S05E08: 21st Century Appropriate

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I'm writing from sunny Lisbon, Portugal, where I was invited to do a couple of presentations at a European IoT Large-Scale Pilot Programmes event. (It's about… you guessed it… European IoT Large-Scale Pilots. I love EU naming schemes.) I'm tacking on the weekend to enjoy Lisbon and take stock of where I am in my work, and ponder a little more which direction I'll want to move in. A weekend in Lisbon at the tail end of a one-year fellowship seemed like the perfect opportunity to do some reflection.

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Personal updates

Mozilla Fellowship

Yesterday was my last day as an active Mozilla Fellow. It's been quite a year: I enjoyed getting to know a great community, I learned a lot. I also got to focus on one project (ThingsCon's Trustable Technology Mark) for the better part of a year — I don't even remember the last time I wasn't juggling five balls simultaneously. A big thank you to the great folks at Mozilla Foundation!

Also, as I already said on Twitter and would like to reinforce here as well: It's been a great year - and I highly recommend to look into upcoming fellowship openings. It's a lovely, smart community that cares about the web. You can usually find information about fellowships (and fellows) here. I think the next call, this time for Tech Policy Fellows, will be opening in mid-March.

Keep a personal touch

If you've followed my Twitter for some time, and I think a good number of you have, you'll most likely have scratched your head every now and then. What is this, why's he posting this nonsense? Here's the simple, honest truth: I enjoy Twitter, and I defend it against myself, against getting too slick and professional on the platform. I want this to be a space, yes, for learning and professional exchange; but also for some playfulness. Not brand building but playful exploration. A real conversation place (within reason and platform limits, natch). This is what has made Twitter great for me, and that's how I'd like to keep it. I'm a little nostalgic that way, I guess.

So yes, I get waaay to much enjoyment out of keeping my Twitter stream not super professional. In fact, I've over the years done all kinds of things to protect this as a space that I can just enjoy for what it is. So if you see the occasional really bad haiku or some other nonsense, don't fret. Take it as a sign I'm still engaged, and this isn't a bot posting links to a blog post on LinkedIn. 🌈

I Spent a Few Days at an EU IoT Event And You Won't Believe* What Happens Next

*Yes, you will. It's pretty straightforward.

And learned a lot of random things during conversations over lunches and coffees. IoT is a big topic for energy and water utilities, and Portugal is big on solar and water energy; might even be positioned to be a leader in clean hydrogen, made with excess solar energy. (Note: I don't know the first thing about hydrogen; is "clean hydrogen" even a thing, or a "clean coal"-style euphemism?) Learned that parental leave in Spain was bumped up to 16 weeks (not enough) but can now be split equally between both parents, which is new (sigh). Learned about drones for vine monitoring. And had my brain broken by a lot of EU-specific jargon. So lots of kinda on-topic/off-optic stuff, but it made me realize again that things at these otherwise sometimes very business-y conferences get a lot more interesting once you ask people about the stuff they care about, and all of a sudden there's tons to learn and better ways to connect.

But then I also saw a preview of the European Commission's next round of policy targets and their funding plans to reach them, and then things got more interesting. Universal quantum computers made an appearance, as did curing certain types of cancer, as did carbon free cities. I found myself jotting down in my notes: "Fuck Yeah Europe!"

Also, some challenges mentioned seemed might be worth tackling: That large orgs have trouble spending small amounts; that seems solvable. The public sector has trouble getting external expertise in for internal capacity building; that seems solvable, too.

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New Economics

This piece about Economics after Neoliberalism (Boston Review) is quite something.

Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik, Gabriel Zucman: Remember these names. I know I will start following them more closely. They're behind the Economics for Inclusive Prosperity (EfIP) network: "This nascent collective effort is not simply to offer a list of prescriptions for different domains of policy, but to provide an overall vision for economic policy that stands as a genuine alternative to the market fundamentalism that is often—and wrongly—identified with economics."

So that's a big, juicy challenge right there. And as I quite fondly recall Bruce Sterling describing the ThingsCon community at the first event: "People tend to grow by the size of their chosen problems. These people have some pretty big problems."

I'm excited by the fact that economists are taking this position, and actively trying to build more bridges to other disciplines - we certainly need all the fresh thinking in this space.

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The last ones are falling

Know the feeling when you look back and realize that a thing you really liked has gone stale or bad, and then you look around and realize that there's a whole bunch there that's gone meh?

This is what a good chunk of the web has been feeling like for me this last year or two. There's really good stuff, but a lot of the formerly fresh (now old) wave of web services that I used to be really excited about have either disappeared or been corrupted at the core.

I think that Foursquare has crossed that threshold - potentially quite some time back. Of course we all knew that location data is a mess, commercially speaking. But looking at the aggressive stance that Foursquare's Enterprise pages take to sell data about or access to millions of users with "real time location switched on" is disgusting.
 

Screenshots of foursquare.com

It's also a giant leak waiting to happen. Yuck. Nothing good can come of this; but what's the alternative? NOT having any kind of social recommendation system? Screw surveillance capitalism. One of these days I'll raise some funds so we can pay some folks to build essentially all these services from scratch, sans surveillance.

(Come to think of it, that would be a fun Kickstarter style project: Resurrect/improve the best of those services, but 21st century appropriate...)

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Miscellanea

Charismatic tech: Dr. Laura James has been writing most excellent week notes. This week's are outstanding. In them, she explores the role of charisma in tech, the funding and power dynamics in the non-profit space, and so much more.

AR infographocs: Sven Ehmann, who heads the lab at the excellent Infographics Group (and is a good friend) shares research notes about experiments with AR - specifically with augmenting interactions in art and play contexts. I'm a total sucker for this kind of glimpse behind the scenes. Interesting angle by extending artworks for kids by building on the actual motif, too.

Trust by Design: Consumers International has launched Trust by Design guidelines for consumer IoT. 🙌

GDPR is working: The Irish data protection watchdog's annual report shows lots more consumer complaints about companies' mishandling of consumer data, indicating that the law works. (Original report as PDF, TechCrunch summary)

Equal rights for everyone... in 6 countries: Learned in this Quartz piece that only 6 (in words: six!) countries have 100% equal rights for men and women. Sigh. Baby steps, I guess?

All the voices: Mozilla's Common Voice project collects voice samples from a wide range of languages and accents to offer better, more inclusive, and freely available training data for voice recognition training. It's now got almost 1,400 hours of recorded voice data from more than 42,000 contributors in 18 languages.

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If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability, so let's have a chat!

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I wish you an excellent weekend. Enjoy life, live a little.

Yours truly,
Peter

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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight company. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that fosters the creation of a responsible Internet of Things. In 2018, Peter is a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.

Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter or benefit from it? A shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!

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Pictures: Top, Unsplash (Rodion Kutsaev). Bottom, Pexabay (Pexels).