McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 24th 2020

• Scream if you want to go faster! Why government technology needs (much) better governance. Good analysis of the Government's ineptitude and how they're grasping at the wrong bits of the tech world. As ever, we need more (good, diverse, rounded) digital/tech expertise at all levels of government to help counter some of this.
• Conservative anarchism, self-organisation and the future of government "A public servant thinking in this way cannot just be upwardly accountable to politicians: they must also be outwardly and downwardly accountable to their partners and citizens. The new world demands that public servants stop being grey suits with power point presentations, and instead become vibrantly, actively engaged with the people and communities they serve. It prizes relationships and networks above hierarchies and data (while recognising that all of those matter).".
• It's Only Going to Get Weirder. Sensible thoughts on supply-chain capitalism and modern life, from Ingrid Burrington.
• Weeknotes: the home, tech reporting, technocratic government, dependencies. When I got to too many new tabs open to read from Laura's weeknotes, I figured I should just include them rather than picking out highlights...

This week's RSS additions (see aboutfeeds.com if you don't know what RSS is, RSS is how I find most of these Interesting Things...):

• Electric Flapjack build blog. I realised that I'd only been keeping up with my mate Michael's blog posts about his guitar building by spotting the links on his Mastodon feed, and so had missed some. Rectified that by adding it to my RSS reader.
• … My heart’s in Accra. Ethan Zuckerman seems to be working in an interesting public interest tech areas.

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 17th 2020

• Paul Peter Piech in 2020. I hadn't come across Paul Peter Piech before, but I'm really liking his work. There are lots of examples in the "Eye on Design" article linked from Matt Jones'.
• UN Sustainable Development Goals – Let’s Not Sleepwalk to Disaster. A critique of the UN's SDGs, which sadly rings true.
• Why is This Idiot Running My Engineering Org?. I think, I hope, I'm the sort of leader who embraces death.
• Impact Measurement: A Cautionary Tale. "too often impact measurement is middle class people demonstrating to rich people the worthiness of poor people to receive some small portion of the funds expropriated from them". Good to see this sort of self-reflection happening. All the measurement seems logical, but ends up excluding so much good work and often just privileges a different set of chancers. This quote rings true too: "No one in this field enters it or stays in it to perpetrate harm. Quite the opposite. Every single person I have met in impact measurement is passionately committed to making the world a better place. That is the reason they decided to do this work in the first place. But intentions are not enough." I don't have a better idea for how to set up the system, which is why I continue working outside it, in the hope of replacing it, or at least (and most realistically) showing that other ways are possible.
• "when might production *be* the product?" Interesting framing of how Patreon, etc. could be people paying for the future process, rather than an expected product. I have similar conflicting thoughts around my work and the topic of getting paid for it; so far I partly dodge the issue by being able to do well-paid (and mostly interesting) work that subsidises the rest, but that doesn't scale as well to a collective/group (I think...)

Interesting Things on the Internet: August 3rd 2020

• The New Stability. "Before I become your doctor, you have been intubated for weeks. I am a point in time, unattached to the greater narrative." Life as a doctor in a pandemic. Sad. Powerful.
• Lab Notebooks. Doesn't need to be a physical notebook, but this captures why my github/gitlab issues and README.md files have lists of the things I tried.
• Ask a Sane Person: Jia Tolentino on Practicing the Discipline of Hope "I try to expect nothing and hope that everything is possible. I want the courage to need very little and demand a lot."
• Not an Amazon Problem. "There’s lots more to complain about but little of it is specific to Amazon, it’s all about 21st-century-capitalism". Tim Bray refusing to sit neatly in the clickbait headline pigeonhole that people want to sit him in. More of this please, from more of us.