Notices by neil 🍄 (neil@social.coop), page 48

First two candidates for albums to get on my phone for offline listening:

Entrance - Prayer of Death
Comets on Fire - Blue Cathedral

A couple of great long players I used to listen to a lot.

Looking forward to getting long form again!

I am not the world's best cook and the BBC recipe I have stumbled upon seems to know this and is trolling me.

"Ask a grown-up to turn the oven on to 200C/180C fan/ gas 6."

@Corvusheart I went because I saw your post :D

I subscribe to the london hashtag to see what's going on.

@Corvusheart I went to this and can confirm that Metalogue was indeed ace. As was the whole lineup.

@cstanhope "How long until renters are required to have a "smart home" device as part of their lease agreement?" Oouch, scary thought. It could happen.

I think you're right, it does seem to be picking up steam regardless of wants/needs. It important to have some entity pushing back and raising awareness, so it's good if Mozilla can provide some of that. e.g. the discussion about how smart homes can be a vector for domestic abuse was something I had never thought of.

Final talk of the day was Mitchell Baker to give a bit of a state of the union. It was an unstructured Q&A so I'm struggling to remember much of it now.

You can watch it here though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmcU-uMWNj0

I remember one intriguing point: that Mozilla is going to have a focus on smart homes / IoT going forwards. As they see it as somewhere where no big player has yet monopolised. Is that true? Alexa, Google Home already out there. I'm a bit sceptical of the utility of IoT in general.

@douginamug It was actually last weekend! It's taken me a week to get around to tooting it out. (Even writing it down has taken a long time!) MozFest is always full on - a postivie problem - but honestly it could easily span two weekends, maybe more.

@bob Yes. Country struggling on (our) economic/health/education indicators? Could it be that it's down to centuries of extraction and colonialism and debt indenture? Nah, they probably need us to sell them some cheap laptops to use Facebook and Wikipedia.

It kind of feels like an implicit corollary to techno-optimism.

Tech will fix everything - and by the way, we mean *our* tech will fix everything. You have no choice in this.

Afternoon we ran our own session, "Let's fight for our right to repair."

Gauging people's interest in the right to repair, and their reasons why. Discussing what people have personally found has been a barrier to repair.

Good turnout, lots of good discussion. Right to repair feels like a strong framing. It seems to resonate intuitively across the spectrum.

There's a right to repair movement coalescing in Europe in addition to that already in the US.

#mozfest #righttorepair

Afternoon we ran our own session, "Let's fight for our right to repair."

Gauging people's interest in the right to repair, and their reasons why. Discussing what people have personally found has been a barrier to repair.

Good turnout, lots of good discussion. Right to repair feels like a strong framing. It seems to resonate intuitively across the spectrum.

There's a right to repair movement coalescing in Europe in addition to that already in the US.

#mozfest #righttorepair

I caught some of the talk on 'Who Controls the Internet?'

White dudes in Silicon Valley controlling a lot of tech is a big problem. Much more diversity is needed. Not white saviour complex but genuine flourishing of tech from all around the world. It's all already there but it's stifled.

Monopolies/anti-competition is a big problem. They tended to focus on regulation. Around interoperability, data portability.

I don't think capitalism was mentioned at all?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8crgz1Wb1I

I think green IT guides are important. But there was some interesting criticism from participants of the criteria of the rating system used in Greenpeace campaigns.

For example in smartphones (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Guide-to-Greener-Electronics-2017.pdf), Fairphone and Apple get almost the same grade, but Fairphone lacks the same level of quality control, which would make it hard to recommend Fairphone on that rating system alone. Makes it important to know what values go into a rating, if they align with your own.

#mozfest

Caught the second half of Greenpeace's session on their green IT campaigns, also their internal tech use and procurement policies.

Greenpeace try to avoid dirty hosters (e.g. AWS); they teach staff about the importance of repair, e.g. inviting iFixit in to talk about fixing.

#mozfest

Sunday I started with the session Patterns of Decentralised Organisations run by @richdecibels and Natalia Lombardo of The Hum (and Loomio and Enspiral). I couldn't stay for the full session due to a clash but really wanted to attend some and glad I did.

Some great (and funny because it's true) insights into how to reach decisions and take action in a decentralised organisation. Definitely want to read more of this.

https://www.thehum.org

@robin @nicksellen Hi Robin!

Always the question posed about Mozilla is where is the money coming from. To host the MozFest event itself must have cost a ton, but felt super worthwhile.

The evening party at the RSA felt kind of extravagant.. But on the flipside, as the saying goes, a revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having. And a revolution that has a Jurassic 5 MC and an improv'ed rap battle that includes the words 'decentralisation', 'algorithm', and 'privacy', I'm pretty OK with that.

#mozfest

That was it for Saturday. Honestly, there was like 20 other sessions I would have gone to if I had the time and could clone myself. So many good people and good topics. Even if you can't be part of them, good to know they are taking place.

#mozfest

In general MozFest is a mixture of super exciting and depressing.

Exciting to learn meet people working on so many great projects. Depressing to learn about the havoc being wreaked by the Silicon Valley consensus and capitalism. Depressing to learn about the struggles of brothers and sisters around the world. Exciting again to learn how strong they are in their resistance.

#mozfest

On a more positive note, that Bahrainian techno is, apparently, better than anything you will find in Berlin.

I think Esra'a is probably biased 😆
But still, I want to check out some Bahrainian techno.