Thanks to everyone who’s worked on and supported this great little IndieWeb and Domain of One’s Own friendly CMS that has made my life happier and all the better for its existence. Kudos especially to Ben Werdmüller, Marcus Povey, and Erin Jo Richey.
Why are we doing this?! It’s not TwitterCamp. It’s a W-O-R-D-C-A-M-P!! Why can’t we ask for and put our own domain names (running WordPress, natch…) in our registration and on our name tags?! Let’s get with the program people… Twitter is nice, but obviously WordPress on a domain name we own and control is far better.
Obviously it’s great for reading native digital content, material in the public domain, or Creative Commons content, but how could one work on participatory annotations for more restricted copyright material? Is there a Hypothes.is plugin for the Kindle, Kindle apps, or other e-readers that may work with copyright material?
Read Chapters: The Ethics of Design, How Designers Destroyed the World, and Moving Fast and Breaking Things
I was very reticent about this book at first, but it is way more essential than I initially thought! I knew I was going to know almost all of the examples, and I’ve generally been right on that account so far, but he’s going beyond the problems with potential solutions. I was worried it was going to be something that I would appreciate and heartily recommend to others without getting much out of it myself, but it reads quickly and easily and there’s a lot here that I want to come back and ponder about further.
Despite the fact that I don’t feel like a professional web designer by trade, what he’s talking about here are standards of human care and interaction that anyone who makes anything should be thinking about on a daily basis. Whether you’re building or creating things for others or even making your own daily life, at heart, you’re designing something.
If Chuck Chugumlung hasn’t come across this book yet with respect to his Design X Pasadena group, I’ll recommend it heartily to him.
I also find myself thinking a lot about how people are building and designing technologies in the edtech space. May of the researchers, professors, and instructional designers I know are immersed in some of the ethics and morals behind using these technologies. Generally I hear them talking about what they “wish” they had as tools, but often they seem to be stuck with things they don’t really want and are then attempting to figure out ways around these technologies after-the-fact so that they can use them in an ethical manner. They really need to stand up, refuse to use what they’re given, and demand better design from the start. Even if they’re incapable of building their own tools, they’re slowly, but surely going to loose the war if they don’t move upstream to where the actual decisions are being made. Fortunately some of the work I see in the OER space is being done at the grass roots where people have more choice and say in the design, but I worry that if they’re not careful, those tools will be siloed off with bad design choices by for-profit companies as well.
A nice, and even hopeful introduction.
I’ve already begun digging into some follow up and what comes next. One of my favorite ideas is doing a future WordCamp for Kids in the Los Angeles area. I’ve also begun thinking of some future volunteering-related projects at larger scale, but more on that later.
Thanks again to all the volunteers, sponsors, and attendees who helped to make it such a great camp!
I’m pretty sure I caught the right people in person, but I’ll say it again that this was one of my favorite camp themes of all time.
I briefly spitballed the general idea of this with Robby McCullough today.
There’s also the potential that an IndieAuth/Micropub set up could be created to give advertising platforms the ability to access smaller portions of a website to essentially inject advertising into a site’s sidebars, footers, or content directly, maybe on a pay-per-pixel basis. I’d really have to implicitly trust an advertisement server to allow this however.