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Aurialie Jublin

An Apology for the Internet - From the People Who Built It - 1 views

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shared by Aurialie Jublin on 27 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • There have always been outsiders who criticized the tech industry — even if their concerns have been drowned out by the oohs and aahs of consumers, investors, and journalists. But today, the most dire warnings are coming from the heart of Silicon Valley itself. The man who oversaw the creation of the original iPhone believes the device he helped build is too addictive. The inventor of the World Wide Web fears his creation is being “weaponized.” Even Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, has blasted social media as a dangerous form of psychological manipulation. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he lamented recently.
  • To keep the internet free — while becoming richer, faster, than anyone in history — the technological elite needed something to attract billions of users to the ads they were selling. And that something, it turns out, was outrage. As Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, points out, anger is the emotion most effective at driving “engagement” — which also makes it, in a market for attention, the most profitable one. By creating a self-perpetuating loop of shock and recrimination, social media further polarized what had already seemed, during the Obama years, an impossibly and irredeemably polarized country.
  • The Architects (In order of appearance.) Jaron Lanier, virtual-reality pioneer. Founded first company to sell VR goggles; worked at Atari and Microsoft. Antonio García Martínez, ad-tech entrepreneur. Helped create Facebook’s ad machine. Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit. Filed major gender-discrimination lawsuit against VC firm Kleiner Perkins. Can Duruk, programmer and tech writer. Served as project lead at Uber. Kate Losse, Facebook employee No. 51. Served as Mark Zuckerberg’s speechwriter. Tristan Harris, product designer. Wrote internal Google presentation about addictive and unethical design. Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, entrepreneur who founded influential message board Something Awful. Ethan Zuckerman, MIT media scholar. Invented the pop-up ad. Dan McComas, former product chief at Reddit. Founded community-based platform Imzy. Sandy Parakilas, product manager at Uber. Ran privacy compliance for Facebook apps. Guillaume Chaslot, AI researcher. Helped develop YouTube’s algorithmic recommendation system. Roger McNamee, VC investor. Introduced Mark Zuckerberg to Sheryl Sandberg. Richard Stallman, MIT programmer. Created legendary software GNU and Emacs.
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  • How It Went Wrong, in 15 Steps Step 1 Start With Hippie Good Intentions …
  • I think two things are at the root of the present crisis. One was the idealistic view of the internet — the idea that this is the great place to share information and connect with like-minded people. The second part was the people who started these companies were very homogeneous. You had one set of experiences, one set of views, that drove all of the platforms on the internet. So the combination of this belief that the internet was a bright, positive place and the very similar people who all shared that view ended up creating platforms that were designed and oriented around free speech.
  • Step 2 … Then mix in capitalism on steroids. To transform the world, you first need to take it over. The planetary scale and power envisioned by Silicon Valley’s early hippies turned out to be as well suited for making money as they were for saving the world.
  • Step 3 The arrival of Wall Streeters didn’t help … Just as Facebook became the first overnight social-media success, the stock market crashed, sending money-minded investors westward toward the tech industry. Before long, a handful of companies had created a virtual monopoly on digital life.
  • Ethan Zuckerman: Over the last decade, the social-media platforms have been working to make the web almost irrelevant. Facebook would, in many ways, prefer that we didn’t have the internet. They’d prefer that we had Facebook.
  • Step 4 … And we paid a high price for keeping it free. To avoid charging for the internet — while becoming fabulously rich at the same time — Silicon Valley turned to digital advertising. But to sell ads that target individual users, you need to grow a big audience — and use advancing technology to gather reams of personal data that will enable you to reach them efficiently.
  • Harris: If you’re YouTube, you want people to register as many accounts as possible, uploading as many videos as possible, driving as many views to those videos as possible, so you can generate lots of activity that you can sell to advertisers. So whether or not the users are real human beings or Russian bots, whether or not the videos are real or conspiracy theories or disturbing content aimed at kids, you don’t really care. You’re just trying to drive engagement to the stuff and maximize all that activity. So everything stems from this engagement-based business model that incentivizes the most mindless things that harm the fabric of society.
  • Step 5 Everything was designed to be really, really addictive. The social-media giants became “attention merchants,” bent on hooking users no mater the consequences. “Engagement” was the euphemism for the metric, but in practice it evolved into an unprecedented machine for behavior modification.
  • Harris: That blue Facebook icon on your home screen is really good at creating unconscious habits that people have a hard time extinguishing. People don’t see the way that their minds are being manipulated by addiction. Facebook has become the largest civilization-scale mind-control machine that the world has ever seen.
  • Step 6 At first, it worked — almost too well. None of the companies hid their plans or lied about how their money was made. But as users became deeply enmeshed in the increasingly addictive web of surveillance, the leading digital platforms became wildly popular.
  • Pao: There’s this idea that, “Yes, they can use this information to manipulate other people, but I’m not gonna fall for that, so I’m protected from being manipulated.” Slowly, over time, you become addicted to the interactions, so it’s hard to opt out. And they just keep taking more and more of your time and pushing more and more fake news. It becomes easy just to go about your life and assume that things are being taken care of.
  • McNamee: If you go back to the early days of propaganda theory, Edward Bernays had a hypothesis that to implant an idea and make it universally acceptable, you needed to have the same message appearing in every medium all the time for a really long period of time. The notion was it could only be done by a government. Then Facebook came along, and it had this ability to personalize for every single user. Instead of being a broadcast model, it was now 2.2 billion individualized channels. It was the most effective product ever created to revolve around human emotions.
  • Step 7 No one from Silicon Valley was held accountable … No one in the government — or, for that matter, in the tech industry’s user base — seemed interested in bringing such a wealthy, dynamic sector to heel.
  • Step 8 … Even as social networks became dangerous and toxic. With companies scaling at unprecedented rates, user security took a backseat to growth and engagement. Resources went to selling ads, not protecting users from abuse.
  • Lanier: Every time there’s some movement like Black Lives Matter or #MeToo, you have this initial period where people feel like they’re on this magic-carpet ride. Social media is letting them reach people and organize faster than ever before. They’re thinking, Wow, Facebook and Twitter are these wonderful tools of democracy. But it turns out that the same data that creates a positive, constructive process like the Arab Spring can be used to irritate other groups. So every time you have a Black Lives Matter, social media responds by empowering neo-Nazis and racists in a way that hasn’t been seen in generations. The original good intention winds up empowering its opposite.
  • Chaslot: As an engineer at Google, I would see something weird and propose a solution to management. But just noticing the problem was hurting the business model. So they would say, “Okay, but is it really a problem?” They trust the structure. For instance, I saw this conspiracy theory that was spreading. It’s really large — I think the algorithm may have gone crazy. But I was told, “Don’t worry — we have the best people working on it. It should be fine.” Then they conclude that people are just stupid. They don’t want to believe that the problem might be due to the algorithm.
  • Parakilas: One time a developer who had access to Facebook’s data was accused of creating profiles of people without their consent, including children. But when we heard about it, we had no way of proving whether it had actually happened, because we had no visibility into the data once it left Facebook’s servers. So Facebook had policies against things like this, but it gave us no ability to see what developers were actually doing.
  • McComas: Ultimately the problem Reddit has is the same as Twitter: By focusing on growth and growth only, and ignoring the problems, they amassed a large set of cultural norms on their platforms that stem from harassment or abuse or bad behavior. They have worked themselves into a position where they’re completely defensive and they can just never catch up on the problem. I don’t see any way it’s going to improve. The best they can do is figure out how to hide the bad behavior from the average user.
  • Step 9 … And even as they invaded our privacy. The more features Facebook and other platforms added, the more data users willingly, if unwittingly, released to them and the data brokers who power digital advertising.
  • Richard Stallman: What is data privacy? That means that if a company collects data about you, it should somehow protect that data. But I don’t think that’s the issue. The problem is that these companies are collecting data about you, period. We shouldn’t let them do that. The data that is collected will be abused. That’s not an absolute certainty, but it’s a practical extreme likelihood, which is enough to make collection a problem.
  • Losse: I’m not surprised at what’s going on now with Cambridge Analytica and the scandal over the election. For long time, the accepted idea at Facebook was: Giving developers as much data as possible to make these products is good. But to think that, you also have to not think about the data implications for users. That’s just not your priority.
  • Step 10 Then came 2016. The election of Donald Trump and the triumph of Brexit, two campaigns powered in large part by social media, demonstrated to tech insiders that connecting the world — at least via an advertising-surveillance scheme — doesn’t necessarily lead to that hippie utopia.
  • Chaslot: I realized personally that things were going wrong in 2011, when I was working at Google. I was working on this YouTube recommendation algorithm, and I realized that the algorithm was always giving you the same type of content. For instance, if I give you a video of a cat and you watch it, the algorithm thinks, Oh, he must really like cats. That creates these feeder bubbles where people just see one type of information. But when I notified my managers at Google and proposed a solution that would give a user more control so he could get out of the feeder bubble, they realized that this type of algorithm would not be very beneficial for watch time. They didn’t want to push that, because the entire business model is based on watch time.
  • Step 11 Employees are starting to revolt. Tech-industry executives aren’t likely to bite the hand that feeds them. But maybe their employees — the ones who signed up for the mission as much as the money — can rise up and make a change.
  • Harris: There’s a massive demoralizing wave that is hitting Silicon Valley. It’s getting very hard for companies to attract and retain the best engineers and talent when they realize that the automated system they’ve built is causing havoc everywhere around the world. So if Facebook loses a big chunk of its workforce because people don’t want to be part of that perverse system anymore, that is a very powerful and very immediate lever to force them to change.
  • Duruk: I was at Uber when all the madness was happening there, and it did affect recruiting and hiring. I don’t think these companies are going to go down because they can’t attract the right talent. But there’s going to be a measurable impact. It has become less of a moral positive now — you go to Facebook to write some code and then you go home. They’re becoming just another company.
  • Step 12 To fix it, we’ll need a new business model … If the problem is in the way the Valley makes money, it’s going to have to make money a different way. Maybe by trying something radical and new — like charging users for goods and services.
  • Parakilas: They’re going to have to change their business model quite dramatically. They say they want to make time well spent the focus of their product, but they have no incentive to do that, nor have they created a metric by which they would measure that. But if Facebook charged a subscription instead of relying on advertising, then people would use it less and Facebook would still make money. It would be equally profitable and more beneficial to society. In fact, if you charged users a few dollars a month, you would equal the revenue Facebook gets from advertising. It’s not inconceivable that a large percentage of their user base would be willing to pay a few dollars a month.
  • Step 13 … And some tough regulation. Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress on April 10. Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images While we’re at it, where has the government been in all this? 
  • Stallman: We need a law. Fuck them — there’s no reason we should let them exist if the price is knowing everything about us. Let them disappear. They’re not important — our human rights are important. No company is so important that its existence justifies setting up a police state. And a police state is what we’re heading toward.
  • Duruk: The biggest existential problem for them would be regulation. Because it’s clear that nothing else will stop these companies from using their size and their technology to just keep growing. Without regulation, we’ll basically just be complaining constantly, and not much will change.
  • McNamee: Three things. First, there needs to be a law against bots and trolls impersonating other people. I’m not saying no bots. I’m just saying bots have to be really clearly marked. Second, there have to be strict age limits to protect children. And third, there has to be genuine liability for platforms when their algorithms fail. If Google can’t block the obviously phony story that the kids in Parkland were actors, they need to be held accountable.
  • Stallman: We need a law that requires every system to be designed in a way that achieves its basic goal with the least possible collection of data. Let’s say you want to ride in a car and pay for the ride. That doesn’t fundamentally require knowing who you are. So services which do that must be required by law to give you the option of paying cash, or using some other anonymous-payment system, without being identified. They should also have ways you can call for a ride without identifying yourself, without having to use a cell phone. Companies that won’t go along with this — well, they’re welcome to go out of business. Good riddance.
  • Step 14 Maybe nothing will change. The scariest possibility is that nothing can be done — that the behemoths of the new internet are too rich, too powerful, and too addictive for anyone to fix.
  • García: Look, I mean, advertising sucks, sure. But as the ad tech guys say, “We’re the people who pay for the internet.” It’s hard to imagine a different business model other than advertising for any consumer internet app that depends on network effects.
  • Step 15 … Unless, at the very least, some new people are in charge. If Silicon Valley’s problems are a result of bad decision-making, it might be time to look for better decision-makers. One place to start would be outside the homogeneous group currently in power.
  • Pao: I’ve urged Facebook to bring in people who are not part of a homogeneous majority to their executive team, to every product team, to every strategy discussion. The people who are there now clearly don’t understand the impact of their platforms and the nature of the problem. You need people who are living the problem to clarify the extent of it and help solve it.
  • Things That Ruined the Internet
  • Cookies (1994) The original surveillance tool of the internet. Developed by programmer Lou Montulli to eliminate the need for repeated log-ins, cookies also enabled third parties like Google to track users across the web. The risk of abuse was low, Montulli thought, because only a “large, publicly visible company” would have the capacity to make use of such data. The result: digital ads that follow you wherever you go online.
  • The Farmville vulnerability (2007)   When Facebook opened up its social network to third-party developers, enabling them to build apps that users could share with their friends, it inadvertently opened the door a bit too wide. By tapping into user accounts, developers could download a wealth of personal data — which is exactly what a political-consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica did to 87 million Americans.
  • Algorithmic sorting (2006) It’s how the internet serves up what it thinks you want — automated calculations based on dozens of hidden metrics. Facebook’s News Feed uses it every time you hit refresh, and so does YouTube. It’s highly addictive — and it keeps users walled off in their own personalized loops. “When social media is designed primarily for engagement,” tweets Guillaume Chaslot, the engineer who designed YouTube’s algorithm, “it is not surprising that it hurts democracy and free speech.”
  • The “like” button (2009) Initially known as the “awesome” button, the icon was designed to unleash a wave of positivity online. But its addictive properties became so troubling that one of its creators, Leah Pearlman, has since renounced it. “Do you know that episode of Black Mirror where everyone is obsessed with likes?” she told Vice last year. “I suddenly felt terrified of becoming those people — as well as thinking I’d created that environment for everyone else.”
  • Pull-to-refresh (2009) Developed by software developer Loren Brichter for an iPhone app, the simple gesture — scrolling downward at the top of a feed to fetch more data — has become an endless, involuntary tic. “Pull-to-refresh is addictive,” Brichter told The Guardian last year. “I regret the downsides.”
  • Pop-up ads (1996) While working at an early blogging platform, Ethan Zuckerman came up with the now-ubiquitous tool for separating ads from content that advertisers might find objectionable. “I really did not mean to break the internet,” he told the podcast Reply All. “I really did not mean to bring this horrible thing into people’s lives. I really am extremely sorry about this.”
  • The Silicon Valley dream was born of the counterculture. A generation of computer programmers and designers flocked to the Bay Area’s tech scene in the 1970s and ’80s, embracing new technology as a tool to transform the world for good.
  • Cécile Christodoulou on 27 Aug 18
     
    Internet en 15 étapes, de sa construction à aujourd'hui, regards et regrets de ceux qui l'ont construit... [...] "Things That Ruined the Internet" les cookies 1994 / la faille Farmville 2007 / le tri algorithmique 2006 / le "like" 2009 / le "pull to refresh" 2009 / les "pop-up ads" 1996 [...]
Aurialie Jublin

Véhicule électrique urbain : mais où est donc passée la sobriété ? - 0 views

usbeketrica.com/...-est-donc-passee-la-sobriete-1

sobriété mobilité automobile

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 10 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Aurialie Jublin on 10 Jul 18
     
    "Les designers de l'industrie automobile sont-ils mélancoliques d'une Belle-Epoque des voitures, coincée entre les années 50 et 80 ? C'est du moins ce que pense Philippe Vallat, CEO de l'entreprise de design industriel Pilot Design, et auteur de cette tribune. Ayant la volonté de produire des véhicules tout en sobriété, les entreprises automobiles ne semblent trouver l'inspiration qu'à partir d'anciens modèles. Pourtant, ces nouvelles voitures sont obligées de ne ressembler qu'en apparence à leurs modèles d'inspiration : la technologie, et les normes, ayant évolués depuis ces années-là. Et cette progression technologique s'accompagne souvent d'une profusion de gagdets, plus ou moins utiles, trahissant quelque peu la volonté de sobriété des constructeurs de l'époque. "
Aurialie Jublin

"I Was Devastated": Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World Wide Web, Has Some R... - 2 views

www.vanityfair.com/...orld-wide-web-has-some-regrets

web

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 09 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • Initially, Berners-Lee’s innovation was intended to help scientists share data across a then obscure platform called the Internet, a version of which the U.S. government had been using since the 1960s. But owing to his decision to release the source code for free—to make the Web an open and democratic platform for all—his brainchild quickly took on a life of its own.
  • He also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer once infamously observed of his own creation. His prophecy came to life, most recently, when revelations emerged that Russian hackers interfered with the 2016 presidential election, or when Facebook admitted it exposed data on more than 80 million users to a political research firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Donald Trump’s campaign. This episode was the latest in an increasingly chilling narrative. In 2012, Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on nearly 700,000 users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood shifts and emotions in the human voice.
  • This agony, however, has had a profound effect on Berners-Lee. He is now embarking on a third act—determined to fight back through both his celebrity status and, notably, his skill as a coder. In particular, Berners-Lee has, for some time, been working on a new platform, Solid, to reclaim the Web from corporations and return it to its democratic roots.
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  • What made the Web powerful, and ultimately dominant, however, would also one day prove to be its greatest vulnerability: Berners-Lee gave it away for free; anyone with a computer and an Internet connection could not only access it but also build off it. Berners-Lee understood that the Web needed to be unfettered by patents, fees, royalties, or any other controls in order to thrive. This way, millions of innovators could design their own products to take advantage of it.
  • “Tim and Vint made the system so that there could be many players that didn’t have an advantage over each other.” Berners-Lee, too, remembers the quixotism of the era. “The spirit there was very decentralized. The individual was incredibly empowered. It was all based on there being no central authority that you had to go to to ask permission,” he said. “That feeling of individual control, that empowerment, is something we’ve lost.”
  • The power of the Web wasn’t taken or stolen. We, collectively, by the billions, gave it away with every signed user agreement and intimate moment shared with technology. Facebook, Google, and Amazon now monopolize almost everything that happens online, from what we buy to the news we read to who we like. Along with a handful of powerful government agencies, they are able to monitor, manipulate, and spy in once unimaginable ways.
  • The idea is simple: re-decentralize the Web. Working with a small team of developers, he spends most of his time now on Solid, a platform designed to give individuals, rather than corporations, control of their own data. “There are people working in the lab trying to imagine how the Web could be different. How society on the Web could look different. What could happen if we give people privacy and we give people control of their data,” Berners-Lee told me. “We are building a whole eco-system.”
  • For now, the Solid technology is still new and not ready for the masses. But the vision, if it works, could radically change the existing power dynamics of the Web. The system aims to give users a platform by which they can control access to the data and content they generate on the Web. This way, users can choose how that data gets used rather than, say, Facebook and Google doing with it as they please. Solid’s code and technology is open to all—anyone with access to the Internet can come into its chat room and start coding.
  • It’s still the early days for Solid, but Berners-Lee is moving fast. Those who work closely with him say he has thrown himself into the project with the same vigor and determination he employed upon the Web’s inception. Popular sentiment also appears to facilitate his time frame. In India, a group of activists successfully blocked Facebook from implementing a new service that would have effectively controlled access to the Web for huge swaths of the country’s population. In Germany, one young coder built a decentralized version of Twitter called Mastodon. In France, another group created Peertube as a decentralized alternative to YouTube.
  • Berners-Lee is not the leader of this revolution—by definition, the decentralized Web shouldn’t have one—but he is a powerful weapon in the fight. And he fully recognizes that re-decentralizing the Web is going to be a lot harder than inventing it was in the first place.
  • But laws written now don’t anticipate future technologies. Nor do lawmakers—many badgered by corporate lobbyists—always choose to protect individual rights. In December, lobbyists for telecom companies pushed the Federal Communications Commission to roll back net-neutrality rules, which protect equal access to the Internet. In January, the U.S. Senate voted to advance a bill that would allow the National Security Agency to continue its mass online-surveillance program. Google’s lobbyists are now working to modify rules on how companies can gather and store biometric data, such as fingerprints, iris scans, and facial-recognition images.
  • It’s hard to believe that anyone—even Zuckerberg—wants the 1984 version. He didn’t found Facebook to manipulate elections; Jack Dorsey and the other Twitter founders didn’t intend to give Donald Trump a digital bullhorn. And this is what makes Berners-Lee believe that this battle over our digital future can be won.
  • When asked what ordinary people can do, Berners-Lee replied, “You don’t have to have any coding skills. You just have to have a heart to decide enough is enough. Get out your Magic Marker and your signboard and your broomstick. And go out on the streets.” In other words, it’s time to rise against the machines.
  • Cécile Christodoulou on 09 Jul 18
     
    "We demonstrated that the Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places," he told me. The increasing centralization of the Web, he says, has "ended up producing-with no deliberate action of the people who designed the platform-a large-scale emergent phenomenon which is anti-human." "While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people-and can be fixed by people." Tim Berners-Lee
  • Aurialie Jublin on 10 Jul 18
     
    "Berners-Lee has seen his creation debased by everything from fake news to mass surveillance. But he's got a plan to fix it."
Aurialie Jublin

Illectronisme : quelles solutions pour les exclus du numérique ? - U&R - 0 views

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illectronisme capacity dématérialisation

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 08 Jul 19 - No Cached
  • Le Livre Blanc appelle ainsi les concepteurs à améliorer la simplicité d’accès, estimant qu’une « grande part de responsabilité » incombe aux designers d’interface (UX designers) dans l’intégration des problématiques d’accessibilité aux outils du numérique. « Les concepteurs de sites ont tendance à créer des sites pour eux-mêmes, commente Olivier Sauvage, entrepreneur et fondateur de Wexperience, société de conseil en UX Design. C’est aussi un problème de formation : pendant leurs études, pratiquement aucun UX designer n’entend parler d’illectronisme. Il faut absolument former ceux qui font le web à ces questions-là ».
  • À moins que les personnes concernées par l'illectronisme ne soient aidées par les interfaces vocales. C’est le pari d’Olivier Mejean, directeur de demain.ai, un cabinet de conseil en stratégie spécialisé dans l'intelligence artificielle, et également contributeur du rapport. À ses yeux, la solution peut résider en deux lettres désormais bien connues : IA. « Pour apporter un service à ceux qui ne sont pas capables de communiquer via des interfaces, la meilleure solution n’est-elle pas de créer une interface sans interface ?  », explique-t-il, estimant qu’on peut « récupérer une partie des gens par la voix ».
  • L’apprentissage machine pourrait également permettre d’identifier les « abandonnistes », soit les 19% des Français qui, au cours des douze derniers mois, ont renoncé plus d’une fois à faire quelque chose parce qu’il fallait utiliser Internet. « La machine est capable de déceler les comportements anormaux, et donc d’identifier la personne qui est sur le point d’abandonner et de la rattraper, en lui proposant soit d’appeler un numéro, soit de prendre un rendez-vous, soit d'échanger avec un chatbot ». Soit exactement les stratégies déployées par les sites de e-commerce pour vous rattraper quand vous avez déguerpi avant de « valider votre panier » - leur hantise ultime.
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  • Alors que rien ne semble pouvoir arrêter la dématérialisation, le « cyberminimalisme » et l'émergence d'un « droit à la non-connexion qui donnerait le droit, par exemple, d’accéder aux services publics sans passer par un écran, en allant trouver un humain à un guichet » ne semblent donc toujours pas être des options pour notre futur. 
  • Aurialie Jublin on 08 Jul 19
     
    "Le Syndicat de la Presse sociale (SPS) publie un Livre Blanc contre l'illectronisme. Un phénomène qui concerne 23% de la population française."
Asso Fing

Louise Drulhe cartographie le web caché | Mediapart - 0 views

www.mediapart.fr/...ulhe-cartographie-le-web-cache

web cartographie design

shared by Asso Fing on 06 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • « Lorsque nous naviguons sur Internet, nous allons de lien en lien, il y a une force qui s’exerce sur notre mouvement et qui nous fait vagabonder de page en page. Cette attraction est due à la pente du web qui nous fait glisser lentement à la façon d’une dérive numérique. Au début d’Internet, la pente était douce, elle s’apparentait à une errance numérique et facilitait la sérendipité. Aujourd’hui la pente est beaucoup plus raide et nous glissons presque systématiquement vers les mêmes services », écrit l’artiste.
  • Résultat, le web s’est creusé, comme le montre ce dessin du chapitre 4, « Un relief dirigé ». Pire encore, il s’est dédoublé. Toute une mécanique s’est installée, celle des données, et c’est alors à la représentation de ce web caché que Louise Drulhe s’est attaquée, un projet qu’elle évoquera mardi 6 novembre à la Gaîté-Lyrique, à Paris, lors de la première soirée d’un cycle de rencontres intitulé Technologies et idéologies. L’occupation idéologique des réseaux numériques, organisé en partenariat avec Mediapart et l’EHESS. 
  • « En moyenne, explique Louise Drulhe, neuf autres pages sont activées par chaque page que nous consultons, et nos données fuitent par là. Elles sont récupérées par des sites tiers bénins ou malins qui récupèrent nos données de navigation. »
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  • Pour cette cartographie, Louise Drulhe s’est appuyée sur les données de fréquentation des sites, elles-mêmes issues d’Alexa, le service de mesure d’audience d’Amazon, et sur les travaux de Timothy Libert, spécialiste des questions de données personnelles et vie privée, actuellement chargé de cours à l’université Carnegie Mellon de Pittsburgh (États-Unis). Sur l’image ci-dessus (à consulter en plus grand ici), elle a représenté les sites agrégés par compagnies (YouTube inclus dans Google qui le possède, Bing dans Microsoft…). Où l’on voit que « le poids grignote et déforme l’espace, crée des gouffres ». 
  • Au centre, Google et ses dépendances, Gmail, Blogspot, YouTube... En bas à gauche, les compagnies chinoises, proches des russes. En bas au centre, Wikipédia. Tout en haut, autour de Reddit gravitent les sites d'info, New York Times, CNN, Huffington Post... © Louise Drulhe.
  • Dans l’Internet chinois, Baidu occupe, comme Google dans le reste du monde, une place centrale : il est au milieu, et très profond. Tous sont très étroits : moins qu’ailleurs, d’autres sites y conduisent. Mais ils sont proches de l’Internet russe, beaucoup de liens menant de l’un à l’autre.
  • De l’autre côté du web se trouvent les aspirateurs à données (voir ici l’image en plus grand). « La hauteur des bosses représente la portion du web qui est tracké », et Google, qui surveille 78 % des pages du web, se retrouve encore une fois très loin devant les autres.
  • Entre la surface du web, celle que l’on connaît, où l’on navigue, et ses profondeurs, où sont aspirées nos données, Louise Drulhe a fait apparaître, ou plutôt constaté, « comme un miroir, ou une contreforme ». Il y a d’abord des monopoles dans les deux espaces, dit-elle. Ces monopoles sont bien souvent les mêmes, à deux exceptions notables : le serveur de cache Akamai, invisible pour l’internaute, n’est « que » dans le web caché, et c’est le contraire pour Wikipédia, qui ne récupère aucune donnée et n’est présent que sur le web visible. Et enfin, « Google tient la même place des deux côtés ».
  • Asso Fing on 06 Nov 18
     
    "Collecte des données et centralisation du web seront au centre de la première rencontre organisée par Mediapart, la Gaîté-Lyrique et l'EHESS, mardi 6 novembre à Paris. Brève rencontre avec Louise Drulhe, designer graphique, qui matérialise au feutre cet étau de plus en plus serré."
Aurialie Jublin

[Accessibilité] Make tech accessibility better already - CNET - 0 views

www.cnet.com/...bility-disability-deaf-hearing

internet accessibilité design

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 01 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • "It's a crime that the most versatile device on the planet, the computer, has not adapted well to people who need help, who need assistive technology," he said in an interview last month. "It's almost criminal that programmers have not had their feet held to the fire to build interfaces that are accommodating for people with vision problems or hearing problems or motor problems."
  • He's not alone in needing an assist from technology. About 360 million people worldwide have a hearing disability, roughly 5 percent of all the people on Earth, according to the World Health Organization. Then factor in those with vision, motor or other impairments. In the US alone, more than one in three households has a member who identifies as having a disability, according to panel research by Nielsen last year.
  • Aurialie Jublin on 01 Feb 19
     
    "Vint Cerf says "it's almost criminal" that programmers aren't held accountable to design with disabilities in mind."
Aurialie Jublin

Ind.ie - Ethical Design Manifesto - 0 views

2017.ind.ie/ethical-design

design manifesto tribune

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 25 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Technology that respects human rights is decentralised, peer-to-peer, zero-knowledge, end-to-end encrypted, free and open source, interoperable, accessible, and sustainable. It respects and protects your civil liberties, reduces inequality, and benefits democracy.
  • Technology that respects human effort is functional, convenient, and reliable. It is thoughtful and accommodating; not arrogant or demanding. It understands that you might be distracted or differently-abled. It respects the limited time you have on this planet.
  • Technology that respects human experience is beautiful, magical, and delightful. It just works. It’s intuitive. It’s invisible. It recedes into the background of your life. It gives you joy. It empowers you with superpowers. It puts a smile on your face and makes your life better.
Aurialie Jublin

DAISEE - internets of energu - energy as a common(s) - 0 views

daisee.org

energy blockchain énergie commun QN2019 data gouvernance partagée

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 22 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Aurialie Jublin on 22 Jun 18
     
    "DAISEE is an open design program for people who consider Energy as a Common(s). Our mission: Build the *Internets of Energy* relying on resilient, distributed, secured and trusted energy data & physical infrastructures. Our purpose: Provide the conditions for a shared governance of energy by ALL the grid stakeholders. "
Aurialie Jublin

LOW←TECH MAGAZINE - How to build a low-tech website - 0 views

solar.lowtechmagazine.com/...how-to-build-a-lowtech-website

low-tech lowtech énergie environnement

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 25 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Aurialie Jublin on 25 Sep 18
     
    "Our new blog is designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content."
Aurialie Jublin

Charter for Building a Data Commons for a Free, Fair and Sustainable Future | CommonsBlog - 0 views

commons.blog/...ee-fair-and-sustainable-future

charte data communs données

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 17 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • 1. **Reflect on your intentions together** Discuss the core of your project again and again. Everybody involved should always feel in resonance with the direction in which it’s heading.
  • 2. **Make your community thrive** For the project to be successful, a reliable community is more important than anything else. Care for those who might support you when you need them most.
  • 3. **Separate commons and commerce** Mapping for the commons is different from producing services or products to compete on the map-market.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • 4. **Design for interoperability** Think of your map as a node in a network of many maps. Talk with other contributors to the Data Commons to find out if you can use the same data model, licence and approach to mapping.
  • 5. **Care for a living vocabulary** Vocabularies as entry points to complex social worlds are always incomplete. Learn from other mappers‘ vocabularies. Make sure your vocabulary can be adjusted. Make it explicit and publish it openly, so that others can learn from it too.
  • 6. **Document transparently** Sharing your working process, learnings and failures allow others to replicate, join and contribute. Don’t leave documentation for after. Do it often and make it understandable. Use technologies designed for open cooperation.
  • 7. **Crowdsource what you can** Sustain your project whenever possible with money, time, knowledge, storing space, hardware or monitoring from your community or public support. Stay independent!
  • 8. **Use FLOSS tools** It gives you the freedom to further develop your own project and software according to your needs. And it enables you to contribute to the development of these tools.
  • 9. **Build upon the open web platform** Open web standards ensure your map, its data and associated applications cannot be enclosed and are prepared for later remixing and integration with other sources.
  • 10. **Own your data** In the short run, it seems to be a nightmare to refrain from importing or copying what you are not legally entitled to. In the long run, it is the only way to prevent you from being sued or your data being enclosed. Ban Google.
  • 11. **Protect your data** To own your data is important, but not enough. Make sure nobody dumps your data back into the world of marketization and enclosures. Use appropriate licenses to protect your collective work!
  • 12. **Archive your project** When it doesn’t work anymore for you, others still might want to build on it in the future.
  • Aurialie Jublin on 17 Jul 18
     
    "Nations-States rely on constitutions. Common(er)s find common ground through a Charter. If you are part of the co-creation of a powerful Data Commons - through mapping, coding, data modelling or other activities - this is for you. It is an fundamental building-block for online and offline cooperation. The following is version 0.6 of what has been called in previously: Charter for Building a Data Commons of Alternative Economies or Mapping for the Commons Manifesto. We, the participants of the Intermapping meeting (March 2017 in Florence), hope to hereby publish a version that provides orientation to the countless mapping processes for a free, fair and sustainable world. We invite you to work together on the practical issues: how to implement the principles outlined in the Charter (see below)? Let's federate our efforts to make the Commons thrive!"
Aurialie Jublin

Pour une pratique féministe de la visualisation de données - Catherine D'Igna... - 0 views

visionscarto.net/isualisation-donnees-feministe

féminisme visualisation données

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 20 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Et pourtant, il existe des façons de procéder à des représentations plus responsables. Il existe des moyens pour « situer » le regard et le localiser dans des corps et des géographies concrètes. Les cartographes critiques, les artistes de la contre-cartographie, les pratiquants de cartographie participative et d’autres développent des expérimentations et des méthodes pour cela depuis des années et ont beaucoup à nous apprendre.
  • Une manière de re-situer les visualisations de données pourrait être de les déstabiliser en rendant les désaccords possibles. Comment créer des manières de répondre aux données ? De mettre en question les faits ? De présenter des points de vue et des réalités alternatives ? De contester et même de saper les bases de l’existence de ces données et des méthodes par lesquelles elles ont été acquises ? Comment procéder ? Sachant que la plupart des gens qui travaillent sur les données sont des hommes blancs, il s’agit simplement d’inclure des gens différents, avec des points de vue différents, dans la production des visualisations. Ainsi par exemple, le Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute était né, à la fin des années 1960, d’une collaboration entre des géographes universitaires, dont les responsables étaient des hommes blancs, et des jeunes du centre ville de Detroit conduits par Gwendolyn Warren, une militante de la communauté noire de 19 ans.
  • Cette carte, intitulée « Where Commuters Run Over Black Children on the Pointes-Downtown Track », était technologiquement en avance sur son temps. Peut-être est-elle assez conventionnelle (à nos yeux) dans sa stratégie visuelle. Mais ce qui donne à cette carte son caractère dissident, c’est le titre, formulé par les jeunes Noirs qui ont produit la carte. « Où les banlieusards qui rentrent du boulot écrasent les enfants noirs ». Un titre qui n’est pas neutre. On est loin de « Localisation des accidents de la route dans le centre de Detroit », titre qui aurait probablement été donné à la carte si elle avait été élaborée par des consultants extérieurs employés par la ville. Mais du point de vue des familles noires dont les enfants avaient été tués, il ne faisait aucun doute que les enfants étaient noirs, les banlieusards blancs, et les événements décrits comme des « meurtres » plutôt que des « accidents ».
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • ToxicSites.us, un site web géré par Brooke Singer, met en ligne un rapport sur chacun des sites « superfund » — ces lieux répertoriés par le CERCLA, l’agence américaine en charge des sites souillés par des déchets dangereux. Le site invite les contributeur·e·s à ajouter des reportages locaux, des images et des films qui documentent ces sites (et contredisent potentiellement les données), et cherche à faciliter l’organisation et le plaidoyer pour les efforts de nettoyage. Permettre de « répondre aux données » invite aussi à transformer la conversation en action.
  • Si les infographies — je ne parle pas ici des outils de recherche et d’exploration, mais des représentations publiques et populaires — excellent à présenter des mondes entièrement contenus, elles ne savent pas représenter visuellement leurs limites. Où sont les lieux où l’enquête n’est pas allée, qu’elle n’a pas pu atteindre ? Comment les indiquer ? Comment représente-t-on les données manquantes ? Andy Kirk a fait cet exposé remarquable sur le design du rien, qui recense diverses manières de représenter l’incertitude et d’intégrer le zéro, l’absent et le vide. Comment encourager plus de designers à prendre ces méthodes en considération ? Peut-on demander à nos données qu’elles montrent aussi ce qui constitue leur extérieur ?
  • Quelles sont les conditions matérielles qui ont rendu cette infographie possible ? Qui l’a financée ? Qui a collecté les informations ? Quel travail a été nécessaire en coulisses et comment la production de ce graphique s’est-elle déroulée ? Par exemple, le Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science — un groupe de science citoyenne dont je fais partie — utilise une technique de cartographie consistant à suspendre une caméra à un cerf-volant où à un ballon pour collecter des photos aériennes. Un effet secondaire de cette méthode, adopté avec entrain par la communauté, est que la caméra capture aussi l’image des personnes qui collectent les images. On voit le corps des collecteurs des données, un objet généralement absent des représentations sous forme de produit fini.
  • Quel est le problème ? La théorie féministe du point de vue situé rappelle que toute connaissance est située socialement et que les perspectives des groupes opprimés — femmes, minorités et autres — sont exclues de manière systématique de la connaissance dite « générale ». La cartographie critique dirait que les cartes sont des sites du pouvoir et produisent des mondes qui sont intimement associés à ce pouvoir. Comme le soulignent Denis Wood et John Krygier, le choix de ce que l’on place sur la carte « fait inévitablement surgir le problème de la connaissance, tout comme les opérations de symbolisation, de généralisation et de classification ». Il faudra bien admettre l’existence de ce pouvoir d’inclure et d’exclure, apprendre à le dépister et développer un langage visuel pour le décrire. Dans l’immédiat, il importe de reconnaître que la visualisation de données est un des outils de pouvoir parmi les plus puissants et les plus biaisés.
  • Aurialie Jublin on 20 Sep 18
     
    "La visualisation de données, ou infographie, est à la mode et chacun s'enthousiasme pour les nouveaux outils qui permettent d'en produire - nous en avons dénombré, avec mon collègue Rahul Bhargava, plus de cinq cents. Malgré cette richesse technique, on manque souvent d'outils permettant une réflexion critique sur la politique et l'éthique de la représentation. Et comme le grand public est plutôt facile à impressionner avec des graphiques, la « data visualization » acquiert un grand pouvoir rhétorique. Quand bien même nous savons rationnellement que ces images ne représentent pas « le monde entier », nous avons tendance à l'oublier, et à accepter les graphiques comme des faits car ils sont généralisés, scientifiques et semblent présenter un point de vue neutre et expert. Quel est le problème ? La théorie féministe du point de vue situé rappelle que toute connaissance est située socialement et que les perspectives des groupes opprimés - femmes, minorités et autres - sont exclues de manière systématique de la connaissance dite « générale ». La cartographie critique dirait que les cartes sont des sites du pouvoir et produisent des mondes qui sont intimement associés à ce pouvoir. Comme le soulignent Denis Wood et John Krygier, le choix de ce que l'on place sur la carte « fait inévitablement surgir le problème de la connaissance, tout comme les opérations de symbolisation, de généralisation et de classification ». Il faudra bien admettre l'existence de ce pouvoir d'inclure et d'exclure, apprendre à le dépister et développer un langage visuel pour le décrire. Dans l'immédiat, il importe de reconnaître que la visualisation de données est un des outils de pouvoir parmi les plus puissants et les plus biaisés."
Aurialie Jublin

Open Source Doesn't Make Money Because It Isn't Designed To Make Money - 0 views

www.ianbicking.org/...esnt-make-money-by-design.html

open source économie

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 21 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • We treat open source like it’s a poison pill for a commercial product. And yes, with an open source license it’s harder to force someone to pay for a product, though many successful businesses exist without forcing anyone.
  • I see an implicit assumption that makes it harder to think about this: the idea that if something is useful, it should be profitable. It’s an unspoken and morally-infused expectation, a kind of Just World hypothesis: if something has utility, if it helps people, if it’s something the world needs, if it empowers other people, then there should be a revenue opportunity. It should be possible for the thing to be your day job, to make money, to see some remuneration for your successful effort in creating or doing this thing.
  • That’s what we think the world should be like, but we all know it isn’t. You can’t make a living making music. Or art. You can’t even make a living taking care of children. I think this underlies many of this moment’s critiques of capitalism: there’s too many things that are important, even needed, or that fulfill us more than any profitable item, and yet are economically unsustainable.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • So what can you get paid to do? People will pay a little for apps; not a lot, but a bit. Scaling up requires marketing and capital, which open source projects almost never have (and I doubt many open source projects would know what to do with capital if they had it). There’s always money in ads. Sadly. This could potentially offend someone enough to actually repackage your open source software with ads removed. As a form of price discrimination (e.g., paid ad removal) I think you could avoid defection. Fully-hosted services: Automattic’s wordpress.com is a good example here. Is Ghost doing OK? These are complete solutions: you don’t just get software, you get a website. People will pay if you ensure they get a personalized solution. I.e., consulting. Applied to software you get consultingware. While often maligned, many real businesses are built on this. I think Drupal is in this category. People will pay you for your dedicated and ongoing attention. In other words: a day job as an employee. It feels unfair to put this option on the list, but it’s such a natural progression from consultingware, and such a dominant pattern in open source that I think it deserves acknowledgement. Anything paired with a physical device. People will judge the value based on the hardware and software experience together. I’m not sure if Firefox makes money (indirectly) from ads, or as compensation for maintaining monopoly positions.
  • And so I remain pessimistic that open source can find commercial success. But also frustrated: so much software is open source except any commercial product. This is where the Free Software mission has faltered despite so many successes: software that people actually touch isn’t free or open. That’s a shame.
  • Aurialie Jublin on 21 Mar 19
     
    "We all know the story: you can't make money on open source. Is it really true? I'm thinking about this now because Mozilla would like to diversify its revenue in the next few years, and one constraint we have is that everything we do is open source. There are dozens (hundreds?) of successful open source projects that have tried to become even just modest commercial enterprises, some very seriously. Results aren't great."
Aurialie Jublin

Gauthier Roussilhe | Guide de conversion numérique au low tech - 0 views

gauthierroussilhe.com/...convert-low-tech

lowtech low-tech web site sobriété

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 08 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Aurialie Jublin on 08 Apr 19
     
    "En mars 2019 j'ai mis en ligne mon nouveau site web en suivant des principes de conception "low tech". Je me suis décidé à faire cela car, premièrement, j'ai été impressionné par la refonte de solar.lowtechmagazine.com. Leur site est devenu extrêmement léger grâce à une approche esthétique et technique sensée. De plus ils ont pensé au système énergétique : le serveur est alimenté par un panneau solaire et une batterie, ce qui veut dire que si la batterie est à plat et si le temps est mauvais alors le site n'est plus en ligne. Deuxièmement, depuis 2 ans je m'intéresse au concept d'Anthropocène, aux politiques de transition sociale et écologique et à l'impact du numérique sur les écosystèmes. Ces recherches et travaux de terrain m'ont permis de refonder complètement ma pratique et j'avais envie de développer un outil qui pourrait démontrer ce changement dans ma pratique de designer et inspirer d'autres personnes à faire de même."
Aurialie Jublin

Livre blanc PrivacyTech (pdf) - Une nouvelle gouvernance pour les données du ... - 0 views

www.privacytech.fr/livre-blanc-privacytech.pdf

pdf données personnelles gouvernance rgpd standard

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 17 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • Aurialie Jublin on 17 Apr 19
     
    Une économie digitale performante et éthique nécessite une libre circulation des données personnelles sous le contrôle des individus. Le RGPD (Règlement Général sur la Protection des Données), lancé le 25 mai 2018, est un pas en avant majeur vers une nouvelle économie centrée sur l'individu grâce : au nouveau droit à la portabilité (Article 20) qui encourage la circulation des données, à une série de mesures et principes visant à augmenter la protection des individus comme le consentement spécifique et informé et le privacy by design. Le RGPD s'inscrit dans la stratégie de Marché Unique du Digital (Digital Single Market) de l'Union Européenne et a pour but de créer les conditions pour une économie sans barrières qui bénéficierait autant aux individus et aux entreprises qu'à la société dans son ensemble. Presque un an après le lancement du RGPD, nous observons un paysage prometteur d'organisations qui commencent à s'adapter au nouveau règlement, autant en Europe que dans le reste du monde. Mais il reste encore beaucoup à faire, particulièrement en ce qui concerne la mise en œuvre du contrôle des données par l'individu et de la portabilité. La tâche est éminemment complexe et requiert une coordination internationale, multisectorielle et multi-expertises. Pour réussir nous avons définitivement besoin d'une nouvelle approche ambitieuse qui pourrait partir de l'Europe pour s'étendre à l'international. Dans un tel contexte, nous proposons d'engager un échange constructif entre tous les acteurs de la donnée personnelle (entreprises, administrations, académies, associations) qui voudraient joindre leurs efforts au sein d'une nouvelle forme d'organisation dont le but serait de construire, harmoniser et proposer des standards technologiques, terminologies et bonnes pratiques pour la circulation et la protection des données personnelles, ainsi qu'une gouvernance adaptée. Les grandes pro
Aurialie Jublin

[Environnement] How Improving Website Performance Can Help Save The Planet - Smashing M... - 0 views

www.smashingmagazine.com/...-improving-website-performance

sobriété développement

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 08 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • Mozilla Internet Health Report 2018 states that — especially as the Internet expands into new territory — “sustainability should be a bigger priority.” But as it stands, websites are growing ever more obese, which means that the energy demand of the Internet is continuing to grow exponentially.
  • As web developers, it’s understandable to feel that this is not an issue over which we have any influence, but this isn’t true. Many efforts are afoot to improve the situation on the web. The Green Web Foundation maintains an ever-growing database of web hosts who are either wholly powered by renewable energy or are at least committed to being carbon neutral. In 2013, A List Apart published Sustainable Web Design by James Christie. For the last three years, the SustainableUX conference has seen experts in web sustainability sharing their knowledge across an array of web-based disciplines.
  • Perhaps the biggest win when it comes to making websites more sustainable is that performance, user experience and sustainability are all neatly intertwined. The key metric for measuring the sustainability of a digital product is its energy usage. This includes the work done by the server, the client and the intermediary communications networks that transmit data between the two.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • There are, however, some good fallbacks which we can use that demonstrate energy usage. These include data transfer (i.e. how much data does the browser have to download to display your website) and resource usage of the hardware serving and receiving the website. An obvious metric here is CPU usage, but memory usage and other forms of data storage also play their part.
  • Aurialie Jublin on 08 Feb 19
     
    "Climate change may not seem like an issue that should concern web developers, but the truth is that our work does have a carbon footprint, and it's about time we started to think about that."
Aurialie Jublin

There is no easy fix for Facebook's reliability problem - 0 views

mondaynote.com/liability-problem-eb7dd45fd360

facebook fake news

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 15 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Aurialie Jublin on 15 Mar 19
     
    "Rating news sources is a complicated task. But rating Facebook is especially hard, because of the way it's designed. Here's a look at several critical issues the company is facing."
Aurialie Jublin

GQ Ran This Photo Of "Tech Titans" In Italy. All The Women Were Photoshopped In. - 0 views

www.buzzfeednews.com/...en-fake-photoshop-cucinelli-gq

photo femme

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 13 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Aurialie Jublin on 13 Jun 19
     
    "Last week, men's lifestyle magazine GQ published this photo of Silicon Valley executives including LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston from their pilgrimage to a small village in Italy to visit Brunello Cucinelli, a luxury designer famous for his $1,000 sweatpants. But if you think something looks a little off in this photo, you're right: A BuzzFeed News "investigation" reveals that two women CEOs, Lynn Jurich and Ruzwana Bashir, were photoshopped into what was originally a photo featuring 15 men."
Aurialie Jublin

The Very First Oakland Co-op DiscoTech - Danny Spitzberg - Medium - 0 views

medium.com/...nd-co-op-discotech-a1d7b471562

coopérativisme de plateforme plateforme

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 22 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Technology isn’t necessary for bars or farms to become better co-ops, but it can help.Two coalitions that embrace co-design — civic tech and online organizing — can offer lessons on how to build better tech.At the same time, co-op theory and history offer a model of how to own, control, and share the value generated by the tech we build.
  • While each area has its emphasis, each can learn from the other, too:Civic tech is a coalition for better citizenship, trying to achieve citizen engagement. An example is southbendvoices.com, an automated call-in system. Yet tweeting the city to shut off sprinklers after the rain is a far cry from building better neighborhoods. What could it add? Economic solidarity.Online organizing is a digital approach to social change, trying to achieve community power. An example is 18millionrising.org, a group running rapid-response campaigns for racial justice. What’s missing? Platforms that support lasting effort with multiple allies.The co-op movement is about democracy in the workplace, trying to achieve real ownership, control, and value for the people doing the labor. An example is the Arizmendi Association, an umbrella group supporting six worker-owned bakeries. It’s a model that only the Enspiral network has replicated in New Zealand. What potential remains untapped here? Widespread relevance.How might all three of these areas become better, together?
  • There are co-ops, and then there is cooperation. Shane from CCA asked “what counts as a co-op?” and Willow Brugh from Aspiration Tech described a multi-stakeholder project in Africa that supports self-determining small businesses. I mentioned how Enspiral exemplifies the first co-op principle of open and voluntary membership better than most legally-recognized co-ops with a quarterly auto-email to their 30 member organizations that simply asks, “Do you still feel like a member?”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • There are parallel worlds we can learn from, if we take care not to reproduce extractive practices. Developer and counselor Kermit Goodwin suggested that the open source community might be a place to learn more, and Noah Thorp of CoMakery cautioned that while developers might play better, the open source software economy is “broken” and dominated by corporate interests — most of the people making a livelihood through open source software do so through extractive enterprises (think, Microsoft).
  • And then there is the agitation and education that leads to organizing. After Evangeline asked “Why do people stop trying?” and how we can make co-ops familiar to more people, Molly McLeod brought up relatively passive directories like cultivate.coop and showed us Co-opoly, a boardgame about starting worker-owned businesses and having all of the poignant conversations that go along with it. Jackie Mahendra from CEL said her first serious role was working with a co-op house, and then others agreed co-ops can stay relevant if they provide services more widely — housing, education, health care, consumer finance, and more. Building viable co-op platforms is exactly what the creators of Platform Cooperativism are organizing around.
  • Aurialie Jublin on 22 Aug 18
     
    "Evangeline asked why people get involved in co-ops, and then drop it. "Why do people stop trying?" For half of the 30 people at The Very First Oakland Co-op DiscoTech, it was a tough question - they had little exposure to co-ops in the first place."
Aurialie Jublin

Open source sustainability | TechCrunch - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...open-source-sustainability

sustainability soutenabilité open source

shared by Aurialie Jublin on 29 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • Engineers around the world pour their sweat and frankly, their hearts into these passion projects that undergird all software in the modern internet economy. In exchange, they ask for nothing in return except for recognition and help in keeping their projects alive and improving them. It’s an incredible movement of decentralized voluntarism and represents humanity at its best.
  • Two years later, a new crop of entrepreneurs, open source maintainers, and organizations have taken Eghbal up on that challenge, developing solutions that maintain the volunteer spirit at the heart of open source while inventing new economic models to make the work sustainable. All are early, and their long-term effects on the output and quality of open source are unknown. But each solution offers an avenue that could radically change the way we think of a career in open source in the future.
  • Eghbal’s report two years ago summarized the vast issues facing open source maintainers, challenges that have remained essentially unchanged in the interim. It’s a quintessential example of the “tragedy of the commons.” As Eghbal wrote at the time, “Fundamentally, digital infrastructure has a free rider problem. Resources are offered for free, and everybody (whether individual developer or large software company) uses them, so nobody is incentivized to contribute back, figuring that somebody else will step in.” That has led to a brittle ecosystem, just as open source software reached the zenith of its influence.
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  • Eghbal pointed to OpenSSL as an example, a library that powers a majority of encrypted communications on the web. Following the release of the Heartbleed security bug, people were surprised to learn that the OpenSSL project was the work of a very small team of individuals, with only one of them working on it full-time (and at a very limited salary compared to industry norms).
  • No one wants open source to disappear, or for maintainers to burnout. Yet, there is a strong cultural force against commercial interests in the community. Money is corrupting, and dampens the voluntary spirit of open source efforts. More pragmatically, there are vast logistical challenges with managing money on globally distributed volunteer teams that can make paying for work logistically challenging.
  • Kyle Mitchell, a lawyer by trade and founder of License Zero, says that there is an assumption that “Open source will continue to fall from the sky like manna from heaven and that the people behind it can be abstracted away.” He concludes: “It is just really wrong.”That view was echoed by Henry Zhu, who is the maintainer of the popular JavaScript compiler Babel. “We trust startups with millions of VC money and encourage a culture of ‘failing fast,’ yet somehow the idea of giving to volunteers who may have showed years of dedication is undesirable?” he said.
  • Mitchell believes that one of the most important challenges is just getting comfortable talking about money. “Money feels dirty until it doesn’t,” he said. “I would like to see more money responsibility in the community.” One challenge he notes is that “learning to be a great maintainer doesn’t teach you how to be a great open source contractor or consultant.” GitHub works great as a code repository service, but ultimately doesn’t teach maintainers the economics of their work.
  • Perhaps the greatest debate in sustaining open source is deciding who or what to target: the individual contributors — who often move between multiple projects — or a particular library itself.
  • Patreon is a crowdsourced subscription platform, perhaps best known for the creatives it hosts. These days though, it is also increasingly being used by notable open source contributors as a way to connect with fans and sustain their work. Aboukhadijeh launched his page after seeing others doing it. “A bunch of people were starting up Patreons, which was kind of a meme in my JavaScript circles,” he said. His Patreon page today has 72 contributors providing him with $2,874 in funding per month ($34,488 annually).
  • That may seem a bit paltry, but he explained to me that he also supplements his Patreon with funding from organizations as diverse as Brave (an adblocking browser with a utility token model) to PopChest (a decentralized video sharing platform). That nets him a couple of more thousands of dollars per month.
  • Aboukhadijeh said that Twitter played an outsized role in building out his revenue stream. “Twitter is the most important on where the developers talk about stuff and where conversations happen…,” he said. “The people who have been successful on Patreon in the same cohort [as me] who tweet a lot did really well.”
  • For those who hit it big, the revenues can be outsized. Evan You, who created the popular JavaScript frontend library Vue.js, has reached $15,206 in monthly earnings ($182,472 a year) from 231 patrons. The number of patrons has grown consistently since starting his Patreon in March 2016 according to Graphtreon, although earnings have gone up and down over time.
  • While Patreon is one direct approach for generating revenues from users, another one is to offer dual licenses, one free and one commercial. That’s the model of License Zero, which Kyle Mitchell propsosed last year. He explained to me that “License Zero is the answer to a really simple question with no simple answers: how do we make open source business models open to individuals?”
  • License Zero is a permissive license based on the two-clause BSD license, but adds terms requiring commercial users to pay for a commercial license after 90 days, allowing companies to try a project before purchasing it. If other licenses aren’t available for purchase (say, because a maintainer is no longer involved), then the language is no longer enforceable and the software is offered as fully open source. The idea is that other open source users can always use the software for free, but for-profit uses would require a payment.
  • Mitchell believes that this is the right approach for individuals looking to sustain their efforts in open source. “The most important thing is the time budget – a lot of open source companies or people who have an open source project get their money from services,” he said. The problem is that services are exclusive to a company, and take time away from making a project as good as it can be. “When moneymaking time is not time spent on open source, then it competes with open source,” he said.
  • Supporting individuals makes a lot of sense, but often companies want to support the specific projects and ecosystems that underpin their software. Doing so can be next to impossible. There are complicated logistics required in order for companies to fund open source, such as actually having an organization to send money to (and for many, to convince the IRS that the organization is actually a non-profit). Tidelift and Open Collective are two different ways to open up those channels.
  • Fischer and his team wanted to create a platform that would allow open source ecosystems to sustain themselves. “We felt frustrated at some level that while open source has taken over a huge portion of software, a lot of the creators of open source have not been able to capture a lot of the value they are creating,” he explained.Tidelift is designed to offer assurances “around areas like security, licensing, and maintenance of software,” Fischer explained. The idea has its genesis in Red Hat, which commercialized Linux. The idea is that companies are willing to pay for open source when they can receive guarantees around issues like critical vulnerabilities and long-term support. In addition, Tidelift handles the mundane tasks of setting up open source for commercialization such as handling licensing issues.
  • Tidelift initially launched in the JavaScript ecosystem around React, Angular, and Vue.js, but will expand to more communities over time. The company has raised $15 million in venture capital from General Catalyst and Foundry Group, plus former Red Hat chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik.
  • Fischer hopes that the company can change the economics for open source contributors. He wants the community to move from a model of “get by and survive” with a “subsistence level of earnings” and instead, help maintainers of great software “win big and be financially rewarded for that in a significant way.”
  • Where Tidelift is focused on commercialization and software guarantees, Open Collective wants to open source the monetization of open source itself.Open Collective is a platform that provides tools to “collectives” to receive money while also offering mechanisms to allow the members of those collectives to spend their money in a democratic and transparent way.
  • Xavier Damman, founder president of Open Collective, believes that this radical transparency could reshape how the economics of open source are considered by its participants. Damman likens Open Collective to the “View Source” feature of a web browser that allows users to read a website’s code. “Our goal as a platform is to be as transparent as possible,” he said.
  • Open Collective was launched in late 2015, and since then has become home to 647 open source projects. So far, Webpack, the popular JavaScript build tool, has generated the most revenue, currently sitting at $317,188 a year. One major objective of the organization is to encourage more for-profit companies to commit dollars to open source. Open Collective places the logos of major donors on each collective page, giving them visible credit for their commitment to open source.
  • Damman’s ultimate dream is to change the notion of ownership itself. We can move from “Competition to collaboration, but also ownership to commons,” he envisioned.
  • It’s unfortunately very early days for open source sustainability. While Patreon, License Zero, Tidelift, and Open Collective are different approaches to providing the infrastructure for sustainability, ultimately someone has to pay to make all that infrastructure useful. There are only a handful of Patreons that could substitute for an engineer’s day job, and only two collectives by my count on Open Collective that could support even a single maintainer full time. License Zero and Tidelift are too new to know how they will perform yet.
  • The change though can happen through all of us who work on code — every software engineer and product manager. If you work at a for-profit company, take the lead in finding a way to support the code that allows you to do your job so efficiently. The decentralization and volunteer spirit of the open source community needs exactly the same kind of decentralized spirit in every financial contributor. Sustainability is each of our jobs, every day. If we all do our part, we can help to sustain one of the great intellectual movements humanity has ever created, and end the oxymoron of open source sustainability forever.
  • Aurialie Jublin on 29 Jun 18
     
    "Open source maintainers are exhausted and rarely paid. A new generation wants to change the economics."
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