Notes2015

Friday

Save Raveoke

This workshop concluded with Live [Prancercise]

Open Source Low Tech Appropriate Alternative Infrastructure

[[1]]

Wild Food Walk

Edible plants found:

- St. Johns Wort - Cowslip - Thistle - Red Clover - White Clover - Mallow - Coltsfoot

Minislots

Antibody tools network

How to deploy pgp encrypted email in an organisation 20+ people

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap

Strawberry TARTS

TEDx preview about computer re-use and repair

PRISM and the dark side of the net

will cover the whole internet and what it all means

Creating Wordpress blogs for communities - a network approach

Things to do for network 23 (and example wordpress community).

• Plug in audit
• Themes audit and search for new ones.

=== Wordpress networks for communities

Christian talked about Commons in a box. Facebook like install with Buddypress http://commonsinabox.org/ This needs a multinetwork install of wp

Network 23 - C says don't upgrade yet until UTF8 table conversion is sorted out - as for Networks will

Interesting project which has enhanced tracking of the conversation surrounding your posts https://indiewebcamp.com/Bridgy

Calendar: A good plug in is Event Organiser - https://wordpress.org/plugins/event-organiser/

Suggestion - Take out custom CSS manager - this is probably too much

Jetpack - has a good carousel - and you can take out the link to wordpress.com via a constant Generating good metatags - etc

Subscribe to comments - (plugin to help track conversation streams)

Multilingual - replacement for exising qtranslate - https://wordpress.org/plugins/qtranslate-x/

https://wordpress.org/plugins/multilingual-press/ (may not be suitable)

A good theme - Scrawl

Saturday

Secure Your Phone

The slide notes, including apps, is at https://github.com/foobacca/secure-phone-talk

Collaborative Writing, online tools and offline practices

List of tools identified

• google docs
• etherpad
• comment press
• everpad
• Crabgrass
• booktype
• wikibooks
• gitbooks
• readthedocs

Some of the people there and thoughts

Mark – has done collaborative writing with local groups using etherpad - The development of Cryptoparty manual has been interesting - different directions – moved onto github – they were then merged. Christian - Comment press – annotation of wp posts. Different tools vary in their use. Rich – Bristol wireless website was a wiki – this has been edited and improved by other users – google docs another tool Frederica – collaborative editing of a book previously - wikis could be useful to replace paper based collaboration. Widening involvement. Brent – a more activist friendly google docs would be useful – saving and importing from word docs is often needed – low entry no password is good. Libre office is coming up with an online set up. Micaela interested in collaborative writing from publishing background Michael - as above Pheadra – invites us to a book sprint on the plight of the bumble bee children's book. Loukas - - involved in a visual communication coop – writing policies collaboratively Scotty – bits of collaborative writing for green tech also on policies. Using crabgrass and another wiki and everpad. Also interested in documenting workshops. Darren – etherpad, but there are issues working with online tools like that.

Mick gave a presentation on Booktype and Booksprints. Some of those notes are up online here. http://blog.clearerchannel.org/2014/06/17/booktype-ebooks-learning-platform-future-cetis/

Re-using computers in our communities

Some of peoples' experiences:

• G (and previously J) run Bit Fix It computer cafe in Sheffield, which has a strong emphasis on repair
  • found that limits to re-use are
    • old interfaces (e.g. ISA slots on motherboards)
    • ability to play youtube videos is the arbiter of how low a machine can be specified
    • a 2GHz processor and 1GB RAM are pretty much the bottom line (although there are exceptions)
    • Firefox "aurora" builds include "showtime" technology which works on about 70% of youtube content
  • It's easier to repair things if you focus on a few models
  • Software skills are teachable, and both the skills and the teacher's skills have value

• We talked a lot about the carbon cost of new tech Vs re-used
  • For new equipment, a laptop has much less impact than a desktop machine
  • However, it's much easier to repair desktops, and all workers including volunteers need to think about the value of their time
  • Miniaturisation generally means lower impact, however for an exception look at the impact of successive generations of iphones
  • For a laptop, energy use breakdown is like this:
    • 73% power consumption during a 3-year lifespan
    • 25% manufacture
    • 2% disposal (but remember that even local council WEEE providers sometimes route to e-waste hell)

• Advertising what you do could be linked in to other people with similar ethos, e.g. bike repair cafes.

• Dealing with people's expectations for service and support is more of a drain than providing gear
  • Perhaps you could have a monthly 'club meeting' when people support each other and ask volunteers if they're still stuck
  • Much easier if people get a standardised installation of the same OS

• Models of funding could include
  • Pay up-front for a reconditioned machine
  • Pay in installments until you own it outright (maybe collaborate with a credit union?)
  • Join a club which provides peer support, and membership fee entitles you to loan a machine
  • Purchasing cooperatives (analogous to food coops) but with some way of getting back used machines

• B was involved in a repair cafe
  • turned out that all the problems people brought in were software rather than hardware
  • most of the software problems were malware
  • it's great to give someone the skills to sort it out themself in future

• Mike has a "classroom in a box" project consisting of Strawverry TARTS
  • ideally, these machines shouldn't need to declare themselves as being linux
  • people love how fast they fire up
  • idea of offering three different models
    • Bilberry = zero dollar laptop. It might not do what you want.
    • Strawberry = cheap refurbsihed laptop with ubuntu-mate
    • ?berry = medium price but still great value, for people with specific requirements

• Mark has been trying to get peer-support project going
  • One of the challenges is without a regular location, people don't develop a "drop in" habit
  • It feels like people might respond better to a simple offer of a product or a service, rather than innovations they're not familiar with
  • All most people want is a computer that will
    • Boot up in less than a minute
    • Browse the web and deal with flash etc. without complaining
    • Word-processor that can load & save .docx

• Finding funding for new initiatives can require a bit of "hacking the system"

• it would be good to refine and expand these ideas into a book