Time for a reflective wrap-up of last week’s “Datensummit”, the first national-level meetup on Open Data in Germany, co-hosted by the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure. I was only able to attend the conference part […]
2017 (2/3)
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Responsible Data Forum responsibledata.io
The Responsible Data Forum, a collaboration that develops tools and strategies to help data-driven advocacy with ethical, security and privacy implications of their work, was mentioned in Zara Rahman’s talk at Datensummit 17. The RDF defines “responsible data” as:
The […]
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Two fresh data sets from Pew Research Center, highlighting realities I would love to see considered more often in design teams and boardrooms alike: “Not everyone in advanced economies is using social media”, and “Smartphones are common in advanced economies, but digital […]
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We Need More Alternatives to Facebook technologyreview.com
In an article on the MIT Technology Review, Brian Bergstein compares Facebook to the early days of televsion in the US:
The problem, the FCC chairman told the group, was the way the business was making money: not by serving the public interest above all but by airing a lot of dumb […]
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Why designing for #engagement #metrics is not always a good idea. Hint: Many people like crude stories. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/how-the-like-button-ruined-the-internet/519795/?single_page=true
Oliver posted:
“Why designing for #engagement #metrics is not always a good idea. Hint: Many people like crude stories.”
The linked article points out how the obsession with “engagement” around single items damages the whole, and why it is the […] -
From my first-hand experience, this lightweight research process described by Rian Van Der Merwe is incredibly efficient. In the article it is summarized as chosing: The RITE testing method (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation) The right remote usability testing tools The right fidelity The […]
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The inaccessible web: how we got into this mess uxdesign.cc
Mischa Andrews lists five reasons how the web, an accessible medium by default, ended up in an inaccessible mess: We can (and do) learn to make websites without learning accessibility We’re not held accountable for inaccessible products Assumptions guide us astray The legislation […]
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Recent writings about the consequences of the AWS outage on centralised services make me believe that an “Offline First” mindset can help improve the worth and use experience of digital artefacts. (Screenshots from the Mashable article quoted below and offlinefirst.org) Allow […]
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Privacy Tools privacytools.io
After PRISM Break, that I posted about last week, here is another valuable resource that aims to create a list of any tools related to personal privacy online:
privacytools.io is a socially motivated website that provides information for protecting your data security and privacy. never […]
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Cognitive bias - the tendency of the human brain to interpret information based on unrecognised irrational factors - is a phenomenon that has been fascinating me for well over a decade. There is no more efficient way to improve the quality of a design concept than by doing a heuristic evaluation on […]
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The Guardian view on big data: the danger is less democracy theguardian.com
A Guardian’s op-ed on big data highlights the threat corporate surveillance poses not only on an individual level, but to democratic culture as a whole.
There are two kinds of privacy under threat in the emerging economy, where everyone is almost always connected to the internet […]
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“All pages could support rich layers of conversation” – #Annotation is now a web standard https://hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ #webstandards
This is great news: a web standard for annotations - in true #hypertext spirit
“All pages could support rich layers of conversation” – #Annotation is now a web standard https://hypothes.is/blog/annotation-is-now-a-web-standard/ #webstandards
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Why Nothing Works Anymore theatlantic.com
Ian Bogost, in this piece on The Atlantic, expands the notion of “precarity” from the economic into the technological sphere - the instability and unpredictability of (technological) objects:
The frequency with which technology works precariously has been obscured by […]
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The Internet's Original Sin theatlantic.com
Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and describing himself as part of the actors who established the ad-based web, investigates how and why advertising became the backbone of the fast-spreading web and the negative consequences it has brought along - making it “The […]
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PRISM Break prism-break.org
The PRISM Break project curates a comprehensive list of privacy-minded free and open source software projects that
Help make mass surveillance of entire populations uneconomical! We all have a right to privacy, which you can exercise today by encrypting your communications and ending […]
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Want To Fight Inequality? Forget Design Thinking fastcodesign.com
The Creative Reaction Lab questions the fashionable “design thinking” mindset and instead focuses on truly inclusive participation in design processes. This FastCoDesign article describes how
the Creative Reaction Lab starts from the premise that design’s greatest […]
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NB. This is a two-years old post, only kept for archive purposes. The technology stack at either Twitter or Uberspace has since changed, and the described issue should no longer prevail - making this workaround obsolete. Ever since I migrated my website to HTTPS (and you should too!), I noticed […]
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Data Selfie dataselfie.it
I don’t use Facebook nor Chrome for the very reasons this project advocates, so cannot put it to the test myself, but Data Selfie by Hang Do Thi Duc and Regina Flores Mir looks like a great tool to bring closer to the user just how much social network providers know about […]
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Terms of Service; Didn't Read tosdr.org
“I have read and agree to the Terms” is the biggest lie on the web. We aim to fix that.
Terms of Service; Didn’t Read (ToS;DR) is a site that dissects the terms and privacy policies nobody ever reads and evaluates services based on these. While the site […] -
The blog post “What should you think about when using Facebook?” by Data Scientist Vicky Boykis is a thorough - yet likely not even close to exhaustive - summary of various ways how Facebook tracks, monetises and manipulates its users. It has rightfully gained quite some visibility over […]
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What It Takes To Truly Delete Data fivethirtyeight.com
We are living in the age of data. “What It Takes To Truly Delete Data” by Mimi Onuoha tells the story of hard drive disposal to illustrate three key facts about data: “All data […] is stored on a physical device somewhere.” As long as this is not a single device under […]
