Dr Laura James's writings

Fortnightnotes, mostly because of  Mozfest  last weekend. It now seems a very long time since the BBC & Mozilla event looking at ideas for a healthy public service internet (which  I wrote up separately ). Mozfest was good, even if I mostly was there for the corridor track, and conversations with the diverse collection of people brought together in one place. Oddly a lot of those people seemed there for similar reasons; not because of the open web, or Mozilla, or even the tracks/themes, but just because this is the place you go to meet a certain set of folks now. Good on Mozilla for providing a venue for this, although I can’t imagine it’s a primary goal for the organisers. I’m still pondering  ideas  for co-operative experiments around everyday technology, and Mozfest was a good place to talk about this, and like last year, there were lots of folks from co-ops there. Some conversations were about how the tech + co-op ecosystem could be enrich...

A rough write up of the BBC and Mozilla event at Mozfest House on 23rd October 2018. Wendy Grossman also  wrote up the event . A lot of similar issues are touched on in  Katja Bego’s post on the ten challenges facing the internet , which is a useful illustration of the breadth of issues under consideration; in a stack concept, from networking and censorship, access, digital infrastructure like identity, applications and services; or networking vs compute vs data and information; or by function — gaming, finance, government services, social, education, civil freedoms, transport, internet of things… Other interesting links: thoughts from the Public Stack Summit earlier this year BBC R&D vision PublicSpaces manifesto BBC R&D and Mozilla brought together a group of folks to explore what a healthy public service internet might look like, plus whether this is the right question or an idea worth pursuing. One of the sessions discussed the idea of ‘public service...

Today sees the launch of the  Impact Union  and you can  read all about it here . We are  the Impact Union . We stand for meaningful practical impact on the challenges of our age, delivered by a community of diverse, committed, change-making entrepreneurs, who share values of fairness and the importance of purpose, working in our own ways to make a real and positive difference in the world. I’m really excited about this, because: We need new ideas to make progress on tough challenges like climate change and social justice. It’s very, very hard to go from an initial pilot to a viable and effective larger scale activity if you are really tackling the hard, complex problems encapsulated by the  sustainable development goals . Supporting entrepreneurs through this phase is critical, and a gap in the current ecosystem. It’s always struck me as strange how so many startup and venture support programmes are defined by the organisational types they accept. Of co...

All my three big successes this week were to do with media. The  Festival of Maintenance  was featured on  Click on the BBC World Service  (from 14min25sec) and then in the  Economist , which coins a great phrase:  In a disposable society, to repair is to rebel . My other success was for my actual paid work at the  Computer Lab  — regaining control of our long-dormant  Twitter account . Limited progress on figuring out how to support more social entrepreneurship within the University context, but signs that this is needed and that others want to see it happen too. I started a  doc  for resources(almost empty so far), heard reflections from one College employee about the skills of today’s student activists, and got  some useful feedback from Graham Mitchell  on my previous post, about the capabilities for co-operative and other change-making in the UK.  “The number of effective cooperative development people tha...