2024-06-12: Do-ocracy, Home-Cooked Code, Missing People
(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.)
Working on:
Doing the do-ocracy
Things are moving along in the STFIL case. The Hanshou police have put out a statement; there’s a group of Chinese lessors who have self-funded themselves legal representation, and I’m looking into more options for other lessors. It’s all too complex to describe here (and to be honest, the STFIL 🄽 community should get all the info I have to give, rather have it come out here — if you want to keep up with the latest, I give regular informal updates in the #sfil-response channel on Filecoin Slack 🄽. )
There’s still a lot of people who feel that we, as the Foundation, should step in and run everything. I have a fairly instinctive sense at this point of what an org like ours, acting in a decentralized environment should (and is capable) of doing. But just conveying that framing is challenging. I often hit this issue explaining work-patterns in open source projects, community efforts, and of course in anarchist hackerspaces. I’m long past the peak optimism point where I think that a do-ocracy 🄽 is the best approach to any problem, but it’s an undeniable Schelling Point 🄽 in many adjacent subcultures — the default organizing form which. you need some active reason to move away from. But it’s definitely not very common at any large scale in the modern world. So when people come in with expectations that differ from that, you have to work hard to make the new pattern visible. I should probably give a talk on this.
Thinking about:
This fantastic post, Home-cooked Software and Barefoot Developers by Maggie Appleton 🄽, based on her talk at the Local First 🄽 conference. (Which I’m so sad I missed, along with last week’s Manifest 🄽 and this week’s Lab Week 2024 Field Building 🄽.”)
There’s a recurring theme here about how LLMs may help get us to not only user-centric applications, but user-crafted applications, which is really the dream since Alan Kay 🄽 ‘s early work. Ugh! I want this to be where we are skating towards! Matt Webb 🄽 is clearly thinking along the same directions too. Must reach out to all these smart people! I should probably give a talk on this too!
Link du jour:
- The Time I Built an ROV to Solve Missing Person Cases — A great hacker tale of Finnish missing persons, and a do-acratic approach to finding them.