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
- found that limits to re-use are
- 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