I am not the world’s best cook and the BBC recipe I have stumbled upon seems to know this and is trolling me.
"Ask a grown-up to turn the oven on to 200C/180C fan/ gas 6."
Category: Uncategorized
Final talk of the day was Mitchell Baker to give a bit of a state of the union. It was an unstructured Q&A so I’m struggling to remember much of it now.
You can watch it here though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmcU-uMWNj0
I remember one intriguing point: that Mozilla is going to have a focus on smart homes / IoT going forwards. As they see it as somewhere where no big player has yet monopolised. Is that true? Alexa, Google Home already out there. I’m a bit sceptical of the utility of IoT in general.
Afternoon we ran our own session, "Let’s fight for our right to repair."
Gauging people’s interest in the right to repair, and their reasons why. Discussing what people have personally found has been a barrier to repair.
Good turnout, lots of good discussion. Right to repair feels like a strong framing. It seems to resonate intuitively across the spectrum.
There’s a right to repair movement coalescing in Europe in addition to that already in the US.
#mozfest #righttorepair
I caught some of the talk on ‘Who Controls the Internet?’ with Maryant Fernandez and Chris Riley.
White dudes in Silicon Valley controlling a lot of tech is a big problem. Much more diversity is needed. Not white saviour complex but genuine flourishing of tech from all around the world. It’s all already there but it’s stifled.
Monopolies/anti-competition is a big problem. They tended to focus on regulation. Around interoperability, data portability.
I don’t think capitalism was mentioned at all?
I think green IT guides are important. But there was some interesting criticism from participants of the criteria of the rating system used in Greenpeace campaigns.
For example in smartphones (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Guide-to-Greener-Electronics-2017.pdf), Fairphone and Apple get almost the same grade, but Fairphone lacks the same level of quality control, which would make it hard to recommend Fairphone on that rating system alone. Makes it important to know what values go into a rating, if they align with your own.
#mozfest
Caught the second half of Greenpeace’s session on their green IT campaigns, also their internal tech use and procurement policies.
Greenpeace try to avoid dirty hosters (e.g. AWS); they teach staff about the importance of repair, e.g. inviting iFixit in to talk about fixing.
#mozfest
Sunday I started with the session Patterns of Decentralised Organisations run by @richdecibels and Natalia Lombardo of The Hum (and Loomio and Enspiral). I couldn’t stay for the full session due to a clash but really wanted to attend some and glad I did.
Some great (and funny because it’s true) insights into how to reach decisions and take action in a decentralised organisation. Definitely want to read more of this.
Always the question posed about Mozilla is where is the money coming from. To host the MozFest event itself must have cost a ton, but felt super worthwhile.
The evening party at the RSA felt kind of extravagant.. But on the flipside, as the saying goes, a revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having. And a revolution that has a Jurassic 5 MC and an improv’ed rap battle that includes the words ‘decentralisation’, ‘algorithm’, and ‘privacy’, I’m pretty OK with that.
#mozfest
That was it for Saturday. Honestly, there was like 20 other sessions I would have gone to if I had the time and could clone myself. So many good people and good topics. Even if you can’t be part of them, good to know they are taking place.
#mozfest