There was a point in my life when I ran Arch, had an elaborate personalized terminal prompt, and my own custom icon theme. I stopped doing all these things at various points for different reasons, but underlying them all is a general feeling that it’s taken me some time to figure out how to articulate: I no longer want to invest time in things that don’t scale.
What I mean by that in particular is things that
Only fix a problem for myself (and maybe a small group of others)
Have to be maintained in perpetuity (by me)
Not only is it highly wasteful for me to come up with a custom solution to every problem, but in most cases those solutions would be worse than ones developed in collaboration with others. It also means nobody will help maintain these solutions in the long run, so I’ll be stuck with extra work, forever.
Conversely, things that scale
Fix the problem in way that will just work for most people, most of the time
Are developed, used, and maintained by a wider community
A few examples:
I used to have an Arch GNU/Linux setup with tons of tweaks and customizations. These days I just run vanilla Fedora. It’s not perfect, but for actually getting things done it’s way better than what I had before. I’m also much happier knowing that if something goes seriously wrong I can reinstall and get to a usable system in half an hour, as opposed to several hours of tedious work for setting up Arch. Plus, this is a setup I can install for friends and relatives, because it does a decent job at getting people to update when I’m not around.
Until relatively recently I always set a custom monospace font in my editor and terminal when setting up a new machine. At some point I realized that I wouldn’t have to do that if the default was nicer, so I just opened an issue. A discussion ensued, a better default was agreed upon, and voilà — my problem was solved. One less thing to do after every install. And of course, everyone else now gets a nicer default font too!
I also used to use ZSH with a configuration framework and various plugins to get autocompletion, git status, a fancy prompt etc. A few years ago I switched to fish. It gives me most of what I used to get from my custom ZSH thing, but it does so out of the box, no configuration needed. Of course ideally we’d have all of these things in the default shell so everyone gets these features for free, but that’s hard to do unfortunately (if you’re interested in making it happen I’d love to talk!).
Years ago I used to maintain my own extension set to the Faenza icon theme, because Faenza didn’t cover every app I was using. Eventually I realized that trying to draw a consistent icon for every single third party app was impossible. The more icons I added, the more those few apps that didn’t have custom icons stuck out. Nowadays when I see an app with a poor icon I file an issue askingifthedeveloperwouldlikehelp with a nicer one. This has worked out great in most cases, and now I probably have more consistent app icons on my system than back when I used a custom theme. And of course, everyone gets to enjoy the nicer icons, not only me.
Some other things that don’t scale (in no particular order):
Separate home partition
Dotfiles
Non-trivial downstream patches
Manual tracker/cookie/Javascript blocking (I use uMatrix, which is already a lot nicer than NoScript, but still a pretty terrible experience)
Multiple Firefox profiles
User styles on websites
Running your blog on a static site generator
Manual backups
Encrypted email
Hosting your own email (and self-hosting more generally)
Google-free Android (I use Lineage on a Pixel 1, it’s a miserable existence)
Buying a Windows computer and installing GNU/Linux
Auto-starting apps
Custom keyboard shortcuts, e.g. for launching apps (I still have a few of these, mostly because of muscle memory)
The free software community tends to celebrate custom, hacky solutions to problems as something positive (“It’s so flexible!”), even when these hacks are only necessary because things are broken by default. It’s nice that people with a lot of time and technical skills can fix their own problems, but the benefits from that don’t automatically trickle down to everybody else.
If we want ethical technology to become accessible to more people, we need to invest our (very limited) time and energy in solutions that scale. This means good defaults instead of endless customization, apps instead of scripts, “it just works” instead of “read the fucking manual”. The extra effort to make proper solutions that work for everyone, rather than hacks just for ourselves can seem daunting, but is always worth it in the long run. Just as with accessibility and commenting your code, the person most likely to benefit from it is you, in the future.
Providing effective support and a meaningful experience for customers is no longer just an option. In today’s business environment, it’s a vital necessity. The opportunities can be hard to quantify, because the potential impact is so significant. One estimate from the Temkin Group indicates that a modest improvement in CX for a $1 billion company could lead to a revenue gain of $775 million over the course of only three years.
As a result, the market has recently seen a dramatic rise in the software, technology, and service offerings that support these customer efforts. Companies now have access to numerous new resources and, therefore, have a lot of important decisions to make going forward. Attending industry conferences is one of the best ways to hone your customer service skills and learn about customer service best practices, the latest tools for measuring customer satisfaction, and more.
Below, we’ve rounded up 50 of the best customer support, excellence, and care conferences in the United States, Canada, and abroad. These gatherings feature expert keynotes, interactive learning sessions, and ample networking opportunities for professionals working in CX and customer service within any industry. We’ve listed our top 50 customer support, excellence, and care conferences of 2020 in chronological order so you can easily view and choose the best options based on your schedule:
Customer Contact Week is the world’s largest customer contact event and has been held in various locations for over 20 years. The upcoming session in Nashville will continue a dialogue about customer experience innovations, technology, and changes expected in the industry. It is an important resource for professionals across many industries and will feature keynotes, workshop sessions, and networking opportunities. New for this year are Think Tank sessions which will focus on identifying workable solutions to challenging ongoing projects.
The Customer Loyalty Conference aims to support professionals working across customer loyalty, CRM, and customer experience at some of Sweden’s top companies. For 2020, the event will have a more international focus with the entire program being moderated in English. This year’s event will include seminars covering topics such as customer journey mapping, artificial intelligence in customer analysis, and delivering customer personalization.
Cost to Attend: 4490 SEK (group discounts available)
Future of the Contact Centre is hosted by Engage Business Media and explores the idea of the contact center as the heart of an organization’s customer engagement strategy. Conference attendees include a diverse mix of professionals representing functions including marketing, operations, customer service, and social media. Over 600 delegates are expected to attend. This year, the conference will feature 30 presentations with strategies and tips for call center development.
The Gartner Customer Experience & Technologies Summit will explore the impact of declining customer volumes in Japan due to a declining birthrate and aging population. An integral part of success in this environment will be superior customer experience. This event will feature over 20 research-driven sessions led by Gartner’s research and advisory experts. Participants will learn some of the priorities for CX initiatives among leadership at top organizations. More than 500 attendees are expected to attend.
Customer Contact Week Asia calls itself the #1 contact center event in Asia. The event provides attendees with four focused tracks of conference content. The key topics will be AI in Contact Centers, Operational and Workforce Excellence, Digital Customer Care and Experience, and Service Excellence and Transformation. Planned sessions include 40 case study presentations and 15 interactive discussion groups that will focus on actionable insights and tips.
Cost to Attend:
2-Day Conference Pass: SG$3,299-$3,899
Conference plus Workshops: SG$4,099-$6,299 (price varies based on number of workshops)
The 2020 Summit on Customer Engagement brings together a group of 150 to 200 professionals for in-depth sessions with a clear customer focus. The founder of the conference, Bill Lee, is a major thought leader in the customer engagement space who has created a unique and curated experience for attendees. The sessions are kept small to enable in-depth conversations and numerous networking opportunities with a focus on long-term relationship building.
SaaStr Annual is the largest non-vendor SaaS conference in the world, gathering over 15,000 professionals, executives, founders, and VCs each year. The focus of the event is on collaborative learning without paid endorsements or ineffective, large sessions. There will be over 300 speakers from leading SaaS companies and more than 3000 1-on-1 and small group meetings throughout the 3-day conference. You’ll hear from CEOs, growth experts, customer experience leaders, customer marketing executives, and other thought leaders offering insights on growing and scaling your SaaS company. Attendees will gain insights on how today’s most prominent SaaS companies deliver top-notch customer experiences, with numerous networking and learning opportunities to choose from.
Cost to Attend:
Fall VIP Startup Founders & Execs: $1,753.37
Fall VIP Big Co Execs & VCs: $2,475.77
Startup Founders & Execs: $2,443.77
Startup Founders & Execs Team Pack (4+tickets): $927.77/ea
Big Co Execs & VCs: $2,062.97
Big Co Execs & VCs Team Pack (4+tickets): $1,495.37/ea
The 2020 X4 Summit is packed with a high-profile list of speakers and a full four-day schedule. Featured keynote speakers this coming year include Brené Brown and former First Lady Michele Obama. In addition to the numerous social gatherings, including a warehouse party and private concert, visitors of the conference will also be able to attend numerous learning sessions. Leading experts in experience management share their personal stories and insights in over 60 breakthrough sessions.
The Oracle Modern Business Experience Conference offers tailored tracks for insights into CX, finance, HR, and supply chain. Within the customer experience track, attendees will learn CX best practices from experts in marketing, commerce, sales, and service. An important topic of discussion will be the future of CX. Attendees learn insights from analysts about how organizations can embrace intelligence and technology innovations to improve the customer experience.
Gartner will host a Data and Analytics Summit in the spring of 2020, providing attendees with important insights into the challenges of business transformation. Attendees will learn best practices for measuring the many components of the customer experience, how to transform CX data into actionable insights through data storytelling, and more. Over 4000 professionals are expected to attend along with at least 100 exhibitors. The experts from Gartner will lead sessions teaching strategies and tactics for evolving business culture, adopting new technologies, and taking a leadership role in the future of digital business.
NGCX is one of North America’s top CX events and continues to promote the importance of customer experience as the leading business differentiator of our time. The conference has been held since 2011. The upcoming agenda includes case studies from some of the top executives working with CX and UX. One of the other major draws of this conference is the large amount of time dedicated to networking activities, with over 10 hours of events to choose from.
The theme for the 2-day 2020 SHIFT/CX conference is “From Customer First to Customer Passion,” which centers around the goal of achieving your customer expectations. This is an important conference in Germany, and while the main language will be German, this year’s event will offer select talks in English, as well. It is a great opportunity for an international audience to listen-in on interactive sessions and benchmark local best practices.
The Adobe Summit is an opportunity to hear from market innovators while learning more about the Adobe suite of products in an interactive setting. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in more than 400 sessions and labs across 11 content tracks, including Analytics and Customer Journey, Personalization, and Cross-Channel Advertising. Featured at the event will be Magento Imagine, which expands the commerce experience of the Adobe platform.
The PACE Annual Convention & Expo is an opportunity for networking and meetings with leadership in the customer engagement space. Over 60% of the conference’s attendees are at a Director level or higher. The event will feature a number of high-level talks about the latest strategies and emerging technologies impacting the industry. As a non-profit dedicated to the advancement of contact center effectiveness, PACE makes this conference a valuable resource for omni-channel communication experts.
Martech West is an important gathering of leaders from some of the top companies in the marketing technology space. The two-day conference will feature networking events, keynotes, and opportunities for discussions with leading marketing technology vendors. Also featured at the event is a comprehensive graduate-level program that will cover how to address universal marketing pain points.
The 9th Annual Customer Experience Strategies Summit is an interactive conference that delivers a full agenda of workshops, panels, and networking opportunities. Representatives from industry leaders such as Disney, American Express, and KFC are expected to attend. This event is known for its award-winning content format. There will be talks from more than 50 CX thought leaders, providing numerous opportunities for benchmarking and sharing new ideas.
Over 2000 attendees are expected at Opentalk 2020. The conference will include 3 dedicated tracks and 36 individual sessions. Industry innovators will discuss the latest technologies and solutions in the CX space, as well as the future trends that could impact your business. The conference host, Talkdesk, will also highlight tips and strategies for how to get the most out of your help desk platform.
The Customer Care Summit is the annual event of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business. The event addresses some of the unique challenges that customer-facing professionals experience in the workplace. Founded in 1973, the trade organization promotes the work of customer care professionals across all industries. Their conference is designed to enhance the skill set of attendees with targeted workshops available throughout the event.
Customer Contact East is a hub for making industry connections and exploring the latest ideas and innovations in customer experience. The event is hosted by research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, and the theme of the 2020 gathering is “Realizing Your Customer First Vision.” Professionals visiting from the east coast and beyond will receive real world insights, advice, and learnings from a broad range of speakers and participants.
The Customer Strategy & Planning conference for the coming year will focus on “2020 Vision” and include best practices and standards that organizations can utilize to meet their target metrics and future customer experience goals. There will be a number of new, high-profile speakers at the event. The sessions are designed specifically for planning, insight, quality, and customer experience professionals.
Smart Customer Service 2020 will be an opportunity to hear from executives and professionals who are leading customer service organizations and implementing new, innovative systems. This conference is also co-located with three other events that offer a wide range of value for visitors: CRM Evolution, SpeechTEK, and the Digital Experience Conference. Smart Customer Service remains a leading gathering for CRM, customer service, and customer experience experts.
The CXPA Global Insight Exchange will offer an international audience the opportunity to learn new CX techniques with high-quality educational content led by industry experts. Also planned for the 3-day event is a packed schedule of talks, interactive experiences, and networking opportunities. The central goal of this conference is to create new, authentic connections and share ideas that can accelerate business growth.
The 21st Annual Customer Experience Conference includes 3 days filled with talks from over 20 world class speakers and industry experts. The agenda also includes a review of the top 10 CX best practices and the culmination of the event will be an industry awards ceremony and gala dinner. In addition to networking opportunities, the event host, SQM, has created an intimate learning setting with sessions that will teach attendees how to develop a winning CX management strategy.
Elevate CX will provide 2 days of educational and networking events for its nearly 200 attendees. This conference is a premier gathering for customer experience experts working in roles, such as customer support managers, customer advocates, and Directors of CX. Due to the focused and intimate nature of the conference, many attendees return each year and form long-lasting relationships with their peers.
The theme of the 2020 SiriusDecisions Summit is “Feel the Energy: Aligning. Empowering. Performing.” Keynote and track sessions throughout the 4-day event will center around the combined offering that Forrester and SiriusDecisions brings to the B2B community. There will also be a marketplace location designated for product and technology discussions along with plenty of time for networking among attendees. This is a must-attend event for sales and marketing professionals, product innovators, and other customer-focused leaders who drive growth within their organizations.
Technology & Services World (TSW) is the conference to attend if you want to learn about the latest customer success trends. Learn how to monetize customer success at scale, how to think "digital first" in your customer engagement models, the customer success capabilities that deliver on the promise of your technology and services, and talent acquisition and talent management best practices. With over 100 technology industry keynotes and sessions, this is an event you won't want to miss.
Cost to Attend:
Full Conference (TSIA Members): $2,395
Full Conference (TSIA Non-Members): $2,795
Day Pass: $995
Early registration discounts are available prior to March 31
HYPERGROWTH is a large conference that is expected to host a combined group of over 5000 speakers, professionals, and industry leaders. The event prides itself on featuring cutting-edge ideas and attendees who are mavericks in their respective fields. The speakers list for this event (not yet announced) is expected to include a wide range of top experts across several industries.
The International Customer Management Institute has been around for over 30 years. Their annual event is an important resource for contact center professionals worldwide. This year’s agenda will include 4 days of case studies, half-day workshops, and a full-day ICMI training session. Off-site tours are a unique offering in which attendees can visit local contact centers to gain insights into their operations, practices, and customer programs.
Pulse is the largest Customer Success learning and networking conference in the world. It is hosted by Gainsight and is their premier gathering among many other regional events held throughout the year. The conference focuses on cutting-edge strategies, with sessions that break down actionable steps that any organization can take to improve their customer success results. There are also dedicated Pulse Academy courses available for learning beginner and advanced customer success tactics.
SITS is a leading event in Europe for IT Service Management and Support. Each year, the two-day event includes seminars and keynotes that can expand your perspective on the IT Service Management industry while growing your network. The educational content of the conference is extensive, including the world’s only free ITSM training program consisting of over 60 educational sessions during the gathering. There will also be a large exhibition with over 75 IT suppliers featuring demos and live presentations of their latest offerings.
Connected Customer Summit is a diverse event that is held with three different stages: Experience, Voice, and Contact. Each stage provides a unique focus on the topics of customer experience, language technologies, and contact center strategies. Visitors can choose among these events to piece together a meaningful agenda based on their specific goals. The event is expected to draw over 500 attendees representing more than 460 distinct brands.
Empower 2020 assembles CX, sales, and knowledge management professionals from some of today’s leading companies like Square, Slack, and Shopify. The two-day conference will include community cohorts to help connect individuals and support networking before, during and after the event. Individuals can also choose from a large number of facilitated workshops and sessions to customize their learning experience.
The TaskUs CX Summit was designed as an open environment for intense discussions with top CX executives about the challenges and opportunities they are facing. This is an invite-only event comprised of the most influential leadership in the industry. Given the highly curated nature of the invite list and agenda, this conference is laser-focused on real issues and seeks to define and comprehend the future of CX.
Customer Service Summit West is presented by Reuters Events as part of the Incite Group. The event brings together more than 30 expert speakers and an overall audience of over 300 customer service leaders. More than half of the attendees are from end-user organizations. The focus of this event will be the creation of company-wide customer success strategies. Talks and workshops during the conference will present useful tools and tips for empowering customer support agents.
The Omnichannel Exec Forum was created as a cross-vertical platform for collaboration among professionals who are engaged in implementing omnichannel solutions. Content for the conference is focused more on high level strategies than on “how-to” sessions on specific aspects of CRM or AI. This makes the Omnichannel Exec Forum a great choice for executive leadership and decision makers.
Held in June at the Victoria Park Plaza in London, the CX Marketing Summit is a must-attend event for understanding the role of marketing in the customer experience. The CX Marketing Summit takes attendees on a journey to CX excellence. Attendees look at companies that are combining their customer and marketing departments to create cohesive messaging and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. With more than 40 presentations spanning nine topic streams, there’s much to learn at the CX Marketing Summit.
CX North America is a regional conference hosted by Forrester. The event includes talks and insights from 50 of their top analysts. Over 1,500 attendees are expected. The 3-day event will cover a wide range of CX-related topics such as AI, modernization, and disruptive technology. The agenda has been designed as highly interactive and will also include the latest software and technology that is making an impact across industries.
Customer Contact Week Las Vegas is moving to a new venue in 2020, and the schedule will include dynamic keynotes, breakout sessions, and site tours. The breakouts will allow participants to choose between tracks such as People, Contact Center Operations, and Customer Experience. Organizers of CCW have also included numerous networking opportunities in the agenda with book signings, after parties, and luncheons.
SaaStock North America 2020 will be the second holding of the event after a successful launch last year. Founders, executives, and investors representing over 25 countries and 40 VC funds are expected to attend the 3-day conference. A startup program and SaaS.City accelerator will be built into the schedule and provide workshops, investor sessions and increased visibility for startups. Attendees will have numerous opportunities for networking, learning, and development, learning from startup founders who have overcome complex challenges that can stifle growth and how to proactively address them. Learn how to avoid the common growing pains that impact rapidly scaling businesses while creating a positive customer experience that contributes to lasting success.
The Customer Engagement Transformation Conference, presented by Engage Employee, is returning for its 7th year. The event will continue to deliver important content on the creation of long-term customer engagement strategies. The sessions and case studies have been curated into 10 topic streams that will include The Rise of Customer Service Design and Personalization of the Customer Experience. Over 500 delegates are expected to attend the event for activities that include 40 presentations, roundtable sessions, and a networking party.
The CEM Africa Summit is a premier forum for the promotion of the CX industry in Africa. Executives and professionals from a diverse mix of industries across Africa attend and participate in the numerous panel discussions, workshops, and keynotes. Representatives from over 200 companies are expected to attend. A curated list of speakers will discuss the latest opportunities and challenges local businesses in Africa are facing.
The 2020 CXO Leaders Summit in Australia will bring together over 150 senior leaders including CMOs, CDOs, and Heads of Customer Experience. This invite-only event will tackle Australia’s most pressing issues facing customer experience and marketing leadership today. Activities at the summit will include one-on-one meetings with leading suppliers, networking sessions, and opportunities to share knowledge through strategic discussions.
INBOUND 2020 is a major annual conference that will host over 24,000 attendees for four days of interactive sessions, keynotes, and social events. The goal of the conference is to bring together a diverse group of creatives to explore, learn, and connect. It has been considered one of the fastest-growing business events in the world due to its unique content and list of high-profile speakers and entertainers each year.
MarTech will arrive in October of 2020 for its annual conference on the east coast. Just like its other events, the experience at MarTech East will be choreographed to help attendees get the most value out of the highly targeted sessions. The program includes a 2-day comprehensive, graduate level offering with an additional day for workshop activities. Attendees should come away with an expanded knowledge base, new connections, and valuable perspectives.
The Customer Service Revolution Conference features world-class speakers, educational sessions, and numerous networking opportunities. An impressive list of keynote speakers will include leading customer service authors, consultants, and brand executives. With a dedicated focus to the topic of customer service, interested professionals can learn important industry insights to develop their competency and improve their operations.
This annual gathering in Dublin is the largest and most attended conference among SaaStock’s global event lineup. Startup founders and executives come to this event to learn how to gain traction, grow, and scale their businesses by cultivating a top-notch culture and delivering outstanding customer experiences. Over 4000 attendees are expected at the 3-day conference that will feature more than 250 exhibitors and over 40 hours of content-rich sessions. A Startup Program, Bootcamp, and a retreat for SaaS Founders are also planned. The event will have plenty of opportunities to match startups with investors, as representative from over 300 VC Funds will be present.
Content Marketing World 2020 will gather members from the global content marketing community in Cleveland for its annual event. Over the 4 days of the conference, there will be 125 sessions and workshops led by brand experts and content marketers. Content has been divided into focused tracks for the over 4000 attendees expected. Visitors can also attend the numerous networking and entertainment events.
Dreamforce is the annual conference hosted by Salesforce and will connect Salesforce experts with newbies and long-term attendees. Salesforce refers to its engaged group of users and developers who continue to innovate on its platform as Trailblazers, which is a large part of the theme for Dreamforce each year. This event is considered the largest software conference in the world and will include over 2700 sessions with a ton of useful content for attendees.
The annual Forrester event CX Europe will bring their analysts together with industry leaders for peer group discussions, informative sessions, and informal chats. Customer experience is most certainly at the center of the two-day gathering, which will focus on tips and strategies for boosting revenue and driving business growth while keeping customers engaged. Forrester designs its conferences to be highly interactive, giving attendees a rich experience and opportunities to connect deeply with others.
Cost to Attend:
Clients (super early bird): £1325
Non-Clients (super early bird): £1425
Government/Education/Non-Profit (super early bird): £1025
The Open Mobile & Digital Experience Summit explores cross-channel and cross-platform marketing for delivering the ultimate customer experience. Conference content is divided into 4 key themes of Product Strategy, Mobile Strategy, Digital and Growth Marketing, and Digital Technology and Innovation. Nearly 80% of the over 300 attendees will be director level or higher.
In 1957,
Dan McCracken
published
Digital Computer Programming,
perhaps the first book on the new art of programming. His book
shows that the roots of extreme programming run deep. In this
passage, McCracken encourages both the writing of tests before
the writing of code and the involvement of the customer in the
software development process:
The first attack on the checkout problem may be made before coding
is begun. In order to fully ascertain the accuracy of the answers,
it is necessary to have a hand-calculated check case with which to
compare the answers which will later be calculated by the machine.
This means that stored program machines are never used for a true
one-shot problem. There must always be an element of iteration to
make it pay. The hand calculations can be done at any point during
programming. Frequently, however, computers are operated by
computing experts to prepare the problems as a service for
engineers or scientists. In these cases it is highly desirable
that the "customer" prepare the check case, largely because logical
errors and misunderstandings between the programmer and customer
may be pointed out by such procedure. If the customer is to
prepare the test solution is best for him to start well in advance
of actual checkout, since for any sizable problem it will take
several days or weeks to calculate the test.
I don't have a copy of this book, but I've read a couple of other
early books by McCracken, including one of his Fortran books for
engineers and scientists. He was a good writer and teacher.
I had the great fortune to meet Dan at an NSF workshop in Clemson,
South Carolina, back in the mid-1990s. We spent many hours in the
evening talking shop and watching basketball on TV. (Dan was
cheering his New York Knicks on in the NBA finals, and he was
happy to learn that I had been a Knicks and Walt Frazier fan in
the 1970s.) He was a pioneer of programming and programming
education who was willing to share his experience with a young CS
prof who was trying to figure out how to teach. We kept in touch
by email thereafter. It was honor to call him a friend.
I didn’t get to blogging much in the last year, but yet I would like to capture some important experiences of it in writing. Getting back to writing shorter regular posts is part of my ambitions for 2020, but so far I am happy I’ve got this one done before the end of January.
***
The end of regular activities in our homeschooling community was the biggest change last year (see The state of social for the lessons learnt). In the middle of that, I let go of writing in public – to free myself from self-set expectations and to cocoon for processing the experiences.
The other difficult thing on the list homeschooling-wise was about figuring out if a secondary school would be a good educational option for Alexander. It came with exploring the interfaces between the formal educational system and homeschooling and a lot of soul-searching – looking deep into our values and how they are reflected in practice. It was an intensive experience where we all have learnt a lot. There is still no definite answer to the guest as a whole, but some shorter-term choices instead. What makes it difficult is the legal situation around homeschooling in the Netherlands: once you start with a school there is no way back to homeschooling.
Moving from primary to secondary school is a rite of passage for many Dutch kids and we wanted to have an experience of similar significance for Alexander. Only different – he went sailing as part of the crew on a wooden replica of Peter the Great Frigate Shtandard. Those 12 days were also special for the rest of the family, in particular for the girls, who were getting more independent in the absence of their older brother.
Next to that there was a lot of other travel. We started the year in tranquillity deep in de Pyrenees, cooking, hiking and working in the garden with friends. There were two trips to Moscow with the kids, in March-April and November, both marked by a rich cultural program, family time and educational camps of Natural school. In August we spent almost a month in Pacific Northwest, staying with Nancy White and her family, revisiting people and places from the time of my internship at Microsoft Research, camping and exploring. All those trips gave a lot to reflect upon and gave impulses to things that are slowly unfolding.
Back at home we’ve got new neighbours and (re)construction projects from two sides of our house. We are getting connected with both families through the kids and shared interests. The house adjacent to ours is currently renovated into an energy-efficient one, providing many opportunities to learn new things for all of us and in particular for Alexander, who spends a lot of time there, observing, helping and learning.
Last year my permaculture interests have shifted from experimenting with new plants and learning new techniques to creating sustainable ecosystems on a small scale, both in our own garden and our allotment at Organic Gardening Drinerlo. Growing part of our own food has been something that brings me a lot of joy and learning for several years. The last year was marked by our first asparagus harvest, tayberry-rhubarb jams and potato harvest that lasted into the first days of 2020.
It was also a year of water-related projects. We have relocated a pond with most of its wildlife from the building site of our new neighbours into our garden. It was a steep learning curve and a lot of work for myself and the kids, both of which I enjoyed a lot. We have connected the pond to our rainwater gathering/irrigation system via two filter ponds with plants. The irrigation part of the system that feeds plants in containers on our balcony and the flat roof was also upgraded and survived the test of hot dry summer and a long holiday.
With the oak processionary caterpillars plague in most of the Netherlands, I started to follow several ecologists and have learnt much more the relations between urban planning and natural ecosystems. This is definitely a theme that I’d like to explore more.
Last year I had an intention to get back to the professional world and it didn’t really work: school-related decision making and dealing with experiences of sorting through the processes and aftermath in our homeschooling community didn’t leave much mental space for doing much else. Yet, there were many conversations with old-time peers and new contacts during the year that help me to move in the right direction, albeit slowly, Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop with Harold Jarche and talks around it, five days at a business happening with Valentina Gabysheva and a group of entrepreneurial Russian-speaking women, and several occasions of helping in a projects of others as a sparring partner.
During the year I also learnt to take care of myself better. Part of that is about physical health: adding 10.000 steps per day to yoga, dancing and garden workouts. Starting to play Pokemon GO was a funny experience in this respect, as it gave me a reason to get out of the house at strange moments, a playful way to get more kilometres on foot and a pleasure discovering new corners around familiar paths. And I had a lot of fun choosing a nickname there, boundaryObject, since I didn’t want immediate findability.
Yes, I am well over 3 years late to the party but I just recently discovered an interesting podcast that blends computing history with today’s coding and nerdiness of all kinds. It’s called ‘Command Line Heroes‘, narrated by Saron Yitbarek and is produced by Red Hat.
The first seasons starts off with a look at the OS wars of the 1990s and then jumps fast forward to Agile, DevOps, Containers, Cloud and all those other buzzwords that have been so perverted in recent year. Instead of falling in tune, Saron explains how those things came about and how they are actually supposed to work and to be used.
No marketing bullshit and subtle instead of heavy handed advertisement for the producing company. For me, that’s how social media from companies should look like. The last company I remember that has understood this was Nokia back in the days, a long long time ago, when Symbian was the thing.
Season two dives into more of the same and I have yet to listen to most of those episodes. This is because I fast forwarded to the third season, in which ‘Command Line Heroes’ jumps the history of open source software on one side of the spectrum and current coding and computing topics on the other side. Season four will start February 28, and I can’t wait for the first episode!
Cool stuff, so I thought I’d make you aware of it. Enjoy!
Last year, we introduced the brand-new SoundSource, version 4. With SoundSource, you gain truly powerful control over all the audio on your Mac. You can adjust sound on a per-app basis, add audio effects, control devices, and much more. SoundSource 4 has proven to be a hit with users, and we’ve been hard at work on updates.
Today, we’re delighted to ship SoundSource 4.2. Read on to see what’s new, or just head over to the SoundSource page to download the latest now.
What’s New in SoundSource 4.2
SoundSource 4.2 is a free update for SoundSource 4 users, but that doesn’t mean it’s light on new features and functionality.
Volume Overdrive
The most visible addition in SoundSource 4.2 is a brand-new built-in effect called “Volume Overdrive”. The Volume Overdrive effect makes it possible to amplify application audio up to 400%, so your speakers get louder than you thought possible.
Better still, Volume Overdrive is smarter than your average amplifier. When active, its built-in limiting functionality works intelligently to improve the quality of overdriven audio, avoiding unpleasant digital distortion.
Control of More Special Audio Sources
The release of SoundSource 4.1 added support for controlling audio from Finder and the OS’s “Text to Speech” functionality in SoundSource 4.1. Now, SoundSource 4.2 provides control of even more of the OS’s audio features, with easy access to Siri and VoiceOver as well. Check out the “Special Sources” section of the “Add App” Source selector to find all of these sources.
A Menu Bar Output Meter
Want a visual indication of when your Mac is playing audio? Head to SoundSource’s Preferences, and turn on the new “Show output activity in menu bar” setting.
Once you do, an output meter will show in the menu bar next to SoundSource’s icon. This meter moves in sync as audio plays through the default output device.
Many More Updates
There’s lots more to enjoy in SoundSource 4.2, including:
Bluetooth Device Battery Status – See battery status for Bluetooth devices like AirPods, AirPods Pro, and Beats hardware.
Removeable Built-In Effects – The built-in Lagutin EQ and Volume Overdrive effects can now optionally be removed from your configurations.
Improvements to Bluetooth Device Reliability – SoundSource 4.2 does additional work to avoid issues caused by Apple’s Bluetooth device handling. That means selecting Bluetooth devices, including all versions of AirPods, will work more reliably.
Enhanced Audio Capture with ACE 11.1 – The Audio Capture Engine (ACE) backend that powers SoundSource has been updated to version 11.1.1, with many enhancements and improvements for the smoothest audio capture yet, and a fix for issues when processing audio from FaceTime.app.
Full MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) Support – SoundSource now has full compatibility with MacOS 10.15 (Catalina).
And Still More – We’re always working to improve our products in ways both big and small. In addition to what’s listed above, SoundSource 4.2 fixes several minor bugs, alongside improvements to audio device tracking, drag and drop, and more.
For those intelligent readers who are already using SoundSource, just open the app’s Preferences window, and click the “Check for Update” button to get the latest immediately. We hope you enjoy SoundSource 4.2!
This week I wrote about the City of Vancouver turning down recognition of the Davis Family who transformed the 100 block of West Tenth Avenue, and who worked tirelessly to bring in the Mount Pleasant zoning that supported maintaining the area’s Edwardian and Victorian houses. Way before the City of Vancouver launched laneway houses, the Davis Family was already making rental units available in the houses they saved from demolition, and oh yes, they built a few laneway houses too.
Every time I think of the Davis Family and their three generations that have promoted neighbourliness and community building I come up with a new initiative they pioneered. One was eliminating the harsh “crotch dropping” of mature street trees to allow for the unfettered access to hydro lines in the trees. The Davis family refused to allow BC Hydro to butcher their street trees, taking the keys to the offending tree cutting vehicles and not giving them back. The compromise was taken forward to City of Vancouver council, and that was raising the hydro lines in mature trees so that the trees were not brutally altered. That is now civic policy for mature tree canopies.
The response supporting the Davis Family receiving a City of Vancouver proclamation has been extraordinary from social media supporters, from local heritage experts, from architects, from city staffers, from area residents and from the Mount Pleasant Business Improvement Association. I will be talking on CBC Radio’s On The Coast with Gloria Macarenko this afternoon on City of Vancouver proclamations, and why this exceptional family should be recognized.
Patrick Spence has posted on the Sonos blog and communicates the plan much better. Read it. What is new? Not much. Sonos will issue security fixes to legacy players in the future.
You can continue to use your legacy players as you please. If you only have legacy players, you won't notice a thing. Things get tricky if you have legacy and modern players, for example one Connect to power your old stereo and a Play:1 in the kitchen. Come May, they may not be talking to each other anymore. Let me explain why.
Sonos is a system. All players have to run the same software and they collaborate. Only one of the players talks to Spotify for instance. If that is your Connect, then your Play:1 receives Spotify through Connect. This gives you a special privilige. Several Sonos players can play different streams from Spotify and they still count only as one. All players elect their "chief". If it dies, because you pulled the power cord, they will elect a different one.
When Sonos issues a software release that cannot run on all players in your house, because you have both modern and legacy players, this becomes a problem. It looks like Sonos will solve this by creating two distinct systems in your house. One with the legacy players, one with the modern ones. You may have the choice to keep all players in the legacy domain, forgoing feature upgrades, but that needs to be ironed out yet. One of the prerequesites would be the ability to downgrade players to shoehorn them in later if you decide that's what you want. However, that will not work with yet to be released product which require the new software. It's complicated and Sonos does not really like complicated.
Sonos made a bad decision with their "30% discount if you disable an old player" program. It demonstrates their ability to shut off old players. Mixed with the legacy/modern split it created the impression your old players would stop working. Sonos truly wanted to make it easy to get the discount, but instead they created this confusion.
There is only one thing that Sonos is not honest about. They would love to get rid of the old legacy players. Then life would remain simple for its customers, and in the end, for Sonos itself. And that is exactly my advice: dispose of the legacy players by selling them, by giving them away, or by disabling them for a 30% discount on new players. There is one exception: if you have only legacy players, sit tight and continue to use them, as long as you can.
Mountain bike sales are soaring, and no wonder! Mountain bikes offer an ideal way to get out and enhance your physical and mental health in nature. And also improve the world. And now, mountain bikes are better than ever, and offer choices for a huge variety of people.
Maybe people don't tell stories only to make sense of the world,
but rather sometimes to deceive themselves?
It was an interesting idea, I said, that the narrative impulse
might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from
the need -- as was generally assumed -- to connect things
together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated,
in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility.
This is from Kudos, by Rachel Cusk. Kudos
is the third book in an unconventional trilogy, following
Outline and Transit. I blogged on a passage
from Transit last semester, about
making something that is part of who you are.
I have wanted to recommend Cusk and these books, but I do not feel
up to the task of describing how or why I think so highly of them.
They are unorthodox narratives about narrative. To me, Cusk is a
mesmerizing story-teller who intertwines stories about people and
their lives with the fabric of story-telling itself. She seems
to value the stories we tell about ourselves, and yet see through
them, to some overarching truth.
As for my own narrative impulse, I think of myself as writing posts
for this blog in order to make connections among the many things I
learn -- or at least that is I tell myself. Cusk has me taking
seriously the idea that some of the stories I tell may come from
somewhere else.
Building better systems for ad placement and
attribution
will depend on a solid chain of consent from web
activity to action. No attribution tracking is going
to work if consent is missing or sketchy on any link
in the chain, because browsers, competing to implement
people's preferences on how their data is used, will
drop attribution data on the floor if it doesn't have
solid "provenance" in the form of good enough consent.
Of course, most of the stuff covered in a "consent"
dialog isn't really consent. IMHO there is consent
that's meaningful enough for a browser or other
software to pay attention to, and fake consent where
the best way to implement the user's intent is either
to rewrite the consent bits, or to block tracking.
Consent is hard to define.
Levels of consent, best to worst.
5: philosophical ideal of consent. Philosophers are
still working on this, so no need to implement in
software yet.
4: informed consent that's good enough to get you
signed up as a human subject for university-run
research. Institutional Review Board approval, so
software should respect, because Science!
3: consent as part of an understandable transaction
(You have consent to use my address to ship me
the package I ordered). This is kind of like the spawn of
consent and legitimate interest. Software must
implement this kind of consent, or people won't
be able to order stuff or log in or anything,
and they will rage-quit the software that's stopping them.
2: consent implied as part of a transaction
such as a registration wall with an email address,
or SSO with a clearly labeled button. This level
is where the action is. Can user research show
that expectations on both sides are compatible?
If so, this is a win! Opportunity for software
to help users by doing this right, and a big
opportunity for sites that people choose to
trust.
The Site Engagement Service in
Chromium
is likely to be increasingly important here,
along with related metrics for how much the a user
probably trusts a site,
1: consent buried in the fine print or in dark UX
patterns is clearly not good enough, and worth
the effort for software to block data transfer
even in the presence of "consent." Blocking bogus
consent, and telling it apart from consent that's
just good enough not to block, is going to be a user
research win, just like blocking other creepy stuff.
0: consent fraud is common, just more stuff to filter or block.
Attribution schemes will work as long as everyone
who touches attribution data also has consent,
which implies a bigger role for publishers in the
audience data market.
Two scholars I really respect and whose writing I follow quite meticulously are Dr. Pat Thomson (University of Nottingham) and Dr. William Germano (The Cooper Union). Both of them have independently developed and/or promoted ideas on how to make your full argument coherent, cogent and readable. When I first started editing my doctoral dissertation to make it into a book, I read Dr. Germano’s book “From Dissertation to Book”. I also have read a lot of the work that Dr. Thomson has written, in particular her coauthored books with Barbara Kamler. I have written before about her “Strategies to Publish Peer Reviewed Journals” here on my blog.
Red Thread (Credit:Aaron Headley on Flickr (CC-BY licensed)
The Red Thread is (from what I’ve read here, here, here, and here) a Nordic/German concept. The intellectual trajectory of a paper or a book, usually book. The overall argument. The global narrative.
As a side note and a funny anecdote: my Mom is a social scientist (a retired professor of political science and public administration, with a PhD in government). I remember when she used to tell her students: “you need to find the conductive thread” (“hilo conductor”, in Spanish). I was a chemical engineer at the time, so I was like “well, unless you’re talking electricity, I have no idea why you would want a conductive thread”. Once I started taking business strategy and later, social science (political science, human geography, history, economics) courses, I realized what she meant).
That in addition to Dr. Thomson and Dr. Germano’s suggestions on The Red Thread and The Throughline, I could glean some insight as to how OTHER scholars develop their own red threads and throughlines.
I imagine it’s a similar process to the one I develop with the GDN.
There’s a number of books that I’ve read in enough depth that I could quickly glean their Red Threads/Throughlines. I am super, super, super busy this week, but I’m going to try to carve some time to go over those and see if I can offer some pointers.
In this blog post I offer these generally-applicable pointers for book-manuscript-style dissertation writers, 3-papers thesis writers, undergrad/masters, and post-PhD book writers. To be honest, I feel that reading Thomson, Germano and Pacheco-Vega would suffice, but it never hurts to have the general patterns drawn out and spelled out as much as possible.
Discerning The Red Thread (Throughline/Global Narrative) from edited volumes and single/multiple author(s) books
This Twitter thread shows how I discerned these books’ RT/T/GN.
If you read a book’s table of contents and you interpret it the same way you would a research paper outline (key topics I’m going to cover), it should yield The Red Thread/Throughline https://t.co/1zazngNo3E
My underlying rationale for searching table of contents and introductory chapter (& concluding chapter) is the Rule of Threes in Writing:
a) Tell me what you’re going to say (introductory chapter)
b) Say it (full manuscript)
c) Tell me what you said (concluding chapter)
From the above, it should follow that reading a book’s table of content, introductory and concluding chapters should give you at the very least AN IDEA of what the Red Thread/Throughline is. Remember, this is the MAJOR argument. If your book were a fish, the Throughline is he fishbone. If you were to antropomorphize your book, the Throughline or Red Thread is the spine. The one thing keeping everything together, tying everything together.
The following Twitter thread shows how to discern the Red Thread/Throughline/Global Narrative off an edited volume.
This is the table of contents for @OsmanyPorto@ceciliaosoriog@sergemont and Da Silva Leite’s edited volume. Reading the table of contents we can infer that the book is about non-orthodox transfer. Usually we think of policy transfer as from countries from North to South pic.twitter.com/G8m6wZaTGu
Luckily, the editors give us the main argument of the book (the Red Thread or Throughline) right in the introductory chapter under (you guessed) the heading: “The main argument” (thanks, y’all!)
This makes my life and yours easier. From the table of contents and introduction pic.twitter.com/RkAXmnWPqO
Not every book is designed in the way Osmany, Cecilia, Sergio and Cristiane designed theirs, making the Red Thread/Throughline very, very, very clearly explicit. Others need you go to on a fishing expedition and read more of the book. But in this case, you can read the intro.
I’ll continue this thread with two other examples, but I strongly believe that this particular book is a great example of how you clearly present your Red Thread (your argument) to your reader, even as an edited volume (you should read it too!) https://t.co/LNTfichgzo
Now, let’s do the Red Thread/Throughline/Global Narrative of a multiple-authors book.
Let’s look at the table of contents and introductory chapter.
At the very core, Thirst is about the two main strands of water marketization: commodification and privatization, and how activists fight both of these types of market-properties’- imprinting on water. pic.twitter.com/zZ0iV71S59
How do *I* develop my own book/thesis/dissertation’s Red Thread/Throughline/Global Narrative?
Below, I outline Thomson’s, Germano’s and my approach to developing the Red Thread, Throughline and Global Narrative. Our approaches should work for dissertations, theses (undergrad and Masters) and single author/multiple author/edited volumes.
This is why I make my students do their Dissertation Two Pager (DTP), their Dissertation Analytical Table (DAT) and Global Dissertation Narrative (GDN). Combined, these three should easily demonstrate where the Red Thread/Throughline is.
Bottom line: your dissertation/thesis/book Red Thread/Throughline is perhaps the one thing that is going to “sell” or “sink” your writing project. How you walk your reader through your writing (how you sell the story of what you’re trying to convey) is very important, I argue.
Right now I am finishing four journal articles, one grant-funded project report and one book chapter and I’m developing 5 syllabi. This is why I have the Red Thread/Throughline/Global Narrative so fresh in my head and why I wanted to write about it .
Enter a city, and using data from OpenStreetMap, you’ve got yourself a map for export. You can also easily change the color scheme to your liking, which is fun to play with as you scroll back and forth.
Since then, two groups of researchers have demonstrated that it’s possible to fool the systems created to comply with G.D.P.R. to get someone else’s personal information.
One of the researchers, James Pavur, 24, a doctoral student at Oxford University, filed data requests on behalf of his research partner and wife, Casey Knerr, at 150 companies using information that was easily found for her online, such as her mailing address, email address and phone number. To make the requests, he created an email address that was a variation on Ms. Knerr’s name. A quarter of the companies sent him her file.
“I got her Social Security number, high school grades, a good chunk of information about her credit card,” Mr. Pavur said. “A threat intelligence company sent me all her user names and passwords that had been leaked.”
Yay.
I’m not saying these new laws are bad, but maybe get yourself a good password manager and change all those duplicate passwords.
A while ago, I had dynamo lighting installed on my winter bike. I used an old light that I had in a drawer for years, and it was a little heavier than the current ones. It also had a plastic mounting bracket.
You can see that it actually broke into several pieces, and some of the smaller pieces were missing.
Fortunately, my good friends at Hoopdriver Bicycles had a metal headlight mount from B&M. (they are a great source for high quality bike lighting and many other things).
All ready to go again. Metal also has a ductile to brittle transition, but for steel it is about -30°C or lower, so I should be OK. The steel mount is also much more sturdy to begin with.
When you have a difficult decision to share, it matters a lot how you communicate it. Sonos proved this by annoying its customers with a message about obsolescing products, then turning around and making things better the next day. The original Sonos post was offensive Here’s the hard fact: technology products become obsolete. After a … Continued
I much like Laura Kalbag’s “I don’t track you” declaration on her blog. She links to that post in the footer of her webpages.
As Laura Kalbag says it’s “as much a fact as a mission statement“. I would definitely like to be able to say the same, because it’s important as a signal, as a statement that the web does not need to be what the silos as advert delivery and manipulation vehicles make it to be. But for this blog it isn’t fully a fact.
I do not track anything anyone does on my site. But others in some instances do. This is the case where I embed material from elsewhere. Although often what I embed is still my own content, such as photos and slides, they are served from the likes of YouTube (Google), Flickr, and Slideshare (LinkedIn). The primary reason for using such services is storage space. Presentations, videos and photo collections tend to be large files, filling up the allocated space in my hosting package quickly. And of course there are occasions where I do want to show content by others (photos and videos). Especially in the case of images, showing other people’s content here is very deliberate, based on an obligation to re-use.
This means that I am an enabler of the tracking that such services do when you visit my blog. To be certain, you have a personal responsibility here too: your browser is your castle, and that Castle Doctrine of browsers means that you should already actively block tracking in your browser. However, I also have a responsibility to not expose visitors to tracking where that can be avoided.
So how to avoid tracking? What alternatives are out there? Here’s a list with the services from which this site over the years has embedded material.
YouTube (Google): I did not know this until I looked for it today, prompted by Laura Kalbag’s blogpost, but Google provides a setting with embedded YT videos that disables tracking and serves the video from a different domain (youtube-nocookies.com). This is what I will do from now on, and I will go through my older postings to change the embed code in the same way.
Flickr: I use Flickr a lot, it’s both my off-site online photo backup, as well as an easy way to post images here, without taking up hosting space. My tracking detection tool (Ghostery) does not find any trackers of embedded images, provided I strip out some of the scripting that comes with an embed by default. This stripping of superfluous stuff I routinely do, and is in my muscle memory.
Slideshare: this I think needs replacing. A Slideshare embed always comes with a Google Analytics tracker and a 3rd party beacon it seems. There is no way I can strip any of that out. It’s a good idea to do without Slideshare anyway, so need to search for an alternative. I might go for my own cloud space, or start making my slides differently, e.g. in HTML5, or find some other tool that I can attach to a private cloud space, and allows easy sharing with others.
Scribd: this one definitely needs to go too. Embedding a Scribd document adds Google Analytics and a Facebook tracker, and curiously still a Google+ tracker too, though that service no longer exists. Again, need to search for an alternative. Same as with Slideshare.
Vimeo: this video embedding service does not add trackers as far as I can tell from my Ghostery tracking monitoring plugin.
23Video: this platform has pivoted to corporate marketing videos and webinars, and no longer supports casual embeds like in the past. I will need to go through my archive though to clean up the postings where I used 23Video.
Qik. This was a live streaming video service I used around 2008. The domain is no longer active, and any embeds no longer work. Will need to clean up some old postings.
So, from this list, Slideshare and Scribd stand out as the ones adding tracking features to this site, and will need to go first. So I’ll focus there on finding replacements. Flickr and Vimeo are ok for now, and Youtube for as long as they respect their own privacy settings. Flickr and Vimeo of course don’t have your data as their business model, whereas YT does, and it shows. Once I’ve removed the tracking functionality from embedded content, what remains is that any call to an outside source results in your IP being logged in that outside server’s logs, and by extension your user agent etc. This is unavoidable as it comes with connecting to any web server. The only way I can avoid such logging is by ensuring I no longer use anything from any outside source, and hosting it myself. For my own content that is possible, as for images I re-use from e.g. Flickr (by serving the image itself from a server I own, and otherwise just linking to the source and creator. As I did with the image below), but hardest for re-using other people’s videos.
Tracks of footprints in the snow, image by Roland Tanglao, license CC BY
As of our last all hands meeting we have moved our company to using NextCloud on a server in a German data center. This is the second major step in improving on our information hygiene in the company, after adopting RocketChat and leaving Slack.
I had created the cloud already last May, but we had not transitioned everyone in the company and all our work. That transition has now been made.
It allows us to avoid having to work with clients in cloud environments like Google Docs, it has OnlyOffice for online collaboration in documents, it allows to avoid file transfer services in favor of being able to provide (time limited, password protected) download links from our own server, and it has integrated STUN/TURN support so we can do (video)conference calls from within our own environment. It’s a managed server/service for a few hundred Euros per year. A key benefit is being able to nudge our clients to routines less exposed to the data hungry silos, and also to show compliance with (regularly inconsistent and differing) rules regarding which online services they do and don’t allow. Setting an example is in itself a benefit given our work on transparent data governance, data ethics and accountability.
In the coming weeks we’ll aim to get fully accustomed to our new working environment, but so far it has been pretty self-evident.
Screenshot from working with a colleague in OnlyOffice (content blurred obviously)
We are working our way through a list of things to improve our overall information hygiene, a discussion I started last spring. It involves changes at the company level (like Nextcloud and Rocketchat) and changes at the individual level (helping colleagues e.g. with password management. We moved all of us onto the same password manager, that also includes the option to share passwords from a company account). It focuses on tools and technological measures, as well as on behaviour and work routines. And it looks at both laptop and mobile devices. I’ve created a ‘information hygiene ladder’ on those three dimensions, with a different level of information security at each rung, that we can strive for. The upper end, the “I’m being targeted by a three letter agency”, we’ll never address I’m sure. But there is a wealth of opportunities to improve our information security level before that extreme stage.
Much of the work and thinking around improving my and my company’s overall information hygiene was triggered by conversations I had with Arjen Kamphuis, finally prompting me into action early 2014. He disappeared during vacationing in Norway in August 2018. Later this week an art exhibition about him will open, as well as a book launched bundling his key writings on a.o. information security. I hope to be able to pick the book up and visit the exhibit coming Friday.
I suppose this was inevitable. People who use Creative Commons (CC) licenses to facilitate sharing sometimes also believe that they protect their rights as creators. After all, Creative Commons is 'some rights reserved' - including especially attribution. But as people use these works without respecting these limitations, creators are increasingly tempted to turn to automated enforcement services - such as, for example, an automated image search service that tracks down unattributed copies of your images. According to this post, Creative Commons is official neutral on such services - it's not in the business of enforcing licenses, just defining them. On the other hand, automated services acting like copyright thugs enforcing the terms of CC licenses doesn't look good for the organization.
This is one of those articles that describes every possible step involved in the creation and issuing of badges and microcredentials while still leaving you not knowing how to do it. That's not to say this isn't a good article. It is. But there has been a disinclination in recent years to actually talk about technology in educational technology literature, leaving practitioners in a position where they have to figure out most of this stuff for themselves. Sure, I can see this article being a useful guide for a professor or administrator managing a technical team deploying a badge infrastructure. But they shouldn't walk away from it thinking that they understand how badges are developed and used. For contrast, consider this article and then my own article that opens up the tech and displays how it actually works.
Web development over the last few years has been dominated by frameworks like jQuery, Angular and React. We're now moving into the next phase of web development: web components. This article is an introduction, giving an overview and then a rationale, then diving into a toolchain called StencilJS. Here's another intro, again with a fair bit of technical detail. Here's an intro slide deck. Here's a whole set of bookmarks. Here's a toolset called Smart. Well... another set of things to learn, I guess.
I'm setting up a new machine in the office, which includes installing browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, etc). Normally when I install Chrome, I get the browser and that's it. But this time, for whatever reason, I also got the 'Web Server for Chrome'. You can also get it on the Chrome web store. First of all, it just works. Click on the icon, select a starting directory, enter http://127.0.0.1:8887 into your browser, and view your files. It can also act as a network web server, or it can try to acquire an internet address, so you can access it remotely. What the indieweb needs is a quick way to set up a personal web server. I'm not sure if this is it, but it looks a lot like this.
Tim Stahmer answers the question in the headline with a somewhat unconvincing "no" based on the fact that it's hard to implement. "Implementation of the GDPR in Europe has been confusing at best," he writes. Maybe, but that's not why we won't be forgotten. There are too many reasons why society as a whole needs to remember that we exist: we might owe money, we might be a wanted criminal, we might have an infectuous disease, etc. It's not that implementation is confusing. It's that we don't actually want to implement it. As a society, I mean.
I swear, I had flagged this for inclusion in the newsletter before reading all the way to the end of the post. What caught my eye was that it offered a look at the positive developments in the last decade of online learning, a welcome counterpoint to the doom and gloom we've heard from many pundits. What positive developments? Well we have cMOOCS and Connectivism, which if I may so humbly say, represented a big leap forward. We have web annotations (ok, they don't thrill me, but so what?). We have the renewed and welcome emphasis on equity and Inclusion in learning. We have data literacy (and I would add, increasing media literacy generally). We have open resources, domain of one's own, and microcredentials. That's a lot to add to the mix for one decade, and I, for one, am gratified to see the progress we as a discipline have made over the last decade.
Good article in Vox listing what we didn't learn from Gamergate (quoted):
Police have to learn how to keep the rest of us safe from internet mobs
Businesses have to learn when online outrage is manufactured
Social media platforms didn't learn how to shut down disingenuous conversations over ethics and free speech before they started to tear their cultures apart
Violence against women is a predictor of other kinds of violence. We need to acknowledge it.
Politicians and the media must take online "ironic" racism and misogyny seriously.
These issues are of course not limited to video gaming culture, and the effects have spilled over into all domains, including our own.
The first half of this paper is a relatively by-the-book overview of connectivism, focusing mostly on George Siemens's presentation, but including my own contributions on methodology. The interesting bit begins just past halfway, at 4.2.2., where the connection between connectivism and leadership is discussed. Some bits of note: the authors cite some used bits from an article by Kristina Natt och Dag, both on leadership, and on adult learning (but it's currently locked behind a paywall and thus useless). The authors also suggest that there hasn't really been any research developing connectivism beyond its original formulation, which I'm not sure is true, but I guess it could be seen that way. Finally, there's a diagram (illustrated) depicting the network as defined by roles, which I think is a serious misrepresentation and should be rethought, perhaps with reference to the organizational graphs developed by people like Valdis Krebs.
This is a good reference document for myself as I begin to think about how I want to write the next generation gRSShopper. It outlines a basic startup server configuration using a Linux OS, Redis database, Nginx server and Node.ja applications, with backup/sync on Amazon S3. I've looking at architecture B. Since this is in essence a personal application, it shouldn't need to scale beyond that (though there are scaling options if I'm wrong). For a messaging backend, maybe MatterBridge?
Today's word is 'connectome', which is a "a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain, and may be thought of as its 'wiring diagram'." It's newly relevant because "Google and the Janelia Research Campus in Virginia have published the largest high-resolution map of brain connectivity in any animal, sharing a 3D model that traces 20 million synapses connecting some 25,000 neurons in the brain of a fruit fly." The article talks about the research being criticized as a waste of money, but I think it's the first real glimpse we have of actual knowledge (indeed, I think the relevant philkosophical; question today is whether the body's knowledge is equivalent to its neural connectome, or whether we need to include connections in additional systems (such as the immune system) to complete the picture.
for most people, most of the time
Last year, we 
The release of 
Bluetooth Device Battery Status – See battery status for Bluetooth devices like AirPods, AirPods Pro, and Beats hardware.
Removeable Built-In Effects – The built-in Lagutin EQ and Volume Overdrive effects can now optionally be removed from your configurations.
Improvements to Bluetooth Device Reliability – SoundSource 4.2 does additional work to avoid issues caused by Apple’s Bluetooth device handling. That means selecting Bluetooth devices, including all versions of AirPods, will work more reliably.
Enhanced Audio Capture with ACE 11.1 – The Audio Capture Engine (ACE) backend that powers SoundSource has been updated to version 11.1.1, with many enhancements and improvements for the smoothest audio capture yet, and a fix for issues when processing audio from FaceTime.app.
Full MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) Support – SoundSource now has full compatibility with MacOS 10.15 (Catalina).
And Still More – We’re always working to improve our products in ways both big and small. In addition to what’s listed above, SoundSource 4.2 fixes several minor bugs, alongside improvements to audio device tracking, drag and drop, and more.
Mountain bike sales are soaring, and no wonder! Mountain bikes offer an ideal way to get out and enhance your physical and mental health in nature. And also improve the world. And now, mountain bikes are better than ever, and offer choices for a huge variety of people.
Screenshot from working with a colleague in OnlyOffice (content blurred obviously) 
