Category: Uncategorized

  • Does peer to peer matched funding exist online?

    I met a guy a few years back, Premasagar Rose. We got on well, and we had a lot of similar interests, but I didn’t know he had left the UK for Portugal until I saw a tweet along these lines: My friends, I need help to spread — We're crowdfunding to rebuild homes after…

  • An update on election Hackday and the goals of WhoTargets.me

    Earlier in August, I went to a hack day with a few friends to work on WhoTargetsMe, a project started by some people in London. We ended up working on the project because we felt that platforms like Facebook had emerged, that were were powerful in the same way that you might consider TV and…

  • On fairphone, and sustainable electronics

    I’ve been a Fairphone user since 2013, when the first phone came out, and I’ve been a user of the FP2, the first phone the company designed fully themselves. In this post, I explain the process of updating it to extend its life, compared with buying a new one, and how hard doing sustainable electronics…

  • Trying out a vision statement for the Planet Friendly Web Guide

    As I mentioned before, I’m part of the Mozilla Open Leadership programme as a Open Project Lead. In this blog, I’ll write a bit getting the vision statement together, and the thinking behind it. First, here’s the statement as of 13th September The Planet Friendly Web Guide: I’m working with web professionals, campaigners, and academics,…

  • Joining the Mozilla Open Leadership programme

    A few weeks back, after I applied to run a session at Mozfest in 2017, the Mozilla Open leadership team sent an email inviting me to apply for the Mozilla Open Leaders programme. It seemed a good way to force me to get my I applied, and was accepted. Last night was the initial remote…

  • So, we ended up at a democracy themed hackday thing

    Earlier in August I wrote a post about the BPB, a German institute focussed on promoting democracy, and WhoTargetsMe, a project to bring more transparency to election campaign advertising on Facebook. After sharing the post online, I had a few people contact me about forming a group to work at an Democracy is Everything, a hackathon at…

  • Notes as I learn more about the German political scene

    Last week, I wrote a post about the BPB and WhoTargetsme, and since writing that, I’ve been lucky to enough to have a few very nice volunteers help make up a team of illustrators, data scientists and talented technical types) with me to go to this German Election themed hackday this Friday. In this post…

  • What if BPB ran service like whotargets.me for Germany?

    We’ve had a number of elections in the last 18 months where digital has been cited as one of the key tools used by the winning party to win. In the US, after the electoral upset of 45 being voted in, we saw a clutch of stories about the massive database used to suppress turnout among…

  • Coming across the Pacman rule

    I’ve been running events and meetups since around 2010, but I haven’t come across the ‘Pacman rule’ before, as blogged by Eric Holscher. It’s a simple rule to follow, to make it easier for new people to join groups, and generally help make events feel nicer for first timers: The rule is quite simply stated:…

  • Worth a watch – Clean Architecture in Python

    I’m experimenting with ways to start posting regularly here, and one way I think might work is to share a link each week to a talk, or video I’ve watched, and why I found it worth watching. As of summer 2017, Python is my primary coding language, and this talk by Brandon Rhodes from 2014…