2024-04-09: Learnt Lessons, Open Questions, Hoot!
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Three Things I Did
1. Said things about STFIL🄽
I alluded to this a little yesterday, and I can’t allude much more, but this story broke in the Filecoin ecosystem yesterday. I’m on the sidelines of the incident room, trying to relay info as we have it to the wider community. It’s adjacent to experiences that I’ve had before — dealing with complex foreign journalist detentions at CPJ, EFF work like the EFAIL disclosure (shudder). We’re all in chat saying “I have $EVENT flashbacks”. Have I learned anything from the past? One decision I was proud of this time is not waking up someone at 3AM to deal with a new situation. You’ve got to let people get some sleep. It can almost always wait.
2. Chatted with a potential FFDW partner
The step before they send us a proposal, where the teams are getting to know each other, and noodling over possible projects. There’s always a question from the partner about how long it takes to be funded; there’s always a question about whether it’s general funding or project-specific funds. I remember asking those questions on the other side of the table too. Have I learned anything from that? I guess, if you end up asking for project funding, don’t make it a project that will distract you from your mission, no matter how much money is on the table.
3. Asked myself: Who do I know who has tried to fund open source?
There’s a dinner this Sunday to discuss lessons learned, but everyone I could think of is out of town. I’m down to just generically famous people (who I don’t actually know), like Mitch Kapor. Any suggestions of mere mortals?
TIL
- The Soviet Union created a written script for the Roma: then banned it, all within twenty years.
- Less than 1% of academic publishers put the majority of their works into multiple archives.
Links Du Jour
- New version of Hoot, the simple language from Spritely that can compile and run in your browser.
- And if you’d like somewhere to play with it, The Dam is a communally-run public Unix server (or pubnix🄽 with a lifetime membership for 10 euros! The dream of the Eighties!