S05E12 of Connection Problem: 5 years / a greener web / a pattern language

Sitrep: This goes out from West Berlin (the coffee shop, not the former Western part of the divided city) right after a lovely conversation with an old friend. (Thanks Sven!)

Thanks also to all the others who took the time to chat, shared their thoughts, offered a shared brainstorm after my ruminations last week about what might be possible next focal points for my work. It's very much appreciated!

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Personal(ish) updates

5 years this week! The Waving Cat — my company, not the website, which is much older — officially turned 5 years old 🙌.

Pants, pants, pants. Thanks to whoever appears to have included Zephyr Berlin on some list or another these last few weeks. It's always really nice to mail out whole stacks of boxes!

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A greener web.

Over at the Green Web Foundation, the ever-brilliant and helpful Chris Adams has been digging into the energy sources that power our everyday internet experience and… Wardley mapped it. Chris has been digging into things at the intersection of tech and energy for a long time, like which ISPs guarantee to use only renewable energy and other more-than-relevant topics that don't get the attention they deserve. If you don't already follow him on Twitter, I highly recommend it.

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Can tech fix democracy?

In The Economist, neuroscientist Darshana Narayanan wrote a piece for a mini-series called How to fix Democracy: Technology and political will can create better governance. In it, she explores how fuller participation can create an ethic of co-operation. Which sounds true enough. The piece also has a long list of some of the best recent projects that explore how tech can facilitate and foster participation, from Decide Madrid to vTaiwan. However, there's one thing here that kinda rubbed me the wrong way: The title and framing of the piece suggest that tech is a key driver allowing for political participation, and I don't think that is true at all. Anyone who's ever spoken to politicians, especially below the federal/national levels, will confirm that the key driver to political work is local and community engagement. We have giant problems in many democracies with campaign financing and out of control lobbying, but if anyone wants to get involved, there are a million open doors. Technology is emphatically not usually the missing link. I'm hoping, and kind of believe, that it was her editors that just framed her piece somewhat awkwardly with that series and title framing of "How to fix democracy / Technology and political will can create better governance". Because when it comes to lowering the barriers for participation, that's where technology can be tremendously useful. But it requires the same level of political will to allow, invite and act on it as most other forms of political participation.

As for Darshana Narayanan: I wasn't aware of her work before, and am very happy that I get to follow her thinking on Twitter. My points above might seem more critical than I mean them; I'm convinced that this kind of fresh thinking, especially across other disciplines, is priceless for reinvigorating democracy.

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Design Non-Fiction

Tellart's Design Non-Fiction project features a great list of folks sharing their insights and predictions scout reports from their perspectives at the cutting edge of their fields. As a side benefit, it was a fantastic overview of what a lot of people whose work I've admired for a long time — but who I haven't been following closely for a while — are up to now. For example, Jack Schulze of former BERG fame just now launched an interactive video/game project featuring an avocado detective, and frankly it looks delightful! And his writing is still some of the most spot on; the BERG crew always was extremely articulate: "Pixels used to be rare. [… They] have moved on since then. Now they’re abundant and free; now they change when you touch them; the pixels know you’re there." I mean, come on! This is fantastic! But also, the Tellart thing: Two thumbs up!

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A Pattern Language

This book from 1977, which I became aware of through CoolTools (of all places!), is a true gem. It's not easy or cheap to source and seems to have been out of print for quite some time. But it's dense, and as interesting for its approach to design patterns and the language it establishes as it is for its concrete, well, design patterns.

It's one of those books that appear a bit like it's fallen out of time, like it couldn't be written (or at least published) anymore: It's very opinionated, it takes no prisoners in its use of language.

For instance, here it is on four story limits for city buildings:

"There is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy: High buildings have no genuine advantages, except in speculative gains for banks and land owners They are not cheaper, they not not help create open space, they destroy the townscape, they destroy social life, they promote crime, they make life difficult for children, they are expensive to maintain, they wreck the open spaces near them, and they damage light and air and view. But quite apart from all of this, which shows that they aren't very sensible, empirical evidence shows that they can actually damage people's minds and feelings."

A Pattern Language covers a lot of ground. Randomly flipping through the tome surfaced things from tips for better arranging parents' bedrooms (no kids! a reading corner!) to use of lighting (create zones for different kinds of activity!) to how much parking area there should be in relation to overall urban surface area. It's quite something.

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Remote event participation: What works?

Because of a delightful trend in my Twitter feed to discuss eco-friendlier alternatives to flying there's been a lot of humming and hawing about remote event participation. Mostly — and I'm including myself in this — it's been along the lines of "this should be made better" or "here's a thing that might work": intentions and guesses, but not first hand experiences. I know that a bunch of folks reading this newsletter have been thinking a lot about designing event experiences, both onsite and remotely. I'd love to learn more about examples where you've experienced first hand aspects of remote event participation that actually worked well. Any stories I can share (or even just can use as inspiration for future events but treat otherwise confidentially?!) would be super welcome here or over on Twitter.

I did manage to cut my business flights down to 1 return trip in Q1, but looking at Q2-3 it looks dramatically different. There are some things that are too good to pass up because of travel, or at least that's the tradeoff I'm making (notably with the common mental self-trickery that of course I'm making that trade-off at literally everyone else's expense, sigh). But not everything would be necessary to attend in person if there is an equivalent or maybe better-than-equivalent way of participating remotely.

So just as a prompt, if we played a game of fill-in-the-blank, how would you complete this sentence:

If Skyping remotely into an onsite meeting was the worst experience, then the best was ______________.

Here's the first spot on thing I've been pointed to, even if it's primarily designed for smaller groups: Agile in the Ether remote meeting tips for conversations of up to 25 pax. (Thank you Emily Webber!)

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Miscellanea

Do we want a WeWork Smart City? WeWork, pardon me, The We Company now also wants to get into the Smart City bizniz. After all, they already track a bunch of stuff in their offices, and their shareholder value is created at the level of real estate development (as opposed to actual work). But anything you can do inside your office in terms of sensors and tracking is almost certain to be an absolute no go outside your office, in public space. I can't speak to the project lead, who's mentioned in the article to have a solid track record, but WeWork as a company has mostly been good at aggressive scaling, gentrification, and sucking the lifeblood out of the coworking scene. So maybe thanks but no thanks.

Better training data for spotting populist content online. As my old friend and now-professor Sven Engesser remarked to me the other day in a discussion about populist content online and if/how machine learning might help identify it, the potential role of Communications Sciences came up. Machine learning is only as good as the training data we can feed into the machine. With complex, context-dependent content as subtle as this, we essentially need to first analyze and clean up any data set in order to encode the data. As he pointed out, there's one scientific discipline that has been producing well-analyzed, clean data sets from complex content for decades: Communications Science. Comms Sciences (which I also majored in as part of a Comms Science/Political Science double major) could be the missing link there. These folks are who you want to get involved to create your right training data.

European copyright reform. As member of the European Parliament Julia Reda just shared on Twitter, the EU Parliament has just passed the highly controversial (read: super bad) copyright reform unchanged: "Dark day for internet freedom: The @Europarl_EN has rubber-stamped copyright reform including #Article13 and #Article11. MEPs refused to even consider amendments. The results of the final vote: 348 in favor, 274 against" Every expert, and most non-experts who don't happen to be big corporate publishers or music labels, see this reform as very bad for copyright, for content creators, and for the internet at large. It's the result of corporate lobbyism at its finest/worst. Sigh.

Prototype Fund has an open Call for Applications. The excellent folks over at Prototype Fund have an open CfA that I highly recommend looking into. Prototype Funds helps software developers, hackers and creatives get from idea to demo. "We support innovative open source projects in the areas of Civic Tech, Data Literacy, Data Security and Software Infrastructure and support you with up to 47.500 Euro per team/developer. With the grant you can code for up to six months and develop a prototype of your open source software. In addition, you will receive coaching, consulting and access to an extensive and diverse network of tech and other communities." This round's leitmotif is Commit: update system. "The technology sector is playing an increasingly important role in global challenges such as climate change, extinction of species and scarcity of resources." (Full disclosure: I was on their jury once, and co-founder Julia Kloiber and I worked together as Mozilla Fellows recently.)

Eurocutter. I have a confession to make: I've been a huge fan of Wirecutter, the product review site that's now part of the New York Times empire. I love the nerdiness with which they do these deep dives; I read them kind of as a zen exercise. Some of them are masterpieces. (As long as you don't go there for aesthetic recommendations; some of those are the equivalent of buying Amazon Basics products for good looks. But everything else is ace.) As my partner can testify, possibly with a light sigh, I've bought many a Wirecutter recommendation and never been disappointed. (Exception: Kitchen equipment, where SeriousEats' and Kenji Lopez-Alt's recommendations rule supreme.) I've even bought a few in categories I wasn't even looking to upgrade, and still haven't regretted any.
BUT! The editors focus in their selection on products that are available in the US first and foremost, and sometimes you just can't get these reasonably in Europe. Is there a Wirecutter equivalent, or some fan-run complementary site or subreddit or something that shows available, equally good equivalents available in Europe, Asia, etc.? In Germany, Stiftung Warentest (the counterpart of Consumer Reports) does the heavy lifting in this space, and does it well, but I personally think it lacks a little… panache and light-heartedness. It's a little stiff and serious whereas Wirecutter isn't above having their roommates' behinds cleaned by a Japanese bidet if the review so requires. It's fun! Pointers welcome.

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Currently reading on a skip-between-books basis: A Pattern Language (Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein); If cats disappeared from the world; (Genki Kawamura); Surveillance Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff); The End of Trust (McSweeny's).

Just finished reading So Many Books (Gabriel Zaid).

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What's next?

Today and tomorrow: Aspen Institute's conference on on Artificial Intelligence – "Humanity Defined: Politics and Ethics in the AI Age". There's a fair bit of research work coming into focus around smart cities, AI, policy, about which I can hopefully share some updates soon, as well as some grant-writing. Next week I'm headed to Valencia for Internet Freedom Festival (IFF). Then in April, at Andrea Krajewski's kind invitation, I'll be teaching a day at Hochschule Darmstadt about trust & tech & the Trustable Technology Mark. 

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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 2018-19, Peter was a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.

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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Pictures: Public Domain