Month: April 2019

There was an eerie and surprisingly large overlap of a lot of what Matt Lumpkin said in his talk this morning and the IndieWeb movement. If you just change the disease from Type 1 Diabetes to Social Media, there are a tremendous number of similarities between the two approaches of problems to be solved in terms of giving people agency, ownership of their data, the silo nature of the big corporations in the space, and the lack of solid inter-operability and standards.

I can’t wait for Chuck Chugumulung and the gang to get the video for this week up on YouTube so I can share it with colleagues.

Based on what I’ve heard, it might not be a completely terrible thing to class what the IndieWeb is working on fixing as a broad public health issue–but in its case a mental health one instead of a pancreas and diet related one.

Matt Lumpkin on stage pointing at a slide on the screen stating "Restoring one's own agency is the most critical task for people working to negotiate a healthy relationship with a chronic disease."
Matt Lumpkin during his talk “For Patients, by Patients: Pioneering a New Approach in Med-Tech Design“.
Matt Lumpkin on stage with a slide displaying the text "Do the people who use the things you make feel their power returned to them?"
Another IndieWeb sentiment in a presentation on UX/UI for improving health of people dealing with type 1 diabetes.
RSVPed Attending Innovate Pasadena Friday Coffee Meetup: How Lack of Opportunity Fuels Entrepreneurship, a talk by Shawna Bigby Davis

Fri, Apr 19, 2019, 8:15 AM at Cross Campus Pasadena

Topic: Expiration Dates as Turning Points -or- How Lack of Opportunity Fuels Entrepreneurship

Do you have a self-imposed expiration date for your working life? When opportunities run out, what’s next?

We have come to know entrepreneurship as people finding an opportunity in the business space by creating a product or service that solves a problem in a new way. But often times it comes from something bigger, and a little more basic: the entrepreneur just doesn’t fit the mold. How glass ceilings, expiration dates, lack of opportunity, and burn-out all fuel startups.

Bio: Shawna Bigby Davis

Former agency owner, stress-junkie, autoimmune awareness vigilante Shawna is an entrepreneurial, imaginative leader with expertise in both creative and business management. As former co-founder and Executive Creative Director of a successful a creative marketing agency, Shawna has a proven track record of building businesses using a design-focused mindset. Her recent startup focuses on autoimmune disease awareness, remission and management tools.Her work has been seen and used by millions of people and cited by numerous press outlets, including AdAge, Fast Company, Adweek, Creativity and AdCritic, in addition to all the major industry award shows including Cannes Lions, The One Show, Addys, Communication Arts and Clios.

I can’t wait to see my friend Shawna talk next week at Innovate Pasadena.

📺 “W1A” Episode #3.2 | Netflix

Watched "W1A" Episode #3.2 from Netflix
Directed by John Morton. With Hugh Bonneville, Monica Dolan, Jessica Hynes, Sarah Parish. The senior civil servant with responsibility for Charter Renewal negotiations visits the BBC to see what a normal day at the corporation looks like, and the campaign to launch user-generated content platform "BBC Me" gathers pace.

👓 New plugin allows the far-right to ‘graffiti’ any website | Columbia Journalism Review

Read New plugin allows the far-right to ‘graffiti’ any website (Columbia Journalism Review)

Dissenter acts as a workaround for people wishing to comment on websites, even those without a comment section. One user, Cody Jassman, describe the plugin as “like the graffiti painted in the alley on every web page. You can take a look around and see what passersby are saying.”

The plugin was launched in beta at the end of February by Andrew Torba, who co-founded Gab, a far-right social network. Gab is well known for being the platform where Robert Bowers, the suspected Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, published anti-Semitic comments before he allegedly killed 11 people and wounded many others at the Tree of Life synagogue.

📺 “W1A” Episode #3.3 | Netflix

Watched "W1A" Episode #3.3 from Netflix
Directed by John Morton. With Hugh Bonneville, Monica Dolan, Jessica Hynes, Sarah Parish. Having dismissed the idea of losing gardening programmes as a way of saving money, the Renewal Team propose that getting rid of the BBC Big Swing Band might be an option - but it turns into a PR disaster. Meanwhile, Siobhan decides to create a launch trail for BBC ME that will go viral, with Will delegated to stand in the main reception of New Broadcasting House to try to persuade various ...

👓 Maxwell House Brings You Midge’s Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Haggadah | Amazon

Read Maxwell House Brings You Midge's Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Haggadah (Amazon.com)
Midge's limited edition Haggadah is free with any purchase of participating Maxwell House Coffee products.
I’ve seen some old Haggadahs like this in the past from Maxwell House, but this is an awesome crossover promotion with Passover coming up.
Replied to a tweet by Marc DrummondMarc Drummond (Twitter)
I notice you’re a Drupalista. Would it help to know that Kristof De Jaeger has already done a huge amount of the work for you? See: https://www.drupal.org/project/indieweb

And Dries has been writing a lot about it over the past year as well.

Building toward an independent web isn’t something one does overnight anyway. Small incremental steps will eventually win the day. I like the way that Brent Simmons describes what he’s working on and why. Perhaps that could be a useful model in addition to the related idea of itches?

If it helps you might take your passions for “diversity, inclusion, equity & justice” and inject them into the space? I would always welcome help in those areas for the broader community.

Watched For Patients, by Patients: Pioneering a New Approach in Med-Tech Design by Innovate Pasadena: Friday Coffee Meetup Innovate Pasadena: Friday Coffee Meetup from YouTube

I was ten years into a career as a user experience designer making new digital products when diabetes blew my family's life apart. The complexity and relentlessness of the burden of care that came with my youngest daughter's diagnosis at 1.5 years old, were overwhelming. I learned that people with diabetes are always 10 minutes of inattention away from a coma. Run your blood sugar too low and risk brain injury or death. Run too high and you do cumulative damage to your organs, nerves and eyes. And as a designer and hardware hacker I couldn't accept the limitations and poor User Experience I was seeing in all the tools we were given to deal with it.

Then I discovered Nightscout (a way to monitor my daughter's blood sugar in real time from anywhere in the world) and Loop (a DIY open sourced, artificial pancreas system that checks blood sugar and adjusts insulin dosing every five minutes 24/7) and the #WeAreNotWaiting community that produced them. For the first time I saw the kinds of tools I needed and true power of solutions that come from the people living with the problem. When I learned about the Tidepool's project to take Loop through FDA approval and bring it to anyone who wants to use it to give the same freedom and relief that we've experienced from it, I had to get involved. Now we are taking an open source software through regulatory approval and using real-life user data from the DIY community for our clinical trial in a process that is turning heads in the industry. We'll get into the many ways this story demonstrates ways that user driven design, open source models and a counterculturally collaborative approach with regulators are shifting the incentives and changing the landscape toward one more favorable to innovation.

Here’s the video I mentioned yesterday. Those deeply enmeshed in the IndieWeb movement and many of its subtleties will get a ringing sense of déjà vu as they watch it and realize there’s a lot of overlap with how (and why) Matt Lumpkin is working to help those with type 1 diabetes and the IndieWeb. Perhaps there are some lessons to be learned here?

Lets Fix This

Jeffrey Zeldman does an excellent job of indicating why and what is wrong with the internet and social media and points to IndieWeb.org as a way forward.

If you’re personally using WordPress as a possible solution to those problems, I’m happy to help point to some quicker ways for people to rapidly implement them without struggling as much as many others have along the way.

(If WordPress isn’t your thing, the wiki has a plethora of other pathways depending on your CMS or programming language of choice–just search. It is abundantly clear that no single CMS is going to dig us out of the hole.)

I’ve written about and documented how I’ve gotten a lot of IndieWeb related technologies running on my own website. In many cases, these solutions are simple plugin downloads and activations, though it helps to have an idea of what they all do and how they may help.

I was particularly impressed with Brent Simmons’ post yesterday explaining how he was using his particular talents to further the cause. Though some may feel overwhelmed at the apparent size and scope of the problem, many diverse hands chipping away at small pieces can help to make a major dent in the problem.

Jen Simmons has indicated a useful paradigm structured around making resolutions with simple concrete steps and deadlines.

I have no doubt that even if you’re not a developer or programmer that you can help. If you’re not sure, ask me or others how.

I hope you’ll join us. Let’s roll up our sleeves and #​LetsFixThis.

👓 Universities should be working for the greater good | Kathleen Fitzpatrick | Times Higher Education

Read Universities should be working for the greater good by Kathleen FitzpatrickKathleen Fitzpatrick (Times Higher Education (THE))
Friendly competition can push us all to do better. But when the competitiveness that fuels excellence and prestige becomes based in the logic of the market, universities lose sight of their true purpose, writes Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Kudos Kathleen! This! This is the type of university I would want to be a part of.

This article reminds me a lot of the thesis in Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson’s book American Amnesia: How the War on Government Led Us to Forget What Made America Prosper. There they indicate that America’s economy isn’t one of pure capitalism and competition, but that we’ve gotten here by a healthy dose of having a mixed economy. Higher education needs a lot of that same mixed economy perspective to fix the wrongs of decades of to much direct competition which is having far too many unexpected consequences and emergent behaviors which we didn’t expect, anticipate, and now have trouble attempting to fix.

This article is so important, just this once, I’ll recommend that those who hit the website’s paywall and don’t want to register, use a read it later service like Pocket or Instapaper which should give you the full text or you can use your browser’s functionality for “viewing source” to get a marked up version.