Category: Read

Read Code of Conduct (OpenETC)
A draft of the proposed OpenETC code of conduct, posted for community feedback. If you have any feedback or questions on this code, please leave a comment using Hypothesis.

📑 Highlights and Annotations

draft of the proposed OpenETC code of conduct ❧

When making a CoC, it’s always nice to spend some time researching others.

Here’s a copy of the IndieWeb’s CoC, which I’ve liked. They also documented a list of other CoC’s for other communities that might be worth looking at as well. Most of them have licenses for ease of cutting/pasting for reuse.

I don’t see a license on this draft, but it would be nice if you provided a CC0 license for it.
Annotated on January 10, 2020 at 08:47PM

Temporary access ❧

Large portions of the material below this read more like a Terms of Service than a Code of Conduct. It might be more useful to split these into two pages to better delineate the two ideas.
Annotated on January 10, 2020 at 08:55PM

Guidelines ❧

These are some generally useful guidelines, but it would be nice to have a section on where to go or who to contact for help and conflict resolution. What should someone who notices a violation do? Where should they turn for help?
Annotated on January 10, 2020 at 08:57PM

use the services of the OpenETC ❧

What would constitute a full list of the services of OpenETC? Is it just this website, or does it include email lists, chat rooms, a Slack room, other services? The CoC should apply to all these areas listed.
Annotated on January 10, 2020 at 09:02PM

Read Looking for community feedback on Code of Conduct by Clint Lalonde (opened.ca)

Two goals the OpenETC stewardship team are working towards in 2020 is to begin formalizing some processes and guidelines for educators and students interested in using the services of the OpenETC community, and to provide more pathways of engagement with the openETC for community members. High on our to-do list for this year are the development of governance documents, like privacy policies and a code of conduct.

Read Digital Detox 2020/1: The Problem with Digital Detoxes by Amy Collier (Digital Learning & Inquiry (DLINQ))

Every year, as DLINQ’s Digital Detox nears, I reflect critically on digital detoxes. From the start of our Digital Detox initiative, we have emphasized looking beyond mindful approaches to technology to ask difficult questions about the complex entanglements of digital technologies in social life (e.g., surveillance, hard-coded biases, misinformation). But as I observe the upswell of interest in digital detoxes more broadly, I can’t help but worry. Do digital detoxes focus on the wrong things? Do they propose that the solutions to our serious digital attention and connection challenges are temporary disconnections from technology, instead of addressing how and why digital platforms operate in the ways they do?

Some interesting and useful things to think about not only with respect to detoxes, but second and third level considerations which aren’t always considered by people.
Read Become A Smashing Editor by Rachel Andrew (Smashing Magazine)
We are currently looking for more subject editors to join the team. To be a subject editor you need to know your area well, and be able to pinpoint the important topics to cover. You should be connected within the community for that subject; happy to contact people and ask them to write for Smashing, helping them to come up with a good article idea. You should be able to be a friendly point of contact for authors as they work on their article - happy to make suggestions, check for technical or factual errors, and guide the article to be useful to our audience. If you haven’t edited before, it’s likely that you already write technical articles, and understand how to structure a good piece.
Liked Now supporting Webmention by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)
I think? If you know how to send a Webmention, please do so that I know it works!
I’ve installed the IndieWeb plugin as well as its companions, Webmention and Semantic-Linkbacks.
The IndieWeb plugin adds a few semantic things to the user profile in WordPress and acts as a launch platform for ...
Hooray! Congratulations!
Read Let’s PESOS Passive Posts with Trakt and Last.FM by Charlotte AllenCharlotte Allen (charlotteallen.info)
So, I’ve been on a kick gluing together my site with other services using IFTTT to PESOS. Because if I can get away with it, the less code I have to maintain, the better. Let’s do more. I now have my passive “watch” and “listen” posts syncing to my site using Trakt and Last.FM, but I had...
Some additional great examples of how to do PESOS using Micropub with IFTTT/Zapier. 
Read webmentions and microsub (gopher.floodgap.com)

This phlog is about web stuff. Specifically it's about Indyweb things and microformats.

I use my website https://tomasino.org as an IndieAuth [0] portal. When logging into sites that understand the IndieWeb concept, I provide my "Home" URL as an identifier. Then the site scrubs through all the various links I have on that page and picks out those that it can understand for authentication. In most cases I get GPG and GitHub hits, though occasionally a site will support more. I oAuth in, and bam... identified. It's pretty neat and requires very little effort on my side.

IndieWeb with Gopher. Not sure if this will send a Webmention correctly though…
Read The biggest mistakes to avoid with your ePaper by Mary-Katharine Phillips (Twipe)
In our discussions with publishers, we often notice higher standards applied to websites than ePapers. This is intriguing, knowing the level of reader engagement of the latter, and seeing steady yearly growth of ePapers in the past eight years. Publishers often tell us their ePaper readers are their...
They’re definitely selling a product here, but it sounds like some solid advice. I should take a closer look at some other ePapers to see what the state of the art is. I’m quite curious what the tracking, advertising, and smaller scale surveillance capitalism effects are here.
Read We're closing Crosscut's comment section. Here's why — and what's next by Ana Sofia Knauf, Anne Christnovich, Mohammed Kloub (crosscut.com)
With the rise of social platforms and an uptick in threatening comments, the newsroom is taking reader engagement in a different direction.

We analyzed our Disqus data and we found that roughly 17,400 comments were made on our site in 2019, but 45% came from just 13 people. That data tells us that social media, email, phone calls, letters to the editor, our Crosscut events and an occasional visit to the newsroom are far better tools for us to hear about your concerns, story ideas, feedback and support.❧

The Disqus data statistics here are fascinating. It also roughly means that those 13 people were responsible for 600+ comments on average or roughly 2 a day every day for the year. More likely it was a just a handful responsible for the largest portion and the others tailing off.

Sadly missing are their data about social media, email, phone, and letters to the editor which would tell us more about how balanced their decision was. What were the totals for these and who were they? Were they as lopsided as the Disqus numbers?
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 04:33PM

In the meantime, stay in touch with Crosscut by:
Liking us on Facebook
Following us on Twitter
Following us on Instagram
Chatting with us on Reddit
Signing up for one (or all) of our newsletters ❧

It seems like they’ve chose a solution for their community that boils down to pushing the problem(s) off onto large corporations that have shown no serious efforts at moderation either?

Sweeping the problem under the rug doesn’t seem like a good long term answer. Without aggregating their community’s responses, are they really serving their readers? How is the community to know what it looks like? Where is it reflected? How can the paper better help to shape the community without it?

I wonder what a moderated IndieWeb solution for them might look like?
Annotated on January 08, 2020 at 04:42PM

It would be cool if they considered adding syndication links to their original articles so that when they crosspost them to social media, at least their readers could choose to follow those links and comment there in a relatively continuous thread. This would at least help to aggregate the conversation for them and their community while still off-loading the moderation burden from their staff, which surely is part of their calculus. It looks like their site is built on Drupal. I would suspect that–but I’m not sure if–swentel’s IndieWeb Drupal module has syndication links functionality built into it.

Rather than engaging their community, it almost feels to me like they’re giving up and are allowing a tragedy of their commons when there may be some better experimental answers that just aren’t being tried out.

The worst part of this for me though is that they’ve given up on the power of owning and controlling their own platform. In the recent history of journalism, this seems to be the quickest way of becoming irrelevant and dying out.