Category: work
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Why talk about monopoly in the context of climate change?
This came up in a recent conversation about sustainability in the digital sector, because the answer isn’t immediately obvious. To understand it, I think you need to understand why we have antitrust or competition laws in the first place. When they were first brought about bout in the first half of the 20th century, there…
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Why we should be intentional about the mental models we use for thinking when we think about digital sustainability
To make sense of our world, we often form incomplete, yet still useful mental models of how it works. Most of the time these are helpful, but when we are dealing with complex systems, what might feel intuitively right, can lead to outcomes totally at odds with we were initially aiming to achieve. This post…
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How much power do hyperscalers use, and how much would it cost to go fossil-free 24 / 7 ?
I found out today that the Carbon Disclosure Project allows you to register and download their questionnaire responses. This means for companies that conveniently leave absolute energy usage figures out of their annual reporting, it’s possible to get an idea of what they might be – something I care about in the context of figuring…
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Options to make software greener without changing the code, and how to remember them
I’ve been doing some research into carbon aware computing, and I’m trying to find a memorable way to talk about the choices available to you when you want to deploy computing resources in a responsible way, but can not change the underlying code of the application. This post summarises a couple of recent papers, and…
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Creating norms in tech, and the climate crisis
I recently started working to help get a document together to help set some norms in the tech community (such that there is one) about our actions in relation to the climate crisis. So far, it’s been referred to as a climate code of conduct, and there was some push back about using the term…
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Trying a test run of a sustainable product design workshop on Nov 29th in Berlin
I work as a freelance developer / user researcher / product person, and later in December, I’m teaming up with Dr Isabel Ordóñez to run a workshop, Designing Out Waste at ThingsCon in Rotterdam. We’re doing a test run first in Berlin, so if you’re in Berlin and you work on building physical products (and ideally,…
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I’m hosting the Mozilla Global Sprints in Berlin in May – come along!
I’m helping host the Berlin Mozilla Global Sprint next week – it’s a two day event, set aside to create the space to make it easy to volunteer on existing open source projects, aligned with the key Mozilla’s key Internet Health issues, outlined in their recently published Internet Health Report. More specifically, these issues, taken…
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OMGDPR is live – ZOMG
I’ve written previously about GDPR, thinking out loud about running an event called OMGDPR – a community run, unconference to explore the changes to the industry it’ll bring about. In this post, I introduce the event publicly and explain why I think it’s important. The background – what’s GDPR? GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation…
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How to start out with user research on a product, when you don’t have much buy-in yet
I recently had a friend ask me about how you would fit user research into your product development process, when: you already have a product released to users and there’s no structured plan for doing user research, nor previous experience with in-house researchers The first thing I did was invite her to the #researchOps workspace…
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Please help me name this product triangle thing
I’ve worked as a developer, a sysadmin, a user researcher, a product manager, and UX’er, with different teams, and I’d like to share an idea here I want to be able to present visually, as a way to identify common patterns of behaviour that make products less successful. This is a work in progress, and…