Listened to another General Intellect Unit episode on Post Open Source. A bit of a downer this one, to be honest – it’s about FOSS being ‘dead’. Free software having died a while back, and open-source being recently departed. There are many valid points. It’s based on this article. Need more time to digest it and read the article.
Author: Neil Mather
Very happy to have stumbled on the General Intellect Unit podcast. “Examining the intersection of Technology, (Left) Politics, and Philosophy”. Loads of good stuff on there. Found it just by a random search for ‘Viable System Model podcast’.
Listened to General Intellect Unit 038 – The Viable System Model. Great overview of VSM (for a newbie such as myself). Some tidbits:
- Jon Walker who writes The VSM Guide was applying VSM to coops in the UK in the 80s (including Suma)
- In VSM management becomes a function of the overall system, not an individual role attainable only by those with a class privilege.
- We should think of VSM as an explicitly socialist technology.
http://generalintellectunit.net/e/038-the-viable-system-model/
Walking in the Forest of Bowland listening to a podcast about the Viable System Model. This is A-OK.
left to right direction actor "Stafford Beer" as beer usecase "Hold My" as hold beer --> hold
Haha, I love this idea! You can skin PlantUML a bit from what I’ve seen. Side note: I have a plot to make a bot that posts randomly-generated PlantUML art.
Very comprehensive report from Common Wealth on suggestions for reclaiming platforms from big tech: A Common Platform:Reimagining Data and Platforms. (via Tech Won’t Save Us discord)
https://www.common-wealth.co.uk/reports/common-platform-tech-utility-antitrust
Came across an interesting post (via TWSU) on Why Does Agile Fail?. It talks about Worker cooperatives and Viable system model as better alternatives.
- Coding. Looking at the notes from the week, it seems like hobby-time has mostly been related to working on my PKM / digital garden system (Flock) and tinkering around with Emacs. Coding and debugging in elisp, and tweaking a bit of the look of the site.
- Writing. Which is all totally fine – I enjoy it! And learn plenty in the process. But just a point to note that left unattended, my attention tends to go towards tweaking and coding, less towards writing. Although writing about what I’ve tweaked and coded still counts, right?
- Reading. I read New UK tech regulator to limit power of Google and Facebook, which made me think a bit about some principles for ethical technology and related praxis for the hacker class.
- Planning to re-read Hail the maintainers too.
- Only managed to catch a couple of talks from EmacsConf 2020, but nice to see such a good community around Emacs. For such a long-lasting program it seems very much alive and well.
- Enjoyed muchly The Central Memory – AI-assisted cyborb pop.
- I had a bit more of a play at getting knowledge maps in to my weeknotes, this time with an org-roam generated graph. It works as a nice easy-to-generate visual aide memoire for me, but sadly not really visually compelling for anyone else.
innovation –> liberation
competition –> cooperation
consumer choice –> agency
growth –> sustainability
competition –> cooperation
consumer choice –> agency
growth –> sustainability
