Social network activism and the Patriot Act (DRAFT)
DRAFT Work in progress! Feedback welcome!
Final version intended for The Seminal and Pam’s House Blend
2009 10 11
Comments Off on National Equality March: some highlights via Twitter
Is my brother Greg well-connected or what?
Since it’s a poem about social media, my brother Greg has version 2.0 of “I’m Pretty Well connected” up on Gottabook and The Happy Accident:
I’m pretty well connected.
I’ve got my Facebook page.
I tweet, blog, plurk
From home and work.
I link, connect, engage!
It’s Goa Gil’s birthday … and we’re *still* fighting for our civil liberties!
… keep your eyes open for a river, once you pass the river, the driveway will be the first right after the river. There is a Scarecrow on the mailbox at the edge of the driveway. Follow the driveway to your destiny 🙂
— from the direction to Goa Gil’s birthday party
Stop me if you’ve heard this one already: I’m in the midst of a social network activism campaign — and looking forward to a psytrance party.
Can Skittles help fix the PATRIOT Act and FISA? (DRAFT!)
DRAFT! Final version published on The Seminal.
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2010: why should people care?
One of our goals for the 2010 Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference is to reach out to a broader and more diverse community. Our upcoming “save the date” announcement is the first good opportunity for this. Getting some attention on Twitter, blogs, and email lists can help raise awareness of “the best computer conference you’ve never heard of”, as Elizabeth Weise so memorably described it a decade ago.  But why should people care?
The intro from the 2006 conference says it well:
Now, more than ever, the lines of technology, freedom, and privacy are colliding. Governments continue their surveillance of citizens in the name of security, huge databases of information on every aspect of individuals’ lives are created, and debates are underway about controlling content. Yet, while technology is at the epicenter of these profound developments, technology also has the potential to advance the civil society…. CFP will explore issues that impact us all, wherever we are, around the world.
Indeed. And for the last two decades, the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference has been at the heart of this discussion, with a mix of technologists, lawyers, policy experts, academics, corporate executives, politicians, and activists. This year, we’ll be having it in Silicon Valley for the first time ever (yes, really!), and so it’s a unique chance to engage deeply and reframe the discussions that too often treat privacy and online rights as an afterthought.
Or so it seems to me. Then again, I’m a regular at the conference (1, 2), and spend a lot of my time hanging out with privacy and free speech advocates … so perhaps I’m not the best judge of what’s a good hook for everybody else.
So, it’d be great to hear some other perspectives. Last year’s program gives an idea of the wide range of topics that are covered at a typical CFP, and Lorrie Cranor’s Ten Years of Computers, Freedom and Privacy (from 2000) gives some historical perspective; I’ve included last year’s suggested topics in the first comment. Given all that …
Why do you care?
How would you convince others who aren’t “the usual suspects” that they should care?
jon
Ask @bing to create grants for nonprofit advertising on their site (DRAFT)
Update, September 1: Microsoft responded. More here.
Draft! Work in progress! Feedback welcome!
Meetings, diversity, and opportunity (DRAFT)
Draft! Work in progress! Feedback, please …
Notes from underground: five years later (Space Tribe at Geomagnetic.tv’s Psyonesis)
As the sample Olli Wisdom started his set with phrased it, “To infinity – and beyond!” [At the set’s climax] a song built around the guitar part from Dire Straits “Money for Nothing” (with a minor change in the only lyric: “I want my LSD”) had the whole crowd playing air guitar.
“You gotta be able to ask yourself … hey man, is this a dream?”
When Olli played a song with a sample “Let’s all travel at the speed of light!”, it seemed remarkably plausible.
— January 10, 2004; posted on e-luminatus
Wow, that was a long time ago.
Listening to that night’s (((thump))) on my iPod takes me back to the frame of mind I was in, just starting out on an amazing journey from a technologist at Microsoft Research to a writer/strategist/activist workingon Qworky, Computers Freedom and Privacy, diversity.
Diversity and technology conferences, part 1: the Government 2.0 Expo
We received 189 valid proposals for talks at Expo Showcase. A few people, men and women, submitted two proposals, but the vast majority submitted just one. Of these 189, only 41 (or 22% of the total) were from women, with 147 proposals submitted by men. I have no reason in particular to offer for this. Perhaps women would like to comment on this blog about why a two month open call for proposals for anyone with a good idea for a five minute talk about Government 2.0 was dominated by 78% men.
— Mark Drapeau’s Government 2.0 Expo: Women by the Numbers
The women in technology community has been doing a great job of highlighting lack of diversity in conference speakers, using mechanisms like the #diversityfail Twitter hashtag and act.ly.  Mark’s post provides some interesting data on how an O’Reilly conference he’s co-chairing wound up with more than two-thirds of the presenters being male. While I’m not actually a woman, I’d nonetheless like to take him up on his invitation for discussion about how the submission process became so male-dominated.
Help us choose Qworky’s logo!
Which of the three options for the Qworky logo would you be most likely to try out yourself?
Which would you be most likely to recommend to a friend?
Please help us out by taking this 60 second survey!
Thanks,
jon
PS: and thanks to Joanne as well for the great work on logo design!
Qworky: the adventure begins!
Welcome to Qworky!
Pardon our construction, we’re busy designing software to revolutionize the way people work together.
Software doesn’t have to suck. Instead, it should fit in smoothly with your work life — and make you more efficient so that you can get your weekends back. By listening to you and focusing on your needs as an end user, and working closely with a diverse community throughout the design process, we’ll build products that work with how people get their jobs done today.
The startup I’ve been hinting at for the last couple months finally has a name. w00t! We’re at a very early stage: just starting the research phase for Qworky Meetings, the codename for our first product. In parallel, we’re working on creating our community, deciding on our technology base, putting together a business plan, and developing our strategies.