Weeknotes: stakeholders (or not), connective labour, following the money, chairs, emoji
Another week, another interesting Zebra community event. This one was about industry level accountability, and I was particularly struck by some comments from Amelia Evans of MSI Integrity. She talked about how we should move away from the term 'stakeholder' - for several reasons. Mostly, it's been ambigious, leaving us with unhelpful ideas like "investors are always stakeholders", or that stakeholders might be acceptably involved by showing up to a committee meeting. Also, the etymology is grim - either from mining and extractive industries, or from gambling. Ouch. Anyway, Amelia proposed we should think about who is affected by the business? Lean into the complexity there, and just think about who is affected. Do they have power? Airbnb has set up a "stakeholder council" but we should note that voice does not equal power. You need decision-making power, otherwise there's a big risk that the effort ends up as tokenism.
The discussion also touched on the need for a complete reframe of what it means to be an ethical company. Too many companies claim this because of a few fairtrade supply chain items, or a diverse board. We need to demand more from businesses (and ethical investment funds) as consumers, perhaps by asking two questions:
- who are you governed by and accountable to?
- who are you owned by and who do you share your benefits from?
These need to become the new refrain. (Full notes from the event)
This, and the thread maybe:
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| https://twitter.com/geotransversals/status/1297767573337980928 |
Allison Pugh writes about connective labour - HT Frank Pasquale.
Many jobs — primary care physicians, therapists, teachers, coaches, ministers, even high-end sales staff and business managers — rely on relationships, on an emotional understanding between the worker and other people. These jobs depend on the ability to connect with others: clients healing, students learning, employees motivated and engaged, congregants inspired or comforted. I call this work “connective labor,” and I have been studying it for the past five years, interviewing more than 100 people and observing them at work for hundreds of hours.
Practitioners tell me that the “magic” of connective labor — what makes it work — lies not in feelings of affection, care or even trust, but rather in witnessing or reflecting the other person so that they (the client or student or patient) feel “seen.” Computers can do the seeing — paradoxically, we often call that “personalization.” But it turns out that being seen by a human can confer a unique dignity.
... While the affluent hire humans to be their personal investment advisors or personal shoppers, at the very bottom of the income ladder, disadvantaged people increasingly get connective labor that is automated. Thousands of young American children, including nearly half of Utah’s four-year-olds, for example, are enrolled in “virtual preschool”: online programs that use animation and songs to teach pre-reading and other skills. The engineers who design these programs argue that they are “better than nothing,” and they are not necessarily wrong. But the question remains whether nothing is the best we can do in terms of human connective labor for poor people. ...
In the emerging landscape of this work, then, we are seeing the rise of a servant economy and a thinning out of connective labor by increasing precarity and automation, and these trends are likely to continue post-pandemic. There is inequality between who is on the receiving end of different kinds of connective labor, as well as whose labor is automated. While the well-off meet their personal needs with the help of hired humans, those increasingly underpaid humans will likely have to turn to machines (like virtual preschools) for their own personal needs. Yet the distribution and conduct of connective labor matter not just because of their documented impact on healing and learning or because they are frequently experienced as meaningful work. It can also provide people with a form of dignity that resists measurement and mechanization.
... “It was powerful for both of us,” she told me. “Just to give him that moment — I’m seeing you, I’m acknowledging you, this is me caring for you.” She paused. “I think we all just want acknowledgment of our sufferings, even if you can’t cure it or do anything about it.”
... But the experience of someone witnessing us, of being seen by another human, is undeniably powerful, and we know this partly by the threat of its absence. The opposite of feeling seen is, of course, feeling invisible... It is captured in the politics of white working-class rage and implicated in our recent social crises, such as the aptly termed “deaths of despair,” those deaths by suicide and drug and alcohol overuse that radically lowered the life expectancy for working-class whites. It may seem odd to point to invisibility as a problem while workers, from warehouse laborers to truck drivers to gig-economy nannies, were increasingly being monitored, rated and replaced, their work ever more measured and intensified. “We literally have to be careful about everything that we do, even in our personal life,” one careworker told researchers.
But to be surveilled or counted is not to be witnessed. Instead, accompanying these trends is a new stratification of human contact. We are only just beginning to know what connecting labor does and how it works. And we surely have a social interest in making certain kinds of connective labor more systematic, so that getting good teaching or healing is less reliant on being affluent or lucky.
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| https://twitter.com/LouWoodley/status/1299075689124110343 |
Marc Barto is building a super timeline of the maker response to the pandemic (a work in progress). He writes:
While rapid prototyping and design innovations of PPE by makers tend to grab headlines, what we hope to document is how communities crossed unexplored bridges to build new relationships and trust with neighbourhoods, businesses, health services and government bodies.
... These initiatives need capturing because we are facing many other challenges that need strong civic structures, community resilience and co-production. I am concerned that the momentum will go without us being able to pause to understand how this mobilisation happened, and more importantly how it it can be reproduced.
Capturing these actions is also useful to avoid falling into the idealisation of the movement, as we have witnessed unnecessary duplication of efforts, as well as questionable designs and safety measures.
Good to see the Open Covid Pledge finding a long term home - at Creative Commons. HT Jenny Molloy
Mirco Tonin surveys research around what behavioural economics might tell us about compliance with social distancing.
Why "Stay alert" is a useless message (thanks to Alice Bennett, who collects safety messages at Read and Heed).
The rich information on *checks notes* Google is actually from people
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| https://twitter.com/iotwatch/status/1299035411050831872 |
Diane Coyle's latest book review includes this:
It reminded me of this comment in Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel lecture (flagged up on Twitter recently by Nicholas Gruen): “Designing institutions to force (or nudge) entirely self-interested individuals to achieve better outcomes has been the major goal posited by policy analysts for governments to accomplish for much of the past half century. Extensive empirical research leads me to argue that instead a core goal of public policy should be to facilitate the development of institutions that bring out the best in humans.”
This:
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| https://twitter.com/natematias/status/1299177524656775168 |
Via Friedrich Lindenberg - the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project has been updating its technology.
Since OCCRP’s data platform, Aleph, first went online in 2016, it has gone through a transformation similar to Google’s — from “strings” to “things.”
Aleph began as a tool to search text documents, but we soon realized that the data collected for our investigations didn’t fit into that paradigm all the time. A table of payment details, for example, would simply be interpreted as a large gob of words, not the intricate network of people, companies, and transactions that our reporters saw it as, and wanted to analyze further.
In response, we decided to change what Aleph did. Instead of just searching the text in documents, we realized we had to index concepts and how they were connected to each other, so we could produce a knowledge graph that allowed us to consider data in terms of semantics, not just text.
There's lots more in the article. OCCRP does important anticorruption work, and they are easy to support via Patreon.
A new prototype "search engine and data explorer that collects declarations of interests, gifts, employment and more from elected members of bodies around the UK" from OpenDemocracy and Open Data Services.
The Engine Room has a new strategy, which is clear and nicely presented.
Via Tiago Peixoto, a paper [PDF] which finds only 5% of hackthon projects continue more than 5 months. If anything I'm surprised it's that many, in the civic tech "let's use a hackathon to fix things" space.
A long article about the tyranny of chairs by Sara Hendren.
A new prototype "search engine and data explorer that collects declarations of interests, gifts, employment and more from elected members of bodies around the UK" from OpenDemocracy and Open Data Services.
Anyone who holds public office in the UK needs to declare financial interests and other benefits because of the potential for influencing any decisions and/or representations they’re making.
At the moment, access to this information is poor. Different bodies often present data in different formats — in the worst cases as handwritten forms that have been scanned and uploaded as a pdf on a council’s website.
Because this information isn’t available as standardised data, it’s difficult to understand, work with and analyse. To find out how many politicians in the UK have been financed by a specific company, for example, you’d need to find where that data is published, scrape it, transform it into a standard format and then load it into a database that can be queried. There’s also no existing historical archive, so we can’t track changes over time.
...declared. is a proof of concept that shows what we could do if politicians were required to declare their interests as open, standardised data.
Over the past three months, we’ve written scrapers to get data about the declarations of financial interests of politicians in certain areas, built a data standard for it and deployed a search engine that sits on top. This means you get to see all the information in one place, and search it in ways that would have taken hours before.
The data standard we’ve built — which is based on the existing reporting standards — can form the basis for local councils and Westminster to publish better data about UK politicians financial disclosures.
The diversity of formats, detail and quality represented by these declarations made work on declared. unnecessarily challenging, and the site itself is not as useful as it could be — but we estimate it could cut the amount of time it takes to search and analyse Registers of Interest, and what you can find out.
The Engine Room has a new strategy, which is clear and nicely presented.
Via Tiago Peixoto, a paper [PDF] which finds only 5% of hackthon projects continue more than 5 months. If anything I'm surprised it's that many, in the civic tech "let's use a hackathon to fix things" space.
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| https://twitter.com/AlexSteffen/status/1294022135497625600 |
A long article about the tyranny of chairs by Sara Hendren.
‘Let’s face the considerable evidence that all sitting is harmful,” writes Galen Cranz, a design historian whose book The Chair traces this object’s long history. ... But while they remind us of the human form, chairs rarely do much to actually support it. For instance, many chair designs feature big, soft cushions that seem to indicate comfort, but in ergonomics, the consensus contradicts this padded aesthetic. Cranz writes that “an overpadded chair forces the sit bones to rock in the padding rather than make contact with a stable surface, thereby forcing the flesh in the butt and thighs to bear weight”.
How can a nice cushioned chair that screams comfort be so ill-suited to most actual bodies? The real science of ergonomics, Cranz argues, should point designers toward chair design that supports and enables the body’s need for movement, not stillness – with seats that angle downward in front, for example, and have a base that’s flexible enough for the sitter to shift their body weight from leg to leg. But for the most part, these principles are ignored in favour of fashion and cheap manufacturing.
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It’s not just chairs, of course – so many of the products brought to market by the profession of industrial design were not created for many bodies. Instead, they were designed to be plentiful, novel rather than necessary, and cheap. One famous designer, Victor Papanek, memorably dubbed these bad designs a form of “do-it-yourself murder”.
“Never before in history have grown men sat down and seriously designed electric hairbrushes, rhinestone-covered file boxes, and mink carpeting for bathrooms, and then drawn up elaborate plans to make and sell the gadgets to millions of people,” he wrote in 1971. “Today, industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis. By designing criminally unsafe automobiles that kill or maim nearly 1 million people around the world each year, by creating whole new species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breathe, designers have become a dangerous breed.”
... Papanek was particularly barbed in his assessment of design’s failure to allow for non-normative bodies. He called for a much closer focus on people and conditions whose needs were commonly written off by his design counterparts as “special”: older people, people with disabilities, elementary school students, and any population considered beyond the scope of the middling mainstream. But as Papanek pointed out, we were all children once, and almost all of us become, in turn, adolescents, middle-aged people and older adults. If we combine all the “seemingly little minorities [and their] ‘special’ needs,” he wrote, we discover that “we have designed for the majority after all”.
... It wasn’t Papanek who offered universal design to the world; it was disabled people whose long-held insights generated what became a set of principles that designers could follow. Ronald Mace, a wheelchair user and architect, is credited with introducing the term “universal design” to the public in 1985. In part, the coinage was strategic, recasting features of design that had been considered “special” as simply good design, resulting in products and buildings that were straightforwardly “usable by all people”.
The universal design principles that Mace and others in the disability community generated read like an antidote not only to the preoccupation with “styling and obsolescence” that Papanek called out, but also to the “murderous” results of negligent design; they include principles such as “simple and intuitive use”, “perceptible information”, “low physical effort”, and perhaps most important of all, “tolerance for error”.
... It would be easy to conclude from these stories that universal design is dispatching “murderous” objects to the dustbin of history, and that it alone points the way to a more accessible future. ... But disability scholars also point to the ironies created by the work that Mace and his ilk set in motion. One is that while the dominant model of universal design has disability at its centre, the very success of the innovations it generates tends to obscure their origin stories, as in the case of the Oxo peeler. That success makes many people overlook the barriers that still exist to an adaptive, flexible world for disabled people. Universal design also tends to stoke an unquestioned faith in the importance of products, attained by consumers, as the key to building a desirable world. A better product might be useful in the short term, but sometimes it’s a better process, or a better system, that’s needed to provide a long-term solution.
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| https://twitter.com/zararah/status/1297810392543121408 |
I was intrigued to spot the call for papers for the first International Workshop on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good (via Martin Kleppmann). Good to see a technical workshop with a more nuanced purpose than just "for good" - I hope there's some consideration/awareness of the non-technical pieces needed in governance etc for this to work out.
I remain surprised by fairly regularly encountering otherwise responsible, smart, progressive and climate aware people who seem to see no issues with short haul flights. From the Conversation:
This workshop is focussed on distributed infrastructures that enable human interactions and economic activity in general with a focus on the common good. Daily life is transitioning to digital infrastructures, including friendships, education, employment, health-care, finances, family connections, and more. These infrastructures can contribute to the common good enabling us to work together to improve the wellbeing of people in our society and the wider world.
... Private ownership of infrastructures does not seem to solve the traditional problems of Tragedy of Commons: pollution (spam and bot network on social media), over-exhaustion of resources (net neutrality), and fairness (gig economy). Privatization of digital commons also introduces the potential for monopolistic abuse, such as: stifled innovation, price discriminations, and distorted market knowledge discovery. We aim to explore within this workshop viable alternatives to 'winner-takes-all' platform ecosystems. Failure of market mechanisms to address these issues suggest that such infrastructures could be treated as commons. We recognize the promising avenue of research build on Nobel laureate Ostroms idea that commons is the third way to organize complex human cooperation, beyond capitalist regulation or governmental regulations.
Scientific challenges include, but are not limited to: the Tragedy of the Commons in such shared-resource systems, fake identities with Sybil attacks, robot economy, trustworthiness in general, self-organizing machine learning, market infrastructures in cashless society, and governance issues in decentralized systems.
I remain surprised by fairly regularly encountering otherwise responsible, smart, progressive and climate aware people who seem to see no issues with short haul flights. From the Conversation:
To keep global warming below 1.5°C, we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 2.5 tonnes of CO₂ per person per year by 2030. But we recently analysed more than 275,000 household budget surveys from 26 countries for an academic study, and we found that only about 5% of EU households live within these limits.Unexpected but necessary legal deliberations! HT Lilian Edwards
... Households in the top 1% of polluters in the EU have carbon footprints that are 22 times larger than the safe limit of 2.5 tonnes. On average, people in this group emit greenhouse gases equivalent to 55 tonnes of CO₂ per person per year.
... What do the top emitters consume that produces so much waste? One of the biggest culprits in our analysis is air travel. Regular flights are responsible for 41% of the carbon footprint of the top 1% of emitters, and almost all flights taken in the EU are by the top 10% of polluters.
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| https://twitter.com/dkrolph/status/1299162991280009222 |