thank u to everyone who came to pay respects

I promise not to post a talk tomorrow

There's a precedent to this interpretation of openness in academic research: Open Notebook Science. It's one of those ideas that everybody supports but that very few people turn into practice. "Our code/data is too messy to be shared" is a frequently quoted reason. The other one is more specific to academic habits: "others will take my material and publish before me."

"oh no someone will benefit from my work"

More like "people will obviously benefit from my work, but nobody shall benefit from it more than I do".

I should spell this out:

If other people benefit from my work more than I benefit from it, then I would be monumentally happy. if someone took my data/findings and published, then I would be overwhelmingly delighted because it would mean I could do something else. It would be a great help

Maybe people should only work on ideas that they aren’t afraid of others stealing 😛 Whoever does the work doesn’t matter - it’s the idea that’s important.

In my experience the gap between “maybe people should” and “actually people do” seems to be rather large.

yes, we should normalise it to make it easier :)

I saw a great talk from Jude Pullen yesterday about encouraging the repairability mindset, and he was saying it’s like a 3 legged chair where you need govt (policy), consumers (behaviour changes) and companies (design and dev) to work together to make the idea work - but in the end, you need to “begin by beginning”, where ever you sit in that ecosystem ♻ If you really believe in the idea, just do your part I suppose 🤷‍♂️

I have often thought "this could be a paper, but I'm never going to write it because writing papers is awful, and I don't have to." 😅

Ultimately this looks like finding the right balance between competition and collaboration. Most academics nowadays see their peers mainly as competitors. Which has lots of reasons, ranging from human nature via selection bias to explicit incentives defined by their sponsors. If you see yourself as a member of a huge open collaboration, you aim for your work being useful to that collaborative project. But with that attitude, it's difficult to get into an academic career that actually pays the bills. I am fortunate enough to have gotten to that point, but I see lots of people drop out rather early.

if academia promotes harmful competition in this way then that's a problem and maybe we should put it in the bin

Great talk Lu Wilson, love a good origin story 😍 I'm all for being open and sharing scrappy fiddles, but how do you balance the logistics of sharing? I enjoy the sharing process and demoing work in progress - it even feels healthy to include, as part of the creative process as a whole...but I can't help but feel when I'm spending time on a talk, sharing on socials etc., I'm not spending time honing my craft or figuring out what it is I'm making. Sure, feedback is great to incorporate, but does it sometimes feel like noise? Esp when social media, by design, wants you to be on it and not escape to do something else 😬

Thank you!! i don't have these problems. adopting "scrappiness" is great because it means that sharing becomes very fast. and the more you do it, the quicker you get. posting something to masto/bluesky is a 10 second thing for me now. i find that most time wasted is from deciding what to share and cleaning it up. you don't need to do those things though.

i don't use platforms that try to suck me in. i don't consume any algorithmic feeds. this makes my life a lot better. highly recommend it as an approach!

"too much feedback" is a very nice problem to have. highly recommend it. the main issue for me now is that i get too many private messages, like 10 a day. i can't possibly respond to them all so i encourage people to message me publicly instead (eg: on masto) to make it more worthwhile for me to respond to

Thanks! Those are great tips. It feels like, not so much giving up on the sharing, but fine tuning the process (as with any other part of the creative process), to make it work for me. I can get behind that! 🙂

if academia promotes harmful competition in this way then that's a problem and maybe we should put it in the bin

Not sure we'd be better off. Academia promotes harmful competition because it's embedded into capitalism. Getting rid of academia while keeping capitalism is not going to help much. The void left by academia would be filled by some other capitalism-inspired institution.

Note: My use of "capitalism" is a caricature, but I don't have a better word for now.

yes let's put capitalism in the bin too!

What if we’re stuck in the bin and need to climb out?

we get a smaller bin and put the smaller bin in the bin and then the bad things in the smaller bin and then transform our binworld into a trashless ex-bin paradise

Well... capitalism is the bin we are stuck in!

Though I think a better image is addiction. We (collectively, as a society) are addicted to growth, i.e. ever increasing material wealth and ever increasing human populations. Capitalism (in the strict sense of the term) is merely the best technique we have found so far to ensure a steady supply of that drug. Soviet-style communism did exactly the same, but less efficiently, which is why capitalim "won". How to get rid of an addiction? I suspect it requires help from outside. Outside being marginal communities practicing different values. In the worst case, they can "take over" when capitalism crashes, which is inevitable in a finite world. Ideally, they will take over before.

Open sharing of non-material wealth is an important aspect of doing better than capitalism, so this is actually related to the topic of this thread.

whether capitalism is here or not, we can still grow communities and practices that behave certain ways :) if capitalism or academia is blocking you from joining, i suggest you put it in the bin in your life as much as you possibly can, subvert or escape it as much as possible

i don't accept the argument that "things are already bad (we're already in a bin) so there's no point trying to make things better (put things in a smaller bin)"

I certainly agree with that! You can mentally put it in the bin, as far as your life is concerned. At least for academia, it's a bit harder to escape from capitalism.

for sure. i mean i can't talk really, i work for a startup right now :)

Ivan Reese I would be glad to hear your feedback too. Since your works helped me a lot when I was writing the whitepaper.

The landing page is down?

A few small notes:

• The miro is lots of fun. The information density (very sparse) makes it a bit hard to approach, but once I felt my way through the rough shape it became more comprehensible. Surely, this must be very helpful as a research aid for you. I'd love to see this info put together into a more sharable form. (Note to self: the visual programming codex sucks and needs an overhaul!)
• The white paper is long enough that I haven't yet taken the time to read it in depth, just gave it a quick skim, so apologies if any of my feedback is inappropriate or unhelpful. You've put a lot of work into this and deserve a deeper read/reflection from someone, but I won't be able to be that person, at least not right now. With that being said, here's some quick / superficial feedback, in case it helps.
• This project seems very broad. I describe these sorts of projects as "burn it all down and start over" or "reinvent the universe". Like, I repeatedly had to ask myself "wait, doesn't 'the web' already do this?" It's unclear to me whether you feel there's a targeted, specific problem at the root of it all, one that could be addressed with a surgical fix to our technology, and are incrementally feeling your way toward a better understanding of that problem — if so, great, keep going. Or, instead, if you started from a place of "computers could be better" broadly and accumulated a whole laundry list of things that could be done differently and tried to pull them together — if so, you're signing up for a much harder challenge, one that will require the involvement of many people, and thus you'll need to work very hard on communicating the problem and convincing people to help. So note the difference: one of these is a problem you can solve with design and invention, the other is a problem you'll need to solve with communication and community. It might be worth thinking about what sort of work you enjoy doing, and what sort of feedback / criticism you're interested in receiving, and whether that's the sort of work/reflection that you'll need to do to see this project through to completion.

Small things:

• Steve Krouse is spelled incorrectly in a few places. Also, while he started the FoC community, he hasn't been active here since 2020.
• The "SomethingNew" community doesn't actually maintain that spreadsheet you linked in footnote 28. That spreadsheet is by Duncan Cragg, for this community. (And I think @Dan Cook has withdrawn from being active in the broader SomethingNew / FoC / etc sphere of communities, and thus SomethingNew has fallen dormant.)

I miss Dan Cook. I've been reminded of his posts and comments multiple times in 2024. I only found out about github.com/d-cook/SomethingNew this year when I went looking for him.