"What Would Open Source Look Like If It Were Healthy?" That's the question @brainwane set out to answer in her @github talk earlier this week - a talk that considers #FLOSS in the broadest possible terms and still makes specific, concrete proposals.

harihareswara.net/sumana/2021/05…

1/ The title-card from Sumana Harihareswara's Github talk,'What
Harihareswara starts with the obvious proposition that "open source" can't be healthy if the programmers who create it aren't healthy, and draws a link between basic income, child care and universal health care and the health of open source.



2/
She also points out that the "health" of open source has been systematically poisoned by harassment, misogyny and racism, and names people who were driven out of OSS because of their gender and race - as well as people like @aaronsw, hounded to death by the FBI.

3/
From there, Harihareswara embarks on three speculative narratives in which "user personas" - a common tool among software developers and product managers seeking to understand how to suit their work to its eventual users are elucidated.

4/
The first is the story of a new kind of community nonprofit, one that goes beyond the idea of "learn to code" and specifically engages with underserved communities to help them develop their own technical infrastructure that suits their own needs.

5/
This nonprofit, based on the Australian Data Science Education Institute, works with formerly incarcerated people before and during re-entry, helping them start a project that maps automatic defibrillators in their community, and identifies AED deserts.

6/
The project is boring, at a technical level, but it can have a profound effect on its community, and its real-world salience makes it a fantastic training exercise. Harihareswara describes the tooling that allows a small number of experts to support this community.

7/
The next persona is "Paula," a DMV data-entry clerk who, thanks to her union and new procurement rules for DMVs, ends up working on an OSS replacement for the bloated, terrible software that state DMVs use across the country.

8/
Paula goes from user to contributor to co-maintainer, and her story reveals how good labor practices, good governance and good community norms are essential to spreading open methodologies to the places they're most needed.

9/
The final persona is "Sean," maintainer of a project to integrate Drupal with Instagram, who is facing burnout. Rather than being given destructive "productivity" advice to let him stave off his inevitable collapse, Sean is given a graceful way to step down from his role.

10/
This graceful method requires user- and developer-based democratic governance of OSS projects, and includes both novel tooling for decision-making, novel norms in accepting that most projects will eventually wind down, and new roles in the form of "wind-down" specialists.

11/
Throughout the talk, Harihareswara skilfully weaves tooling with social impact, norms with technology, ethics with practice. The Q&A is fascinating as well. The whole talk is available as a video and in edited transcript.

eof/
ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/05/18/unh…

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More from @doctorow

18 May
Bruce Schneier coined "feudal security" to describe the dominant Big Tech security model, in which you surrender your autonomy by moving into a warlord's fortress (Google, Apple, Facebook, etc) and in return get protection from the bandits that roam the badlands without.

1/ A medieval tapestry illustration of an overseer forcing peas
The historian Stephen Morillo pointed out that this is more like "manorialism" than "feudalism." As I wrote in January, digital manorialism works well (if the warlord wants the same thing as you) but fails badly (if they decide to sell you out).

locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-d…

2/
Google wants to kill third party cookies to protect you from randos doing tracking and targeting - but it wants to retain the ability to nonconsensually track and target you on its own:

eff.org/deeplinks/2021…

3/
Read 21 tweets
18 May
Last Jan, @NorthwellHealth was the subject of a viral @nytimes story about the thousands of patients it had sued over medical debt, in the midst of a pandemic. The publicity was so bad that the company abandoned its legal campaign of terror.

nytimes.com/2021/01/05/nyr…

1/ A comic-book drawing of a giant grim reaper bringing down a
But not every bloated, financialized hospital chain got the message. The massive chain Community Health Systems has long been addicted to suing the shit out of its patients, and the pandemic didn't change that.

edition.cnn.com/2021/05/17/us/…

2/
CHS's financial crimes are investigated in a must-read @CNN story by @caseytolan. While the company insists that it doesn't sue poor patients over their medical debts, Tolan debunks this claim, revealing the cruel and ugly lengths CHS has gone to during the pandemic.

3/
Read 25 tweets
18 May
A truism in security is "attribution is hard." It's really hard to know who hacked you, first, because it's easy to deflect suspicion by leaving false clues, and second, because the bar for hacking even big, critical systems is so low.

1/ The Windows keyboard selection dialog.
The ransomware epidemic has been raging for years now, and it's quite a tangle. It includes idiots who download (or pay for) some off-the-shelf malware and turn it loose on whatever systems they can find, who don't even know WHO they've hacked.

2/
It includes sophisticated crime-gangs with high degrees of specialization: tooling, payment processing, even "customer service" for victims who can't figure out how to buy cryptocurrency to pay their ransoms.

3/
Read 18 tweets
17 May
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Paygo, false consciousness and the IRS; The Public Interest Internet; Concluding How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/05/17/dis…

#Pluralistic

1/
This Weds (5/19), I'm doing a talk called "Seize the Means of Computation," at the Ryerson Centre for Free Expression:

cfe.ryerson.ca/events/how-des…

And on Thu (5/20), I'm doing a keynote called "Privacy Without Monopoly," for the Northsec conference:

nsec.io/speaker/cory-d…

2/
Paygo, false consciousness and the IRS: Why we can't have nice things.



3/
Read 18 tweets
17 May
This week on my podcast, the seventh and final part of my serialized reading of my 2020 @ozm book HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, a book arguing that monopoly – not AI-based brainwashing – is the real way that tech controls our behavior.

onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy…

1/ The cover of One/Zero/Medium's paperback edition of 'How to
The book is available in paperback:

bookshop.org/books/how-to-d…

and DRM-free ebook :

sowl.co/bm2F7c

and my local bookseller, @darkdel, has signed stock that I'll drop by and personalize for you!

darkdel.com/store/p2024/Av…

2/
Here's the podcast episode:

craphound.com/nonficbooks/de…

And here's part one:

craphound.com/nonficbooks/de…

And part two:

craphound.com/nonficbooks/de…

And part three:

craphound.com/nonficbooks/de…

2/
Read 6 tweets
17 May
I met @mala on 9/11/01, at a surreal dinner we pressed on with despite (or really, because of) the intense terror of the day. He was wearing a t-shirt from NTK, his seminal digital newsletter, bearing its slogan: "THEY STOLE OUR REVOLUTION. NOW WE'RE STEALING IT BACK"

1/ EFF's 'public interest internet' illustration: a 2.5-D gamel
Online culture has its roots in a strange swirl of hobbyists, the military, corporate misfits fooling around with their employers' vast computer labs and students and academics dabbling in the early digital world.

2/
It was no garden of Eden. There was plenty of fighting and plenty of difference, but there was, despite it all, a sense of mission: a collegial urgency to build a commons that would be part of the digital world that everyone could use.

3/
Read 15 tweets

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