I have been developing and using #opensource and #openweb projects for nearly 40 years. For the last 20 years at the coalface of development, this is my experience. Most #openweb projects are more than 99.9% unusable this is normal. A few come up to 5% usability; these are the “successful” ones. It’s very rare for…
Modern poison
I think there is a deep modern poison in not seeing the world from wide ideological views. It leaves people dangerously pointless and thus breeds fascism. As the is poison in the rejection of open media as a solution to social issues. An example of this is the current thinking that communication is responsible for…
Living through a open/closed war in the indymedia years.
What can we learn from the battle over metadata? The closed side were only looking to strengthen their silo by centralizing power in the name of privacy and security. This with mostly no understanding of the problem on a personal level, it was the right thing to do – total control was what they needed.…
Should we use tech or social to verify a news source/flow.
Looking at the indymedia reboot It’s verified by the crowd/community as you will have text, photos etc from the event from different views with some of them by known actors. The event happened. A single post from a unknown source needs verification. Its journalism 🙂 from a grassroots prospective based on community and trust in…
DRAFT – contemporary look and feel
The “newswire” used to be open publishing we now add a switch trust/moderate to this wire. The UK indymedia site did something similar latter in its life. Its up to the “editorial collective” to flip this switch for site/accounts/tags etc The central “fetures column” is newswire articals promoted to a feature. These are written by…
Q&A what is a fashernista in the hashtag way.
Q. I’ve read a lot of your stuff but I’m hoping you’ll clarify something. What’s a “fashernista”? A. A large part of society who do what’s fashionable. Not what’s right/wrong/best. In the era of the #deathcult of neo-liberalism this has always been the wrong path to take. It’s a simple idea. men-make-their-own-history-but… #fashernista is a…
The encryptionsists – the last 10 years.
Security theater you should ask who we are hiding from. The sad and bad outcome of just about everything is only our friends – our enemies, the state and the #dotcons can almost always look behind the curtain. The rare exception of this is p2p encryption, never client server. Though the issue that makes most…
Folksonomy and categories – bottom up/top down – open/closed
How do we federate metadata flows folksonomy and categories – bottom up/top down – open/closed Each has advantages and disadvantages. Can we be creative and bridge this divide The OMN and indymedia reboot are both grassroots bottom up projects, so we obviously start with a folksonomy. Recognising the is some use for categories a draft…