and 1,588 cases respectively. With these cases, people ask us for help because of problems they’re having before a contract has been signed — that’s often because they are worried about whether they’ve been contacted by a mis-selling scams or a rogue trader. People also get in touch with us for help after they have already had something installed in their home... People contacted us about heating when they had higher than usual energy bills or were billed for extra maintenance costs after having heat pumps and other low carbon heating technology installed. This can happen if they don’t have the right product or their home isn’t efficient enough.
We also hear from people who’ve had either the wrong type of insulation installed or had it installed badly. This can cause significant issues like condensation, damp or severe mould — which can in turn have a detrimental impact on people’s health. Nearly a fifth of the insulation contacts we’ve had have been about these issues.
ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine investigated where climate refugees will go. They've modelled a variety of scenarios for Central America for this feature. Indeed, many people are already moving as crops fail, rivers dry up, floods devastate.
Danny O'Brien writes about how news could be in a piece which mentions NTK, which takes me back, etc etc.
The increasingly high frequency of the news-cycle, for instance, was so blatant an issue when I was writing a weekly newsletter, because the collapse of the news-cycle meant we went from a news-breaking weekly, to a news summary weekly, to a news creating weekly. The obvious thing was to just slam the dial on that, and plot out what it meant for news to be on a minute-by-minute hype cycle.A great summary of product management from Alex Reeve. There's a longer list of good product management traits from John Cutler on Twitter.
... A single article provides some insight into an emerging news story. But right now, the elements of that story are scattered across dozens of news services, thousands of witnesses and experts, millions of online participants on social media.
Gathering these threads requires as much work on the part of an involved reader as being a professional journalist: visiting dozens of sites, curating lists of experts, filtering and fact-checking opinions.
Imagine one page —- one permanent home on the Web, or within the searchable app space—for each news story. The majority of these pages could be machine-generated: summaries, with links, to document clusters, together with other relevant indicators (associated hashtags, images or live streams near the source, links to TV reports whose closed-captions indicate deeper coverage.
But the biggest stories are individually curated, pulling together every accessible online source into a coherent and critically-appraised whole.
When you want to find out what’s happening ‘right now’ in a story you care about — and where to find out more— that page will be the place you visit, where you link to, and even where you contribute your thoughts or other comments.
... Stories are far more long-running and timely than mere articles (the story page on the Turkish coup will still be seeing updates now; as does the story page on the 2008 economic crisis.) That means those pages become more than just a first draft of history: they become the most complete historical record (ever?) available.
A permanent place for a story should let readers see, and link to, what it looked like at any moment in time and from multiple entry points or perspectives.