Weeknotes: Leadership, critiques of all kinds of things, human scale online networks
People tend to think that the biggest deciding factor in their career is their talent or skill, but I don’t believe that. The way you process risk and handle fear has more impact on what kind of career you have than any other single factor.
... Leaders as they develop tend to break in one of two directions on risk. There are the leaders that — like samurai — embrace death. They see their role as protecting and empowering the people below them who do the real work and it’s an honor to serve the team’s interests even if things do not go well for them personally. In the best organizations the leader’s manager also does not fear death and they have the same safety as they grant to their people.
But some people don’t process risk in that way. Those leaders get drawn into trying to outrun death, which is as impossible metaphorically as it would be literally. You can’t avoid taking responsibility forever. Eventually there will be some disappointment or mistake that you will be called on to answer for.
The leaders who have a low tolerance for risk ... will respond to risk by either avoiding it outright or figuring out how to spin the situation so that it is Not Their Fault(TM).
These leaders ultimately become bureaucrats. The perfect job is the job with the glamorous title and the big paycheck where no decisions and no risks need to be taken.
The next bit is an important point - although I don't think it's entirely universal. Highlights mine:
These leaders end up in startups more often than you might expect. That’s because continuing down a career where you’re running from death all the time does real damage to you psychologically. It’s important to understand that even though it seems like these people don’t care they are still human and they still have the same basic needs and feelings as anyone else. Fleeing death doesn’t just hurt the people they throw under the bus, it also hurts them. They want to be respected by their employees and often know they are not. They want to be admired and often know they are not. They also feel guilty screwing people over to survive.Thanks to Abbey Kos for sharing that. Abbey definitely embraces death (in this context!).
Cassie Robinson shared this piece by Nina Simon. Although it's mostly about civil society leaders I think it's good advice for other sectors too. Cassie's highlights are perfect - "Hire the Leader for this Moment and the Future You Want to Build." "Hire for What You Need, Not the Patterns You Are Familiar With."
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| https://medium.com/@ninaksimon/calling-all-phoenixes-8d2f57ce93ee |
A nice review / summary of Nadia Eghbal’s new book Working in Public, by Byrne Hobart:
There’s a reason why open source projects are called “projects,” rather than just code. While code is the final output of a project, the term “project” refers to the entire bundle of community, code, and communication and developer tools that support its underlying production.
... And, over time, the outside requests soak up most developers' time. Maybe you write a nice library for doing interesting things with text, which is great, until someone who uses it points out that it can’t handle Cyrillic or Hangul characters. You create a way to do something fancy in browsers, and it turns out to be broken in Internet Explorer. Your library is great for analyzing what you think of as “big data,” but somebody else’s idea of “big data” is orders of magnitude bigger, and they’re asking you for help.
... Software projects go through this exact cycle: at first, they’re mostly producing and building on “software capital,” code that executes the underlying logic of the process. Over time, more of the work involves integration and compatibility, and as all the easy edge cases get identified, the remaining bugs are a) disproportionately rare (or they would have been spotted by now) and b) disproportionately hard to fix (because they have to be the result of a rare and thus complicated confluence of circumstances). So, over time, a software project falls into the Baumol Trap, where high productivity in the fun stuff produces more and more un-fun work where productivity gains are hard to come by.
... Running a successful open source project is just Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights.
... In the end, it’s a mystery that this system works at all. The best explanation is that we’re still very early in the software story: there’s so much low-hanging fruit that we can tolerate vast economic inefficiencies as long as the work being done is on approximately the right projects.
Via Jofish Kaye, Ian Bicking's thoughts on voice interfaces. It's been a long time since I worked on these directly but I'm not sure that much has changed, other than more people are aware of them and these days they are in your home or car, waiting to be awoken. Some of Ian's points were reasonable back, erm, two decades ago when I was at AT&T Labs. Others remind me how glad I was that we could - at least asynchronously - mix voice and text/images/maps etc when developing Evi (even that was almost a decade ago, before Amazon bought it, and I'm reminded of it every time I read about Alexa).
Here's one highlight:
I am skeptical about learning and adaptation.
- Reliability – even reliably making mistakes – is an important feature. It means the user can learn about the system and adapt their behavior, without the system foiling them by changing its own behavior.
- Discovery is hard, and having the search space change under your feet only makes it worse.
- In summary: humans learn faster and better than machines. If the experience is going to grow, it needs to be explicit and deterministic, not clever or implied.
As Terence Eden notes, it's easy to build quick, simple digital systems. It's harder to build them right.
9 crappy paradoxes that shape nonprofit and philanthropy by Vu Le at nonprofitaf. I think I've experienced all of these when working in one non-profit or another, except possibly number 9. Sigh. Moving from the sector to the individual, this week I had a delightfully cathartic chat with a friend about the, hmm, challenges of 'hero' leaders in tech-oriented civil society, plus the intersection of this with the class/wealth issues still hardly anyone talks about in the non-profit sector.
Panthea Lee on what co-creation really means [thread] (often, the term is used for activities more like consultation...) Some highlights on how co-creation ought to be:
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| https://twitter.com/PantheaLee/status/1290685410742620162 |
Via Chris Adams, a critique of the SDGs by Michael Liebreich. It's from 2015, but for me is a new perspective on how these could have been written to be clearer, punchier and perhaps more actionable. Certainly I've seen my share of proposals and projects where it feels like a selection of "SDGs this work vaguely links with" has been made based on keyword alignment to tick funder boxes, rather than anything more constructive or change-making. (I'm guilty of this too.)
From 2019, Chenoe Hart in RealLifeMag on delivery robots (which reminds me of agathonicity):
Given that robots can move through space in uniquely nonhuman ways, they wouldn’t necessarily be subject to boundaries between private and public spaces that constrain delivery people, allowing them to move goods in and out of homes in a constant flow. ... But fully automated robots could travel deeper into homes without compromising privacy. You wouldn’t need to get dressed to greet a robot, if you noticed its arrival at all. It might unobtrusively enter and leave through an opening the size of a pet door.
While startups such as Omni and Tulerie are already experimenting with offering peer-to-peer lending of physical objects delivered through courier services or the mail, automated distribution methods that reduce the labor needed to ship them could render such rentals more affordable while making the act of renting itself feel less unusual and more commonplace.
I'm not sure I'd see today's camera-equipped robots as offering no privacy threat, although clearly it's a different proposition to a delivery person in both privacy and security terms.
... But emergent online shopping behavior suggests a latent consumer desire to circulate goods out of as well as into homes. E-commerce initially grew on the promise of easy returns of merchandise purchased sight-unseen, and it has become common to order multiple items at once under the assumption that some will be returned. Mainstream classified ad and auction websites are nearly as old as those selling new goods, and new improvised alternatives to the traditional garage sale are still emerging; some eBay sellers offer “mystery boxes” to get rid of unwanted goods, and websites and apps for reselling clothing are also growing rapidly.This month my early sign up for Loop in the UK resulted in an invite, although I've not found anything to order yet. The idea of shipping back low-/no-brand packaging for food and household consumables is an interesting one, especially as I tend to remove brand labels from things like shampoo bottles where I can.
... If the development of such a network followed the path of the internet’s historical emergence, anticipatory utopian overtones might eventually yield to corporate centralization. Within your own living space, robots might bring into tempting proximity objects that you haven’t yet paid to use, like those now sold within hotel room refrigerators — an approximation of pop-up ads in space. The ability to automatically exchange items within the home might accelerate the logic behind the internet of things, by which objects become no longer ownable but are sold as a renewable service. As the ongoing value of an object would be less about personal attachment than its history of use by other people, objects specifically engineered to endure higher rates of shared usage might become less affordable to purchase as an individual consumer. In the worst-case scenario a few large companies might seem to own almost everything, with everybody becoming their dependents.I like the comparison with internet history, now we have several eras of that to reflect on. I'm not sure how the delivery robot network future idea feels in a post-pandemic era though. Mixed, maybe.
The response from the authors of a paper, much criticised on Twitter, about water provision in Nairobi and the idea of cutting off supply to drive payment. It's complicated.
The Computer Lab has been logging the weather in Cambridge for a while. It is/has been hot, so Verity Allan had a look at how common this is:
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| https://twitter.com/verityallan/status/1291497620117094400 |
This summary by Laurie Macfarlane [thread] of the government's overhaul of England's planning system makes for depressing reading. Making brownfield development easier sounds good, but all the detail is grim. There's a longer article version in openDemocracy, which explores the roots of the housing crisis and some of the history around planning.
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| https://twitter.com/EinsteinsAttic/status/1291665219241029633 |
Cory Doctorow summarises why behavioural ads are not a good thing.
Kim Stanley Robinson speaking about whether we're aiming for utopia or dystopia doesn't really cover anything new but I was struck a little by Patrick Tanguay's highlights, mostly as a reminder to me that although this doesn't seem new to me it would likely be quite shocking (or unbelievable) to many of the people working on tech ventures (or investing in them), which they think will address issues like these. Patrick notes:
... if you are worried about the climate, extinctions, inequality, and capitalism, this is very much worth a read because of the very clear way in which Robinson puts forth the link between all of those issues, how “we” have all the tools to organize the world differently so everyone can live properly, and on the long, multi-generational political battle to get there.The highlights:
The sustainable and just civilization that we all hope to create cannot be built using a capitalist economy. […]Conventional tech startups simply don't usually take this sort of systemic approach, even though they are increasingly claiming to tackle some of these systemic problems. They identify and tackle problems with a very different view of the world, and a very focussed, niche 'fix'.
[S]olving inequality is not just the right thing to do; it’s the optimally survivable thing to do. […]
So we can describe a utopian vision that addresses poverty and biodiversity and injustice which is realistic given our technology, our social skills, and the physical resources of the whole biological community of Earth. […]
Because technologies don’t just involve machinery. Technology is the full spectrum of ways we organize our relationship to the physical world. […]
You build the scaffold you can in this current situation, and then hope the next generations can keep building on that scaffold and raising the level of discourse and activity to achieve a higher level of interaction with the planet. […]
So a first step is just a return to a Keynesian understanding that government needs to regulate business, rather than the opposite, and as governments create money, to create and spend money appropriately to meet human needs.
Sharing emotions for meeting check-ins and check-outs from the Camplight co-op via the co-op tech list. Really interesting to see how they evolved this tool.
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| https://medium.com/camplight/reimagining-the-way-teams-share-their-emotions-with-moodlight-2e0d3608a493 |
Michelle Thorne on documentation infrastructure sustainability:
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| https://twitter.com/thornet/status/1291705953742729218 |
I ended up in the Play Circus event, which I'd somehow thought would be about creating more play for everyone in our towns and cities, and sort of was, although indirectly by thinking about what a national play strategy might look like. It was a really fun event with a lot of very different folks from around the country and we made a Google Slides of our ideas and thoughts. I also learned about Play Sufficiency - how much play do kids need to thrive? - and wondered how this might translate for adults.
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| https://twitter.com/EmmaKennedy/status/1291633215271247873 |
If you're looking for a Zoom alternative, Meet.coop is offering fully hosted video conferencing. And it's a co-op.
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https://www.org.meet.coop/ |
And finally, I'm still interested in spaces where people can chat in small groups and how they might operate. This (long) article about FriendCamp has some useful ideas (although the implementation is still too focussed around one individual for my liking, as I think these groups + tools/platforms need teams to operate and sustain them.
It's a very small change to Mastodon itself, but it strikes at one of the core things about Mastodon, which is this concept of federation and relaying messages to other places.
There are lots of Mastodon instances out there that are general interest, where people join who don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. It's kind of like your choice of email server—you're not in a community with other Gmail users because you have a Gmail account, you're not in a community with other Hotmail users because you have a Hotmail account. Except that on Mastodon, there are features that seem to imply that you are in a community, like the instance-specific timeline, also known as the local timeline. But the local timeline doesn't make that much sense if there's nothing that you have in common with anyone else.
Then there are instances that are built around particular fandoms, and that can sometimes work. But I'm more interested in people who already have preexisting social connections to one another. For a group of preexisting friends, it made sense for me to provide an extra layer of security, where only the other people in the group can see my messages.
I like to go back to email as an example over and over, because email is federated. It has been forever. I can have a Gmail account, and you can have a Hotmail account, and I can send you an email because our services speak the same language, even though our accounts are on different servers and may be using entirely different technology. Federated social media is basically the same idea: two servers that speak the same language, and enable people to talk to each other.
Email also has similar questions of trust as federated social media. If I send an email to, you know, becky@gmail.com, it's going to the Gmail servers and Google is going to see the message and they're going to do what they're gonna do with it. If I trust Google, that’s okay by me. But if I go to my auto mechanic and I send an email to contact@jimsmechanic.com, I don't know if that email is run by Gmail behind the scenes, or if it’s custom technology or what. For all I know, every email that goes to that mechanic's domain is also posted to a subreddit somewhere that people use to target other people for harassment. I don't know!
That's how posts on the fediverse work too. Friend Camp is connected to something like 6,000 other servers. I haven't audited these 6,000 servers to know if they're safe, nor could I. If my messages go out to any one of those servers, there could be someone opening up private messages and looking at them.
So the local-only feature is about a topology of trust. I know that everybody on Friend Camp trusts me with their data, so if we can have a local-only layer, that means there's only one computer that stores these messages and that's the one that's owned by me, a person that you trust. So a message that you send to someone else on Friend Camp goes from your phone to my computer that's owned by me, who you trust, and then it goes to your friend’s phone, and you trust your friend too. That provides an extra layer of security...
LogicMag: If you made these communities available to a general audience, would the trust part still work? In other words, do you think that these notions of trust and security scale?
I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. Not everybody knows a Darius—not everybody has a friend who's technical and wants to set up one of these networks, and there's currently only one hosting company you could go to who would set this kind of thing up for you.
But this technology could easily piggyback on existing trust networks and infrastructure networks. As a thought experiment, what if every public library system in the US had a federated social media server, and anybody with a library card could have an account? That's not as personal as something like Friend Camp, where the administrator is your friend. But if your administrator is an employee of your local library, then there's a door you can go knock on. You can complain to your local city council member if something happens that you don’t like.... This is where I am playing around with concepts like “neighborhoods,” where a bunch of servers mutually agree to trust each other. That would allow for three levels: you could have local-only posts that only go to your instance; you could have neighborhood posts where messages are only federated to other servers in the same neighborhood; and you could have your global public messages that go to everyone...
LogicMag: Your experiments are able to demonstrate a sense of trust online that isn’t a binary, on/off thing, but where there are degrees of trust. That’s common in interpersonal relationships—you may have an inner circle, then acquaintances, and maybe you have a public persona—but it’s largely absent on the web. Even though your projects are built on Mastodon, it seems like the maintainers of the Mastodon project have a different vision for this system of federation—which is not necessarily to build up networks of trust, but to instead to create an interconnected world. And despite Mastodon having a very different structure from Facebook or Twitter, it feels like all those services share that same motivation.There's a whole guide to running your own small social instance - socially / technically - from Daniel https://runyourown.social/
That's my primary critique of Mastodon: it's still buying into the fact that everyone talking to everyone else is necessarily a good thing.
It’s not just Mastodon—most fediverse developers out there seem to be really interested in the idea of connecting everybody in the world to everybody else in the world. I'm not. I'm trying to create a counter-narrative to that with “Run your own social” and Hometown. And more and more people are switching from Mastodon to Hometown, which is really cool, and a little scary for me. But my hope is that Mastodon will just accept the pull request for my Hometown features, at which point we could all move back to Mastodon...
LogicMag: You've crafted a very particular code of conduct for Friend Camp, and you write in the runyourown.social guide that if someone can't disagree with your code of conduct, then it's probably not strong enough. How do you think about moderation?
The thing about keeping a server and a community small—and by small, I mean less than a hundred people—is that it is possible to individually know every single user and have a sense of where they're at, how they're doing, and really take care of everyone as needed. It also becomes possible in a community that small to make decisions with a pretty strong consensus, if not unanimous agreement, and it's easier to engage in difficult conversations...
LogicMag: What would it take to have Mastodon or these decentralized networks become more mainstream?
I like the small-community approach. I think it would be possible to bring on people who aren't technically advanced, as long as you have an individual coordinating the whole thing.
And one of the beautiful things about federation is that you can have entirely different services talking to each other. So you could have Friend Camp talking to an instance that does Facebook events-type stuff, and you can also be talking to PeerTube, which is a YouTube-type service. There's nothing preventing someone from making a federated app that, on the front end, looks exactly like a text messaging interface that you could use to talk to your grandparents, because most grandparents can send a text message. Now, is anyone doing that? No. My hope is that more people will.