Greg Wilson: Eleven Tips for Organizational Change “This was a proposal for the US Research Software Engineer Association 2023 conference, but was rejected…. I recognize that they are incomplete—in particular, that they are strongly biased toward what works in affluent, democratic societies—but if you’re tired of rolling heavy rocks up steep hills over and over again, maybe they will help.”
NetLogo is a multi-agent programmable modeling environment. It is used by many hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and researchers worldwide.
Queens man indicted again
I have been waiting for the Queens Eagle newspaper to run this story (covered the first indictment), but they have not, so I am backfilling here….
CNN summary of reaction to the indictment (June 14, 2023)
Trump indictment in annotated form (CNN)
CNN summary of coverage through June 16th, 2023
It’s funny – Dave Winer wants to create a FeedLand river page with people using the Old School blogging tool – when there is a perfectly good page already available! Funny how that works…
I saw Ken’s Smith’s recent post on group activities, and I agree that larger social media may not be the place for such groups to work together. I also think another recent post of Ken’s (Choose to affiliate) also echoes this thought. To me, MyStatusTool could be the tool of communication for a small work group or organization, with the added plus of owning your content/work. Since it uses rssCloud as the notification service for new posts, real-time conversations can occur there.
Dave Winer linked this morning to a 2008 post on a “decentralized Twitter”. I believe that MyStatusTool meets that definition. I also discussed this more in a February 2023 post where I link to some other Dave Winer posts on bootstrapping. MyStatusTool is definitely in the bootstrap phase, and available to anyone who wants to try it (see this post for an example)!
New version of MyStatusTool now available
Overview of MyStatusTool
MyStatusTool is a proof of concept for a microblogging tool relying on local files for data storage and rssCloud for notification. I was motivated to do this to show how rssCloud could be used to support a Twitter-like experience. With the chaos underway at Twitter, multiple microblogging services have been getting more attention (Mastodon, Micro.blog, etc.). It seemed like a good time to try something different.
Why use MyStatusTool?
There are many tools/services that people can use to publish their thoughts on the Internet. The features that MyStatusTool brings to the table are:
- Web application
- Can post from a web page (PC, tablet, mobile)
- Can instantly notify people that your feed has updated (if they are using an rssCloud-enabled reader tool/service)
- Can instantly get updates from other rssCloud-enabled feeds (like MyStatusTool feeds, WordPress.com feeds, and WordPress.org sites using the RSS Cloud plugin)
- Hosted by the user – no dependence on a silo service (think Twitter/Facebook, even Mastodon) – you own your content
- Individual pages with URLs for all MyStatusTool posts
In the above description, note how Twitter-like this list of features is. People like using Twitter, so I wanted to leverage the best parts of the user experience.
There has been some recent discussion about being able to have small group conversations on the web. A group of users could use MyStatusTool to support those conversations, with each of the users subscribing to the other users with whom they want to have a conversation. It can be as small or as large as you like – no limits!
How can I get started?
Check out the Github repo and give it a try if you have a Linux server online! I have an instance running here, so you can see how it looks. There is also an alternative implementation written in PHP (MST-PHP, created by Colin Walker) which can run on most web hosting services.
If you do try it, let me know how it goes for you – I am interested in improving the user experience wherever I can….
I have migrated the feed reading part of MyStatusTool to use the formatting from Colin Walker’s MST-PHP implementation – looks great! Next up will be to add posting capability…
The will of the majority
There have been a number of instances of the majority party in different states taking action against minority party representatives (Montana, Tennessee). In these instances, the minority party representatives tried to voice opinions that were at odds with the majority party, and were silenced for it. In other states, minority party representation is hobbled by gerrymandering and voter suppression. Even with majority rule, there should be minority rights:
“Minorities — whether as a result of ethnic background, religious belief, geographic location, income level, or simply as the losers in elections or political debate — enjoy guaranteed basic human rights that no government, and no majority, elected or not, should remove.”
“Among the basic human rights that any democratic government must protect are freedom of speech and expression; freedom of religion and belief; due process and equal protection under the law; and freedom to organize, speak out, dissent, and participate fully in the public life of their society.”
Keeping track of a topic
Ken Smith is looking at workflows to help develop a topic over multiple blog posts (at least, that is one part of what he is writing about, I think). I would like to offer some examples. The first is drawn from my zettlekasten experiments last year (link is to my zettlekkasten file). I created a section in my topical outline for the history of podcasting, and was adding posts and articles to it, and arranging them in chronological order. The Politics section was similar, where I was collecting information on the Kari Lake election conflicts in Arizona. Finally, I created a Github repo where I was editing posts by Ken Smith on organizing information for use. I think all of these are possible solutions for what Ken Smith is trying to do.