Archive (Page 2 of 5)

Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture: Valencia James

We are envi­sion­ing low-cost open hard­ware, open source soft­ware, that would allow artists to cre­ate vir­tu­al per­for­mances in Mozilla Hubs, which is a social vir­tu­al­i­ty plat­form. And through­out this process that was very much spear­head­ed by my artis­tic cre­ation of per­for­mance in Mozilla Hubs, we came up with an edu­ca­tion­al pro­gram that would allow any artist to cre­ate their own live vol­u­met­ric performance.

Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture: Bomani Oseni McClendon

I’ve found that iden­ti­fy­ing ways to be a part of shared col­lab­o­ra­tive and com­mu­ni­ty projects that pro­duce knowl­edge or build infra­struc­ture that has been influ­en­tial and instruc­tive for me has con­nect­ed me to a lot of real­ly amaz­ing peo­ple and ideas. And so, most rel­e­vant to this pre­sen­ta­tion I want to talk about how my more recent work as an open source main­tain­er has actu­al­ly helped me learn more about how to be present in com­mu­ni­ties that are impor­tant to me. 

Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture: A.M. Darke
Representation Matters: On Black Virtuality and Being Included

I want­ed to talk specif­i­cal­ly about visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion and inclu­siv­i­ty, and real­ly try­ing to prob­lema­tize the way that we con­ceive of inclu­siv­i­ty as an inher­ent good. This is not a sort of hash­tag rep­re­sen­ta­tion mat­ters” talk, it is a talk that’s think­ing about you know, mat­ters around rep­re­sen­ta­tion and how to do that in a way that is non-instrumentalizing and non-exploitative.

Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture: Kate Compton
Hello, Goodbye: Why You Should Let Your Users Go

One of the real­ly amaz­ing things about Tracery is that I made it when I had just learned Javascript. It man­aged to be like, most­ly bug-free. But because it’s a very small library and it does­n’t do any­thing ter­ri­bly com­plex, it end­ed up being able to run large­ly with­out me. And so it spawned this mas­sive com­mu­ni­ty that is com­plete­ly distributed.

Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture: Nathalie Lawhead

If you do any­thing gen­er­a­tive on com­put­ers and don’t know what to do with what­ev­er you just made, turn­ing that into a lit­tle tool that peo­ple can use to do stuff like tweak val­ues, play around with some visu­als, and just export what­ev­er they make goes a long way. Coming from more of a game design angle, it’s easy to over­think inter­ac­tiv­i­ty and want to build on the sys­tems in ways that get real­ly com­pli­cat­ed. If you look at tool design, often the oppo­site mind­set is the most rewarding.

Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture: Everest Pipkin

In gen­er­al I work with data sets, big data,” but with the full knowl­edge that this is only ever the lives and expe­ri­ences of peo­ple bun­dled up and repack­aged through process­es angled for use­ful­ness or at the very least posterity.

The Conversation #57 — Joan Blades

What I’ve seen as a founder of MoveOn is that we’ve become increas­ing­ly polar­ized. And in fact we have got­ten to the point where we have separate…realities? when it comes to a whole raft of facts. And so how can we pos­si­bly make good deci­sions togeth­er when we don’t even share basic facts? You first have to have a rela­tion­ship, and you have to have shared values.

The Internet of Agreements

I was look­ing for the tools that you could use to solve glob­al prob­lems in an envi­ron­ment when the nation-state has turned out to be a very very inef­fec­tive set of machin­ery at all. So I’m going to talk a lit­tle bit about the tech­nol­o­gy. I’m going to talk a lit­tle bit about what it does and where it’s going. And then I’m going to try and tell a sto­ry about the kind of glob­al long-term pic­ture that we could get if this stuff actu­al­ly works. 

Pirate in the Empire

I think in order to under­stand why the Pirate Party came about as a polit­i­cal par­ty, you have to look at the way that these file sharers—often minors—were being addressed by the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment and by the cul­tur­al lob­by­ists in par­tic­u­lar. And what kinds of mea­sures were being lob­bied for by the cul­tur­al indus­tries, espe­cial­ly the sur­veil­lance of peo­ple’s online behav­ior, which we’ve only learned prob­a­bly years lat­er was going to become a much broad­er prob­lem for a fun­da­men­tal rights.

Postcapitalism

Neoliberalism is bro­ken. The eco­nom­ic mod­el of the last thir­ty years. It worked for a bit, dragged the bot­tom two thirds of the world’s pop­u­la­tion up the income scale dra­mat­i­cal­ly, facil­i­tat­ed the tech rev­o­lu­tion. But it’s stopped working.