My first job at Amazon was as the first analyst in strategic planning, the forward-looking counterpart to accounting, which records what already happened. We maintained several time horizons for our forward forecasts, from granular monthly forecasts to quarterly and annual forecasts to even five and ten year forecasts for the purposes of fund-raising and, well, strategic planning.
Category: IndieWeb
👓 Self-platforming, DoOO, and academic workflows | Tim Clarke
I see self-platforming as an expression of my own digital citizenship, and I also see it as my deliberate answer to the call for digital sanctuary. The frequency and extent to which educators urge students onto extractive applications is of great concern. Self-platforming offers opportunities to benefit from the collaborative, hyper-textual, asynchronous, and distributed qualities of the web, while diminishing the costs — often hidden to us — of working on proprietary and extractive platforms.
Needing to rely on five or more outside services (Twitter, Instapaper, Pinboard, bit.ly, and finally even Canvas, where some of them are paid services) seems just painful and excessive. He mentions the amount and level of detail he’s potentially giving away to just bit.ly, but each of these are all taking a bite out of the process. Of course this doesn’t take into consideration the fact that Instapaper is actually a subsidiary of Betaworks, the company that owns and controls bit.ly, so there’s even more personal detail being consumed and aggregated there than he may be aware. All this is compounded by the fact that Instapaper is currently completely blocking its users within the EU because it hasn’t been able to comply with the privacy and personal data details/restrictions of the GDPR. Naturally, there’s currently no restrictions on it in the U.S. or other parts of the world.
I (and many others) have been hacking away for the past several years in trying to tame much of our personal data in a better way to own it and control it for ourselves. And isn’t this part of the point of having a domain of one’s own? Even his solution of using Shaarli to self-host his own bookmarks, while interesting, seems painful to me in some aspects. Though he owns and controls the data, because it sits on a separate domain it’s not as tightly integrated into his primary site or as easily searched. To be even more useful, it needs additional coding and integration into his primary site which appears to run on WordPress. With the givens, it looks more like he’s spending some additional time running his own separate free-standing social media silo just for bookmarks. Why not have it as part of his primary personal hub online?
I’ve been watching a growing trend of folks both within the IndieWeb/DoOO and edtech spaces begin using their websites like a commonplace book to host a growing majority of their own online and social related data. This makes it all easier to find, reference, consume, and even create new content in the future. On their own sites, they’re conglomerating all their data about what they’re reading, highlighting, annotating, bookmarking, liking, favoriting, and watching in addition to their notes and thoughts. When appropriate, they’re sharing that content publicly (more than half my website is hidden privately on my back end, but still searchable and useful only to me) or even syndicating it out to social sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Instapaper, et al. to share it within other networks.
Some other examples of educators and researchers doing this other than myself include Aaron Davis, Greg McVerry, John Johnson, and more recently W. Ian O’Byrne and Cathie LeBlanc among many others. Some have chosen to do it on their primary site while others are experimenting using two or even more. I would hope that as Tim explores, he continues to document his process as well as the pros and cons of what he does and the resultant effects. But I also hopes he discovers this growing community of scholars, teachers, programmers and experimenters who have been playing in the same space so that he knows he’s not alone and perhaps to prevent himself from going down some rabbit holes some of us have explored all too well. Or to use what may be a familiar bit of lingo to him, I hope he joins our impromptu, but growing personal learning network (PLN).
👓 Dropping Twitter Support on IndieAuth.com | Aaron Parecki
I've made the difficult decision to drop support for Twitter authentication on IndieAuth.com. Some time last week, Twitter rolled out a change to the website which broke how IndieAuth.com verifies that a website and Twitter account belong to the same person.
👓 MyData – a Nordic model for human-centered personal data | IIS
MyData is the name of a human centered approach in personal data and Antti Poikola is one of the main initiators. The concept is well known on the open data arena in Finland, but now Antti Poikola wants the concept to be more used in other Nordic countries as well.
liest (und hört dann endlich): "Ein IndieWeb Podcast" von @pfefferle über Podcasts von @ChrisAldrich https://t.co/JC5YgdKbIX
— Detlef Stern (@t73fde) May 26, 2018
📺 re:publica 2018 – Jim Groom: Domain of One’s Own: Reclaim Your Data | YouTube
A Domain of One's Own is an international initiative in higher education to give students and faculty more control over their personal data. The movement started at the University of Mary Washington in 2012, and has since grown to tens of thousands of faculty and students across hundreds of universities. The first part of this presentation (5-10 minutes) will provide a brief overview of how these Domains projects enable not only data portability for coursework, but also a reflective sense of what a digital identity might mean in terms of privacy and data ownership.
The second part of this presentation will explore how Domain of One's Own could provides a powerful example in how higher education could harness application programming interfaces (APIs) to build a more user-empowered data ecosystem at universities. The initial imaginings of this work has already begun at Brigham Young University in collaboration with Reclaim Hosting, and we will share a blueprint of what a vision of the Personal API could mean for a human-centric data future in the realm of education and beyond.
Toward the end, Groom makes mention of MyData, a Nordic Model for human-centered personal data management and processing, which I’d not previously heard of but which has some interesting resources which look like they might dovetail into some of what those in the IndieWeb are looking at. I’m curious if any of the folks in the EU like Sebastian Greger have come across them, and what their thoughts are on the idea/model they’ve proposed? It looks like they’ve got an interesting looking conference coming up at the end of August in Helsinki. There seems to be a white paper outlining a piece of their philosophy, which I’ll link to below:
MyData: A Nordic Model for human-centered personal data management and processing by Antti Poikola (t), Kai Kuikkaniemi (t), Harri Honko (t)
This white paper presents a framework, principles, and a model for a human-centric approach to the managing and processing of personal information. The approach – defined as MyData – is based on the right of individuals to access the data collected about them. The core idea is that individuals should be in control of their own data. The MyData approach aims at strengthening digital human rights while opening new opportunities for businesses to develop innovative personal data based services built on mutual trust.
Based on a quick overview, this is somewhat similar to a model I’ve considered and is reminiscent to some ideas I’ve been harboring about applications of this type of data to the journalism sphere as well.
📺 Webstock ‘18: Jeremy Keith – Taking Back The Web | Vimeo
In these times of centralised services like Facebook, Twitter, and Medium, having your own website is downright disruptive. If you care about the longevity of your online presence, independent publishing is the way to go. But how can you get all the benefits of those third-party services while still owning your own data? By using the building blocks of the Indie Web, that’s how!
Presentation slide-deck: speakerdeck.com/adactio/taking-back-the-web
👓 Can we PLEASE talk about privacy, not GDPR, now? | Sebastian Greger
It’s the “morning after”: a mere twelve hours have passed since the GDPR applies and while still awaiting breaking news on hobbyist blog owners being fined EUR 20 million, an army of burnt-out web and legal professionals has begun to clean up from the party that was “the final dash towards GDPR”.
tl;dr: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
🔖 Micro.wiki, Resources for Micro.blog | Eli Mellen
Community resources for the avid Micro.blogger
Micro.blog is groovy. This is a community index, champion’s enchiridion of all things Micro.blog. NOTE! This is a community resource and is in no way officially tied to Micro.blog. The bona fide documentation lives at help.micro.blog (make sure not to miss the community guidelines).
Aaron Davis’ reply to Greg McVerry and Posting on Twitter
I have been following with interest your questions and queries in the IndieWeb chat, especially in regards to WordPress. I thought it might be useful to document my workflow associated with Read Write Collect for you:
I have taken to using HTML to add media or multiple paragraphs into the ‘quote’ box.
His comment here reminds me that I’ve seen him doing much the same thing I’m often doing. However I ought to better document the small code snippets I’ve used to change the default of the Post Kinds Plugin to allow me to input arbitrary html and code into the quote part of the meta box to custom define my reply contexts. (The plugin generally strips out most html and scripts for security, but since I check these or make them manually myself (often when making posts via PESOS), I’m not worried about injected code.)
In great part it comes down to changing ‘false’ to ‘true’ in the indieweb-post-kinds.php
file:
define( 'POST_KINDS_KSES', false );
Though there are one or two other bits so that I don’t need to redefine it each time the plugin changes.
🎧 The IndieWeb – Martijn | jeena.net
We're two senior IndieWeb participants talking about owning your own content.
In particular, I love that they do an excellent job of helping to communicate the intentional work, craft, morality, ethics, and love which most of the community approaches the topic.
As I suspect that Jeena doesn’t receive many “listen” posts, I’ll webmention his post here with an experimental microformat class like-of
. Perhaps he’ll join some of the podcasting community who supports this and make it a stronger standard.
👓 After 5 years and $3M, here’s everything we’ve learned from building Ghost | Ghost
It's always fun to use these milestones to take a step back and reflect on the journey so far. On previous birthdays I've talked about revenue milestones and product updates, but this year I'm going to focus more on all the things we've learned since we started.
Looking at their project pages and site though it does seem like they’ve got a reasonable layout and sales pitch for a CMS project, though it’s probably a bit too much overkill on selling when it could be simpler. Perhaps it might be a model for creating a stronger community facing page for the WithKnown open source project, presuming the education-focused corporate side continues as a status quo?
They did seem to be relatively straightforward in selling themselves against WordPress and what they were able to do and not do. I’m curious what specifically they’re doing to attract journalists? I couldn’t find anything specifically better than anything else on the market that would set it apart other than their promise on ease-of-use.
There were some interesting insights for those working within the IndieWeb community as well as businesses which might build themselves upon it.
Highlights:
Decentralised platforms fundamentally cannot compete on ease of setup. Nothing beats the UX of signing up for a centralised application.
We spent a very long time trying to compete on convenience and simplicity. This was our biggest mistake and the hardest lesson to learn.
Virtual Homebrew Website Club Meetup on May 30, 2018
Are you building your own website? Indie reader? Personal publishing web app? Or some other digital magic-cloud proxy? If so, come on by and join a gathering of people with likeminded interests. Bring your friends who want to start a personal web site. Exchange information, swap ideas, talk shop, help work on a project…
Everyone of every level is welcome to participate! Don’t have a domain yet? Come along and someone can help you get started and provide resources for creating the site you’ve always wanted.
This virtual HWC meeting is for site builders who either can’t make a regular in-person meeting or don’t yet have critical mass to host one in their area. It will be hosted on Google Hangouts.
Homebrew Website Club Meetup – Virtual Americas
Time: to
Location: Google Hangouts (link to Hangout TBD)
- 4:30 – 5:30 pm (Pacific): (Optional) Quiet writing hour
Use this time to work on your project, ask for help, chat, or do some writing before the meeting. - 5:30 – 7:00 pm (Pacific): Meetup
More Details
Join a community of like-minded people building and improving their personal websites. Invite friends that want a personal site.
- Work with others to help motivate yourself to create the site you’ve always wanted to have.
- Ask questions about things you may be stuck on–don’t let stumbling blocks get in the way of having the site you’d like to have.
- Finish that website feature or blog post you’ve been working on
- Burn down that old website and build something from scratch
- Share what you’ve gotten working
- Demos of recent breakthroughs
Skill levels: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced
Any questions? Need help? Need more information? Ask in chat: http://indiewebcamp.com/irc/today#bottom
RSVP
Add your optional RSVP in the comments below; by adding your indie RSVP via webmention to this post; or by RSVPing to one of the syndicated posts below:
Indieweb.org event: https://indieweb.org/events/2018-05-30-homebrew-website-club#Virtual_Americas
👓 Why We Need the IndieWeb | Cathie LeBlanc
Members of the IndieWeb community are building tools to try to make moving your web presence off the corporate web easier, giving you more control over your digital identity. I like to think of the IndieWeb as a way of trying to regain the democratic ideals of early Web 2.0. IndieWeb wants us all to have a web presence that we own and control. We can still use tools like Twitter and Facebook to bring us together but we publish our content first on our own web sites and then decide where we want to share them. An example is this post. I’m writing it on http://cathieleblanc.com/blog. But I want others to see it. So after publishing it on my own site with my self-hosted installation of WordPress, I will put a link to it on Facebook and on Twitter for others to see. Facebook and Twitter serve as today’s interactive hotlist. Everything old is new again.