👓 IndieWebCamps | David Shanske

Read IndieWebCamps by David ShanskeDavid Shanske (david.shanske.com)
This is a list of all the IndieWebCamps I’ve attended since I joined the community in April of 2014. I’m positive I may be missing some remote attendance, but excluding the two Online IndieWebCamps, and the three where I was a remote participant, I have physically attended 18 IndieWebCamps…2 in 2014, 2 in 2015, 4 in 2016, 3 in 2017,4 in 2018, and 3 so far in 2019.
You’ve got me beat.

👓 Permission to Write Stuff | Brendan Dawes

Read Permission to Write Stuff by Brendan Dawes (brendandawes.com)
One of my favourite ever pieces of tech was the original Flip camera. It came out at a time when the only way to shoot video was to dust off that full-size camera — the one you only took out for big occasions such as a wedding or a christening. Those cameras said "I am serious, only shoot serious things." The Flip changed all that. With it's 640 x 480 video and it's big red button it instead said "shoot any old crap — it doesn't matter if it's good, just shoot it." Of course it was doomed to failure once a phone could take video and share it to everyone, but for a moment it removed the pressure to only shoot so called important things. It very much reminded me of when I would run around with a Super-8 camera in the back garden of my Mum's shop, making rubbish sci-fi movies with my mate Ken and my brother John. I've recently seen some tweets expressing the pressure some people feel — understandably — of publishing their thoughts on a blog, fearing what others might say, wondering if it's good enough to be published on this wonderful thing called the web. I would say treat the web like that big red button of the original Flip camera. Just push it, write something and then publish it. It may not be perfect, but nothing ever is anyway. I write all sorts of crap on my blog — some of it really niche like snippets for Vim. Yet it's out there just in case someone finds it useful at some point — not least me when I forget how I've done something. Right now there's a real renaissance of people getting back to blogging on their own sites again. If you've been putting it off, think about the beauty and simplicity of that red button, press it, and try and help make the web the place it was always meant to be.

👓 Into the Personal-Website-Verse | Matthias Ott

Read Into the Personal-Website-Verse by Matthias Ott (Matthias Ott)
Social media in 2019 is a garbage fire.What started out as the most promising development in the history of the Web – the participation of users in the creation of content and online dialogue at scale – has turned into a swamp of sensation, lies, hate speech, harassment, and noise.
A great essay on “Why IndieWeb”.

👓 Bracelli’s Bizzarie di Varie Figure (1624) | The Public Domain Review

Read Bracelli’s Bizzarie di Varie Figure (1624) (The Public Domain Review)
At first glance you may be forgiven for thinking these images to have sprung from some hitherto unknown corner of the Cubist movement, but these remarkably prescient etchings are in fact the creation of an artist working a whole three centuries earlier. In 1624, Giovanni Battist...

👓 Why Ohio’s Congressional Map Is Unconstitutional | ACLU

Read Why Ohio’s Congressional Map Is Unconstitutional (American Civil Liberties Union)
UPDATE (2/27/2019): A federal trial, where the ACLU will argue that that Ohio's congressional map violates the Constitution, will begin on March 4 in Cincinnati, Ohio. The witness list includes plaintiffs, political scientists, former state Sen. Nina Turner, U.S. Rep. Marcia Fudge, and former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, among many others.We all know how representative democracy is supposed to work — each election cycle, citizens vote to determine which elected officials will represent them in Congress. That’s not what’s happening in Ohio, where Republicans designed the state’s redistricting map to keep their party in office in violation of voters’ constitutional rights.Today, the ACLU filed a lawsuit seeking to replace Ohio’s gerrymandered map with one that reflects the will of voters and complies with the Constitution before the 2020 elections.How did Ohio become one of the most egregious examples of partisan gerrymandering in modern history? It’s a sordid tale involving high-level Republican operatives, a secret “bunker,” a rushed vote, and enormous consequences for our democracy.Here’s what you need to know. How are congressional districts drawn?U.S. voters are grouped into districts that elect members of Congress, state legislators and many local offices. These districts are typically redrawn every 10 years, based on the results of the U.S. Census. Under current Ohio law, the state’s General Assembly — its legislature — is primarily responsible for drawing the state’s congressional districts, under the advisement of a bipartisan legislative task force.What happened in Ohio? In anticipation of the 2010 Census, the national Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) came up with a plan to secure Republican control of state legislatures, with a focus on states where legislative bodies controlled the congressional redistricting process. The RSLC identified Ohio as one of those states and spent nearly $1 million on Ohio House of Representatives races in advance of the 2010 election. Ahead of the election, the Republican National Committee also conducted a training session on redistricting, attended by the chief legal counsel for the Ohio House Republican Caucus. The theme of the session was “keep it secret, keep it safe.”In the 2010 election, Ohio Republicans succeeded in securing single-party control of the state and quickly got to work on drawing a map that would deliver favorable results for the next 10 years.National GOP officials also stepped up their support of local redistricting efforts. In a letter to all Republican state legislative leaders nationwide, Chris Jankowski, then-president and chief executive officer of the RSLC, offered a “team of seasoned redistricting experts available to you at no cost to your caucus for assistance.”In the summer of 2011, two of the highest-ranking Republican staffers in the state — the chiefs of staff to the Ohio Senate and the Ohio House of Representatives — hired two Republican political operatives, Ray DiRossi and Heather Mann, as consultants to undertake research and other activities for drafting the congressional map. They were retained exclusively by the Republican members of the supposedly bipartisan task force.Several other national Republican Party operatives also got involved with the drafting the map. Beginning in July 2011, the redistricting operations were based out of a secretly rented hotel room at the DoubleTree Hotel in Columbus, Ohio, rather than in the offices of the General Assembly. The national operatives and state officials driving the redistricting process referred to it as “the bunker.”The operatives and Ohio Republican officials often used their personal, rather than official, email addresses to conduct and discuss the state business of drawing Ohio’s congressional map. The draft map was kept from the public, the full task force, and even from members of the General Assembly until just two days before the full Ohio House would vote on it in September 2011.The map passed. Democratic leaders and advocacy groups quickly sought a referendum to allow the public an opportunity to repeal the map. Under threat of repeal, Republicans moved quickly to pass a slightly revised version. However, the revisions did nothing to change the partisan make-up of any of the proposed districts or the dramatic advantage it provided the Republicans.What did the operatives do to the map?Using partisan indices to draw the districts, the operatives designed a map that would allow Democrats to win four districts, while ensuring Republican wins in the state’s other 12 districts.As a result of the new map, Republican candidates earned 51 percent of the statewide vote in 2012, but secured 75 percent of the state’s congressional seats. In 2014, they earned 59 percent of the vote, and again held onto 75 percent of the seats. In 2016, the Ohio GOP took 57 percent of the vote, and — yet again — kept 75 percent of the Congressional seats.Ohioans who had voted as De
Read Power, Polarization, and Tech by Chris (hypervisible.com)
In Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, he writes about early colonists and how the rich were feeling the heat of poor white folks and poor black folks associating too closely with each other. The fear was that the poor, despite being different races, would unite against their wealthy overlords. Shortly after, the overlords began to pass laws that banned fraternization between the races. The message to poor whites was clear: “you are poor, but you are still far better than that poor black person over there, because you are white.” Polarization is by design, for profit.

👓 How to Cover Hate — The Disinformation War | Columbia Journalism Review

Read How to Cover Hate — The Disinformation War by Sam Thielman (The Disinformation War)
At UNC Charlotte in North Carolina on Tuesday, April 30, a 22-year-old man allegedly shot six people in his anthropology class with a handgun, wounding four and killing two. Three days earlier, on the last day of Passover, in Poway, California, a 19-year-old man walked into a synagogue with what police described as an “AR-type assault weapon” and now stands accused of killing a 60-year-old woman and injuring another congregant, the rabbi, and an 8-year-old girl.

👓 Should the Media Quit Facebook? — The Disinformation War | Columbia Journalism Review

Read Should the Media Quit Facebook? — The Disinformation War by Mathew Ingram (The Disinformation War)
With all that has transpired between Facebook and the media industry over the past couple of years—the repeated algorithm changes, the head fakes about switching to video, the siphoning off of a significant chunk of the industry’s advertising revenue—most publishers approach the giant social network with skepticism, if not outright hostility. And yet, the vast majority of them continue to partner with Facebook, to distribute their content on its platform, and even accept funding and resources from it.
A very solid question to be asking and to be working on answers for. 

Personally I feel like newspapers, magazines, and media should help to be providing IndieWeb-based open platforms of their own for not only publishing their own work, but for creating the local commons for their readers and constituents to be able to freely and openly interact with them.

They’re letting Facebook and other social media to own too much of their content and even their audience. Building tools to take it back could help them, their readers, and even democracy out all at the same time.

Sadly, based on what I’m seeing here, however, even CJR has outsourced their platform for this series to SquareSpace. At least they’re publishing it on a URL they own and control.

👓 Maria Ressa, Zeynep Tufekci, and others on the growing disinformation war | Columbia Journalism Review

Read Maria Ressa, Zeynep Tufekci, and others on the growing disinformation war (Columbia Journalism Review)

👓 Goro Shimura, a 'giant' of number theory, dies at 89 | Princeton

Read Goro Shimura, a 'giant' of number theory, dies at 89 (Princeton University)
Goro Shimura, Princeton's Michael Henry Strater University Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, died on Friday, May 3, at the age of 89.