McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 24th 2014

• 44 engineering management lessons. Lot of good advice, some of which I manage to follow...
• It’s hard to build a good web. It's good to see some of the people building decent web "properties" exploring ways to thrive. Go support them.
• Metafoundry 15: Scribbled Leatherjackets. A good critique of Making. I'm not sure I agree with all of it, although I agree with some of it. It is always about the people, not the things. Maybe if more people answered "a difference", or "a community", or "I make do (and mend)" to the question "What do you make?" then we'd be moving in the right direction. But she's right, the celebration of Making is really just railing against the busywork and churn of making things of no (real) value in order to further line the pockets of the rich. Making isn't really the right term to latch onto, as many people make the world a worse place. It's tricky to find a better alternative though.

Software Patterns for Art and Life

This talk from Lauren McCarthy is full of interesting tech/art projects, many - but not all - her own.

Eyeo 2014 - Lauren McCarthy from Eyeo Festival // INST-INT on Vimeo.

The reason I haven't just folded it into this week's Interesting Things... post is the bit from 33 minutes in where she talks about wondering what it would be like to manage a relationship with someone using version control.

It's an interesting experiment, but especially so given Francis' use of github issues for his house (which we've stolen to good effect so far at DoES Liverpool) and Hakim's wondering about time machines, alternate futures, and version control in his London Perl Workshop keynote.

I've often wondered-out-loud what the github account for a city, and in particular my city, would look like. What code would it collect? What issues could it address? Who would contribute to it? This evening I've taken a small step towards finding out.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 17th 2014

• The Water-Park Scandal and Two Americas in the Raw: Are We a Nation of Line-Cutters, or Are We the Line? Entitlement and class, through the lens of amusement parks.
• The great system thinking battle that is to come. Sounds like "The Whitehall Effect" might be an interesting read.
• The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare. I hope justice is done, but either way, surely we should be implementing laws, processes, etc. so that we don't end up with a financial system "too big to fail" again (or at least for another 50 years until it inevitably fades from the folk memory...)?!?
• Are low-paid, outraged workers ready to fight back?
• The Nor - All Cameras Are Police Cameras. James on excellent form, about city walls (of various forms)
• Leah Meisterlin — Antipublic Urbanism: Las Vegas and the Downtown Project. An excellent exploration of the Creative-Class-Regeneration-project in Las Vegas. There are echoes of what I espouse for DoES Liverpool's role in Liverpool in there, but I hope (truly hope) that we have a more human, considerate, inclusive intent (and I'd hope people would hold us to account and point out our failings if we don't live up to that intent).

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 10th 2014

• Getting the digital autonomy we pay for. "I just want people to understand what’s possible in a world of connected, standards-based software components, to recognize when those possibilities aren’t being realized, to expect and demand that they will be, and to pay something for that outcome."
• Are cities ready for open and creative citizenship? A call for more interesting community centres, with more diverse and active facilities - not just meeting rooms and event space.
• Peak Google. An interesting take on succession in the position of King/Queen of Tech
• Paul Downey is in the middle of an excellent series of blog posts exploring (and showing his workings, so you can play along) an open dataset on house prices and sales in the UK. This one looking at postcode data produces a lovely, detailed map of England and Wales from just properties which have been sold over the years.
• Against Productivity. Meaty thinking from Quinn Norton. And alongside "productivity" I'd add "efficiency" in the grab-bag of sounds-worthy-and-innocuous-but-isn't memes of the modern age. Of course, the irony of the fact that I'm reading that and writing this while sat on a train that a few years ago would have given me just time to think and idly stare out of the window isn't lost on me.
• Intellectual Property, Jewish Ethics, and Aaron Swartz. "Intellectual Property" is in dire need of reform.
• Identity as a weapon. And not the aggressors identity.

Interesting Things on the Internet: November 3rd 2014

• Ten hours of walking in NYC as a woman. The Internet, real life, both just the same. Linking to this doesn't feel like helping much, but I guess pointing out that it's wrong to more people is a start.
• Security Problems. Similarly highlighting the problem more than a solution, but we [geeks] need to get better at fixing security and privacy on the Internet for everyone, rather than just knowing the little back roads and tricks that we only use ourselves.
• Shut Up and Eat. If these tiny acts of consumer choice are the most meaningful actions in our lives, perhaps we aren’t thinking and acting on a sufficiently big scale. Imagine that you die and go to Heaven and stand in front of a jury made up of Thomas Jefferson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Your task would be to compose yourself, look them in the eye, and say, “I was all about fresh, local, and seasonal."