Journal

49 entries for December 2023

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

Let’s talk about pods

[Choosing where and how to store data is less about how to make it work for one app work and more about all other apps.]

How does the way we write data impact others’ ability to reuse that data?

[The document box approach creates conflicts between 1) how data was obtained (provenance); 2) what it will be used for (trust); 3) logical groupings of items (context); 4) who has access (permission). For example, an address book app that dealing with all contact data versus a birthday app dealing only with one detail of many contacts.]

Sunday, December 24, 2023

On a whim, but a deeply felt one, I went live to share some impromptu thoughts on Israel, Palestine, condemnation, and context. Thanks for tuning in and considering.

[Might seem futile to add one’s voice to the cacophony of others on social media, especially as it makes little difference to people suffering over there, but my voice is all I have.]

Saturday, December 23, 2023

Digital Strategy Consulting from Tom Critchlow

I think of clients like partners and typically don’t get hired to make spreadsheets. I’ll make the spreadsheets anyway, but you hire me to care about your business.

Embedded leadership is useful because I’m often available to lead projects on short notice and can shape the strategy, work rapidly to define the roadmap and then over time work to build a robust sustainable team within the organization to own the work.

Engagements often start with a short, small group workshop where we can create clarity around both the problem and solution in a short space of time. These workshops often springboard into larger ongoing retainers and embedded leadership engagements.

Image - Sublime

FROM “Pressure to perform” TO “Freedom to express”

FROM “Low-level anxiety” TO “Aliveness and possibility”

FROM “Immediacy and impermanence” TO “Slowness and contemplation”

FROM “Mindless consumption” TO “Mindful curation”

FROM “Loneliness and disconnection” TO “Connection to ideas and people”

FROM “Perpetual information overload” TO “Joy of discovery and insight”

FROM “Bogged down in irrelevant stuff” TO “The right information when you need it”

FROM “Exploiting our attention” TO “Living in healthy ways with abundance”

FROM “Linear and hierarchical interfaces” TO “Associative, context-rich digital gardens”

open-funding

This document aims to be an open guide to funding of open source projects.

[Grants, Notable Projects, Other Organisations, Crowdfunding]

Awesome OSS Funding

A curated list of awesome resources for funding open source projects and authors.

[Products, Donations, Bounties, Licensing, Articles, Organizations]

A handy guide to financial support for open source

This document aims to provide an exhaustive list of all the ways that people get paid for open source work.

[Donation button; Bounties; Sponsorware; Crowdfunding (one-time); Crowdfunding (recurring); Books and merchandise; Advertising & sponsorships; Get hired by a company to work on project; Start a project while currently employed; Grants; Consulting; Paid support; SaaS; Copyleft + paid license; Open core; Foundations & consortiums; Venture capital; Restricted license]

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

The War on Informality

People cram off the Tube to cram into Pret for coffee to cram into work, before cramming into the self-service checkouts at Tesco for lunch. You’ll never see the bosses or shareholders of the production lines, but you will see a series of CCTV cameras, touch-screens, QR codes and employees, with the latter increasingly subordinated to the technology.

As people cram into the bars in the evening, they’ll leave their Pret cups and Sainsbury’s sushi containers crammed into bins. Those will be emptied before dawn by an army of unseen cleaners, many of them immigrants, who will un-cram the city so the process can continue when everyone drains from the catchment area of the suburbs into the trains again. Once on the platform, our minds can get crammed afresh with the cutting edge of automation ideology, which in London means pervasive fintech ads, like this one from the automated investment manager Nutmeg.

The fintech scene primarily exists for one thing: to help bridge the gap between Big Finance and Big Tech.

London is a city of endless helpful requests coldly delivered to sound like orders, alongside matey propaganda designed by M&C Saatchi to make corporate platforms look warm and cuddly. When I lived here, this mix of dripping corporate inauthenticity and stultifying paternalism was there like a suffocating blanket, but the city had a strong counterculture to balance it out.

Isn’t it strange that a bunch of financial elites were invited to sit on the board. Someone should report that to the See It, Say It, Sorted help-line as suspicious behaviour. I fantasize about calling the operator and saying:

‘I’ve noticed London has been taken over by two colossal American payments firms working in conjunction with Big Finance and Tech, and people don’t seem to notice. Suspicious?’

I can imagine the operator looking for ‘corporate takeover’ and ‘apathy towards ruling class hegemony’ in the list of threats to UK democracy. ‘No, sorry, we only act upon terrorist threats, homeless people, brown people, and people who take photos of our CCTV cameras’.

One of the classic symptoms of deep urban commodification is that the identity of a place gets ripped away from those who live there and displayed back to them from the outside. You don’t host the spirit of Soho. You consume it. You live inside a product, and the local authorities begin to view themselves as product managers.

People ask me why I focus so much on cash. It’s because the arrival of so-called cashlessness is an eviction notice served to non-commercial spirits. The formal sector is slowly assassinating the informal economy, like an imperial death squad hunting down rebels. The creep is like a virus, and old Brixton punks must watch as it spreads into the body of the neighbourhood that hosts their identity. It appears to them as a sedation of the spirit, and a great forgetting of a world where solidarity, disdain for authority, and acceptance of imperfection were standard.

Their – perhaps reactionary – fear, of course, is that young Londoners will be born into this situation of capture, with their brain patterns calibrated within the formal system, such that they can’t recognise an outside. For example, many young people no longer have a concept of ‘money outside the bank’. Money is ApplePay. What is friendship without WhatsApp? What is directions without Google? There is no world that precedes the digital corporate overlay, with its filtering, auto-correcting and curating. The very concept of un-intermediated life is an endangered species.

Tuesday, December 19, 2023

on journaling

[Prompt ideas: 1) what’s happening? 2) gratitude journaling. 3) talk with my older self.]

Journaling

[Prompts levels: 1) what happened? 2) how am I feeling? 3) follow the rabbit hole.]

Digital Tools I Wish Existed

Let me compare my reading list with another to see overlap. I find this a wonderful way to spark conversation and find common interests.

The Future of Search Is Boutique

[Makes little sense to search for recipes and freelancers with the same interface: better to create diverse experiences with specific affordances for each niche.]

Re-Decentralizing the Web, For Good This Time

[Centralized systems addict us by combining what decentralization cannot: speed without cost.]

[Slower results might even be healthy if it gives us space to process the information more deeply and carefully.]

Friday, December 15, 2023

No more raw data

[Sometimes it’s better not to decide what data you share, and defer the choice to someone with more expertise, such as medical data being provisioned by your doctor (who likely knows better how to respond to the request).]

Not only can my pod automatically fill out such forms; the forms don’t need to be there in the first place, because my pod can just share the needed data, machine to machine.

[Recipients will want to keep the trust envelope because it’s their proof to an auditor that they comply with its policy.]

Thursday, December 14, 2023

Musician’s own website as definitive source of all info

I think the musician’s own “.com” homepage website should be the one-and-only place the musician ever has to enter their info. It should be the sole definitive source for their music, photos, bio, lyrics, calendar, blog, and especially their fan/friend/email list.

How to organise yourself - the dangerous path to Explorer, Villager and Town Planners

Be prepared to be shocked, that’s the horror of looking.

This is like a guide on how to run a company or organization.

Deprecating Content

[Include enough context (such as what, when, why, and the plan) so that the reader can make more informed prioritization of how to handle it.]

Foam: Software as Curation

[With a modular enough system, people can simply curate components or plugins into a kind of software experience, requiring less effort or technical skill than programming.]

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Why don’t the Democrats adopt the obvious winning strategies?

[Since the Clinton era, US Democrats want to lose because it enables them to continue campaign funding as a lucrative income, as the Republicans started to do decades earlier.]

Jess Martin on devtools.fm

Do you have ten years of experience? or ten of the same year?