If a problem is shared by only a handful of people, it's probably not worth programming a solution. Great Programmers Solve Important Problems The best programmers aren't simply the ones that write the best solutions: they're the ones that solve the best problems. The best programmers write kernels that allow billions of people to run other software, write highly reliable code that puts astronauts into space, write crawlers and indexers that organize the world's information. They make the right choices not only about how to solve a problem, but what problem to solve.

Here's one rubric you can use to test whether a problem is worth solving:

What I think Smalltalk should look like in 2018 is something like JuPyter / iPython notebook. Or, at a pinch, HyperCard.I open "Smalltalk" (whether that's a browser-based version equivalent to Amber, LivelyKernel or Peter Fisk's Smalltalk Express, or a desktop version like PharoLanguage or SqueakLanguage), and what I see is a "smart notebook" type metaphor :A single page that takes up the whole window. To which I can start adding "cells" or "cards" containing either code or "literate" style documentation, or output produced by the code.You'd still have tools like the Class Browser etc. But they'd be integrated within the same UI. Ie. the class browser is just more "pages" in the notebook. There's no workspace or transcript because every page can have live code on it.This UI is immediate. And focused on "do something".

Traditional visual environments visualize the code. They visualize static structure. But that's not what we need to understand. We need to understand what the code is doing.Visualize data, not code. Dynamic behavior, not static structure.”http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming

Well, the best approximation we have is spreadsheets, actually. That's why they're super popular.Put the data in front, marginalize the code. Code is either "hidden" in cells where you get a live[1] preview of the data or in modules other have built but you can modify[1] if you want to.Now, how do we take this approach to the next level, that's a problem on the scale of figuring out human genetic engineering or fixing climate change :-)[1] Most of the time. relaxing 62 days ago | root | parent | next [–] First let’s figure out how to scale spreadsheets to the complexity of running a medium size business.

I think if we divorce the idea of direct data manipulation from exclusively non-textual representation, we are slowly making progress in this direction through traditional notebooks (e.g. Jupyter) and notebook successors like Clerk (see Moldable Live Programming With Clerk[1]).These are not the sweeping, fundamental changes that Bret Victor envisioned, but we are collectively moving toward more interactive programming. Imagine modern web development without hot reloading.Clojure is the language where I see this happening most, and which is seeing the most expansion toward "visualization and interactivity as part of a the backend dev experience".[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bs3QX92kYA

To reiterate the point, our intention is for readers to acquire key programming skills in orderto read, write and think with, and through, code (and we will return to the issue of literacylater). We feel that it is important to further explore the intersections of technical andconceptual aspects of code in order to reflect deeply on the pervasiveness of computationalculture and its social and political effects — from the language of human-machine languagesto abstraction of objects, datafication and recent developments in automated machineintelligence, for example. In other words, the book embraces both the technical aspects andformal qualities of code as well as opens up imaginaries of code, including acknowledgmentof the material conditions of programming practice, the non-human agency of code itself,and its inherent relationality within broader ecologies.

Sitio sobre Indie Web en Brea

Technosocial bootstrapping of solarpunk futures for/from the Global South Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas

International GLAM Labs Community

Las aplicaciones y archivos ejecutables

ales. Adicionalmente puede encontrarse en la priorización de las versiones en español de su página web57y de la documentación de laherramienta58sobre un idioma más “global”como lo es el

compuesta por un conjunto de instrumentos co

Prac­ti­calTy­pog­ra­phy

proyecto.bib

publicado 2014-03-19

de convertir a archivos con otros formatos

Debajo de la capa visible de palabras, oraciones y párrafos se encuentra una complicada capa de código comprensible solamente para las máquinas. Debido a esta capa oculta, tus archivos .docx y .pdf dependen de herramientas propietarias para mostrarse correctamente

cambiar fácilmente estilos de citación de Chicago a MLA (por ejemplo),

Escritura sostenible en texto plano usando Pandoc y Markdown

Why there’s no e-book or PDF

There are very good reasons why members of the development community should not do the documentation. Developers, for example, often see how the software 'should' work not how it actually does work.

Es de anotar que acá se empezaba a vislumbrar ya una apuesta por lo que denomi-né luego lasinfraestructuras de bolsillo, que podían ser ejecutadas desde hardwaremodesto, con o sin conectividad, eran simples y autocontenidas, lo cual se volveríaun concepto importante después en las prácticas con Grafoscopio, el Data Week ylas Data Rodas y en distintos proyectos, como los de losPanama Papers, particu-larmente desde la perspectiva de hacer la investigación reproducible y decolonizarla infraestructura, como veremos más adelante.

n clon del software de presentacio-nes Prezi

a idea de programación como arte-sanía en lugar de como ingeniería, reto-ma lo dicho en la primera parte en aluciónal “hacer es pensar” deSennett[2009] yserá extendido posteriormente sobre unasideas de la materialidad de código deprogramación expuesta porBlackwell andAaron[2015]

comprensión enactiva (entenderen la medida en que se hace)

Data Rodas

DataSelfies de Twitter

Estos caminos recorridos y prototipos que fallaron o deja-ron de ser centrales, constituyen un repertorio latente de soluciones y técnicas quepueden ser desplegados en artefactos y prácticas posteriores (exaptación, en pala-bras deJonas[2004]).

esfuerzos gentrificadores dentro de la noción del emprendimiento y la innova-ción social

Codiseñar Autonomías:artefactos digitales amoldables, hacktivismo y ciudadanías

Sprint Beyond the Book: Scholarly Publishing

An Open Web

Learning Object-OrientedProgramming, Design and TDDwith Pharo

(-) lua_metadata Lua metadata. An HTML comment beginning <!--@ and containing lua variable declarations is treated as metadata. Note that strings are read literally unless they are explicitly marked as markdown using the markdown (or m) function. Lua metadata can occur anywhere in a document. Example: <!--@ title = m"My title with *italics*" abstract = m[[ This is my abstract. * point one * point two ]] author = { "Me", "You" } -->

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Living in Your Programming Environment

h. Furthermore, there is noteven a correct way to define what an object is; different ontologies emerge from thelogic and metaphors of different languages. The whole task of designing a programinvolves determining how best to delimit the set of objects and their interfaces that willconstitute the program. Thus, both the creators of programming languages and pro-grammers themselves must do ontological work, in so much as a given program mustbe broken into its ontological componen

Smalltalk also advanced this metaphor of computation as objects along anotherrelated track that turned computation into a self-referential system of interactingcomputers. Kay (1996) describes this understanding of objects in relation to computers.Smalltalk is a recursion on the notion of computer itself. Instead of dividingBcomputer stuff^into things each less strong than the whole—like data structures,procedures, and functions which are the usual paraphernalia of programminglanguages—each Smalltalk object is a recursion on the entire possibilities of thecomputer. Thus its semantics are a bit like having thousands and thousands ofcomputer all hooked together by a very fast network. Questions of concreterepresentation can thus be postponed almost indefinit

With this shift, time drops out as a fundamental ontologicalcomponent and the object is left to manage its own internal affairs. We can see in thishow much the work of creating programming languages is a process of describing theworld and crafting a language that can allow the programmer to describe a world ofcomputation. It is a developmental process, wherein certain ideas and metaphors forcomputation have succeeded and others have fallen asi

These developments were not only a change in metaphors but also produced changes inthe underlying code of the compiler

“los artefactos evolucionan a partir de artefactos, y los libros a partir de libros”.

Por ejemplo, cómo diseñar espacios donde las organizaciones colaborativas puedan crear condiciones para dignificar las múltiples memorias existentes del pasado, reconocer la existencia de múltiples mundos superpuestos y, por lo tanto, dar resonancia a los numerosos futuros que pueblan, inevitablemente, el espacio discursivo y emocional de la amplia gama de habitantes de la bioregión.

ay una gran necesidad de métodos que permitan el diseño colaborativo a lo largo de períodos más largos de lo habitual, que construyan a partir de los roles cambiantes de los diseñadores en esta temporalidad extendida (más allá de ser, digamos, iniciadores o facilitadores) y que tomen en serio la naturaleza distribuida de la agencia del diseño, incluyendo, hay que añadir, a los nohumanos. La articulación de prácticas de diseño-en-uso en el contexto de actividades colectivas de diseño de más larga duración es particularmente importante en este momento.

En estas condiciones, ¿es siquiera posible un ejercicio de diseño de transición? Más aún, ¿podría tener alguna influencia real en las políticas públicas, las mentalidades, las acciones y las prácticas? Plantear esta pregunta significa poner a prueba este capítulo, y el libro, por así decirlo.

Cada proceso de diseño implica un enunciado de problemas y posibilidades

Una implicación perspicaz para el diseño del concepto de agencia distribuida es el hecho de que “entre más disperso y en red esté un sistema, más grande y más conectada será su interfaz con la sociedad y más tendrá que ser considerado el lado social de la innovación” (Manzini 2015: 17). Los resultados son sistemas más resilientes y una redefinición del trabajo, las relaciones y el bienestar, muchas veces de manera similar al BV

Además de los cambios en la forma de pensar, por lo tanto, uno podría esperar la creación de habilidades apropiadas para la tarea que enfrentan los diseñadores para la transición.

En el Norte las características de la edad por venir incluyen el post-crecimiento, lo post-materialista, post-económico, post-capitalista y post-humano; en el Sur se expresan en términos de post-desarrollo, lo no liberal, post/no capitalista, biocéntrico y post-extractivista

Todo diseño es para ‘uso’ enactivo (pero no involucra sólo ‘usuarios’); produce eficacia operacional (pero no ‘utilidad’); fomenta la autopoiesis de las entidades vivas y de los conjuntos heterogéneos de vida; es consciente de vivir en el pluriverso.

Evita la desfuturización en objetos y pone de presente la contribución de la tecnología a la insostenibilidad. Articula la imaginación y la tecnología ontológicamente; reconceptualiza ‘mundo’ para crear posibilidades de futurización; y enfrenta la antropogénesis de la tecnicidad

La acústica une forma y evento, convocando a un replanteamiento de la relación entre proceso, diseño y materialidad.

se pueden diseñar dispositivos para transformar, gradualmente, nuestras maneras principales de entender y de ser

Al crear nuevos artefactos, equipos, edificios y estructuras organizativas intenta especificar, con antelación, cómo y dónde se mostrarán las rupturas en nuestras prácticas cotidianas y en las herramientas que utilizamos, abriendo nuevos espacios en los que podemos trabajar y jugar. El diseño con orientación ontológica es, necesariamente, reflexivo y político; reflexiona sobre la tradición que nos ha formado pero imagina transformaciones aún no realizadas de nuestras vidas en sociedad. A través de la emergencia de nuevas herramientas llegamos a una conciencia cambiante de la naturaleza y acción humanas; esto conduce a nuevo desarrollo tecnológico. El proceso de diseño es parte de esta “danza” en la que se genera nuestra estructura de posibilidades

la estructura ontológica del diseño está compuesta de las interrelaciones entre la herramienta, el usuario y la tarea o propósito, todos reunidos por la interfaz.

<table style="width:100%"> <tbody><tr> <td> </td> <td> </td> </tr> </tbody></table>

Las rupturas son momentos en los que se interrumpe el modo habitual de ser-en-el-mundo; cuando ocurre una descomposición de este tipo nuestras prácticas consuetudinarias y el papel de nuestras herramientas en su mantenimiento quedan expuestas y aparecen nuevas soluciones de diseño;

Esta tradición atrapa nuestra imaginación mediante metáforas limitantes, como la de las computadoras como cerebros, como meros dispositivos de procesamiento de información o, en términos del lenguaje, como medio para la transmisión de información (véase Dreyfus 1979 para una crítica de la inteligencia artificial desde esta perspectiva). Por eso es necesario ‘desocultar’ o revelar esa tradición al hacer explícitas sus suposiciones, como hice en el capítulo anterior. De este modo el objetivo de estos autores es una redirección, más que un desmantelamiento, de la tradición pero el objetivo de la redirección es sustancial: «desarrollar un nuevo terreno para la racionalidad —que sea tan riguroso como la tradición racionalista pero que no comparta sus supuestos» (

¿Por qué el diseño podría considerarse «ontológico»? La respuesta inicial a esta pregunta es sencilla: «encontramos la cuestión profunda del diseño cuando reconocemos que al diseñar herramientas estamos diseñando formas de ser» (Winograd y Flores 1986: xi). Si entendemos por diseño «la interacción entre el entendimiento y la creación» (Winograd y Flores 1986: 4), podemos decir que es ontológico porque es una conversación sobre posibilidades. Una forma más para llegar a la dimensión ontológica del diseño es abordando «la pregunta más amplia de cómo una sociedad engendra invenciones cuya existencia altera dicha sociedad» (Winograd y Flores 1986: 4-5). Las tecnologías digitales (como la imprenta, el automóvil o la televisión en el pasado) son, por supuesto, casos dramáticos de innovaciones radicales que abrieron ámbitos de posibilidades sin precedentes; transformaron todo un conjunto de prácticas cotidianas. Cada herramienta y tecnología es ontológica en el sentido de que, por muy humilde o insignificante que sea, inaugura una serie de rituales, formas de hacer y modos de ser (Escobar 1994). Las tecnologías son lo que Haraway llamó «actores materiales-semióticos” (1991) que contribuyen a dar forma a lo que es ser humano.Un segundo sentido en el que el diseño es ontológico, ya insinuado por Winograd y Flores, es que al diseñar herramientas los humanos diseñamos las condiciones de nuestra existencia y, a su vez, las condiciones de nuestro diseño. Diseñamos herramientas y estas herramientas nos diseñan. ‘El diseño diseña’ es la fórmula apta y corta dada a esta circularidad por Anne-Marie Willis:

“tenemos que ampliar nuestro horizonte para abarcar tradiciones no Occidentales de reflexión sobre la experiencia” (

En Decolonizing methodologies [Metodologías descolonizadoras] la pensadora Maori Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999: 36) reflexiona sobre los riesgos que surgen cuando los pueblos indígenas utilizan la escritura académica para discutir su historia y su situación de opresión; al hacerlo, ella pregunta: ¿no corren el riesgo de escribir sobre los pueblos indígenas “como si realmente estuviéramos ‘ahí’, como el ‘Otro’, con todo lo que esto conlleva”? (Smith 1999: 36). En otras palabras, ¿este tipo de pensamiento dualista y logocéntrico no permea, inevitablemente, nuestras representaciones? Como Smith añadiera: “la escritura académica es una forma de seleccionar, organizar y presentar el conocimiento... [Refuerza y mantiene] un estilo de discurso que nunca es inocente” (1999: 36). Me parece que esta preocupación con la escritura logocéntrica es similar a la de Varela. La condición de posibilidad de la escritura académica todavía es una cierta ratio occidental, un rasgo que caracteriza a todo el sistema de las ciencias humanas y sociales dentro de la episteme moderna (F

la invención de algo llamado ‘la economía’ como un dominio independiente de pensamiento y acción ligado a otra poderosa ficción, el mercado autorregulador —con la ciencia económica supuestamente a cargo de decirnos la verdad al respecto—.9 Aunque es posible que la economía neoliberal haya sido sacudida hasta la médula por la crisis financiera de 2007-2008, el imaginario económico en términos de individuos que realizan transacciones en los mercados, la producción, el crecimiento ilimitado, el capital, el progreso, la escasez y el consumo continúa sin obstáculos. Co

la comprensión del mundo es mucho más amplia que la comprensión Occidental del mundo. E

los productos digitales también viven en el mundo social y lo cambian. El diseño digital no puede operar fuera de su contexto social porque los archivos, los sistemas y los medios sólo tienen significado como parte de la práctica de una comunidad. El diseño eficaz y significativo es una actividad social en la que el diseñador es un actor entre muchos. Además de computadores, software, información digital y medios los materiales del diseño digital también incluyen comunidades, procesos, prácticas y cultura y los diseñadores tienen que estar equipados con la habilidad correcta para tratar con estos elementos (

Diseñar, por lo tanto, se convierte en una práctica crítica localizada, que vincula la dimensión abierta (open source) de la tecnología con la práctica cultural del diseño.9Como lo anuncia un reciente texto sobre metodologías de diseño, este tiene lugaren términos de conocimientos, contextos, acciones, y aprendizajes situados, ya no neutrales ni universales (Simonsen et al. 2014). A partir de este debate es importante destacar la relevancia que estos diseñadores dan a las preguntas sobre el lugar, la localidad y la comunidad en su revisión de la práctica del diseño como un correctivo a la aceptación acrítica de las tecnologías digitales móviles y como una manera de redefinir su papel en la vida cotidiana.

La buena noticia, sin embargo, es que ya están sucediendo cosas más allá de lo usual en muchos ámbitos sociales, políticos y tecnológicos (como veremos más adelante, las transiciones civilizatorias ya están surgiendo); la mala noticia es que quizás no están sucediendo con la rapidez suficiente, si nos atenemos a los criterios de científicos y activistas del cambio climático

Podemos encontrar respuestas a estas preguntas, distintas pero complementarias, tanto en los mundos activistas como académicos.

Un proceso ininterrumpido de reconstrucción convivencial es posible a condición de que el cuerpo social proteja el poder de las personas y de las colectividades para modificar y renovar sus estilos de vida, sus herramientas, su ambiente; dicho de otra forma, su poder para dar a la realidad un rostro nuevo [...] Estamos hablando de una sociedad que diversifica los modos de producción. Poner límites a la producción industrial tiene, para nosotros, el objetivo de liberar el futuro [...] Una sociedad congelada sería tan insoportable para el hombre como la sociedad de la aceleración: entre las dos se sitúa la sociedad de la innovación convivencial

El punto de partida es, de nuevo, aparentemente sencillo: que cada comunidad practica el diseño de sí misma. Este fue, puede argumentarse, el caso en las comunidades tradicionales (que producían las normas con las que vivían sus vidas, en gran medida de forma endógena) y lo es, todavía en muchas comunidades, tanto en el Sur Global como en el Norte Global, que abordan el diseño de sí mismas frente a las manifestaciones de las crisis, cada vez más profundas, y la inescapable mediación tecno-económica de sus mundos.

El diseño ontológico surge de una observación aparentemente simple: que al diseñar herramientas (objetos, estructuras, políticas, sistemas expertos, discursos, incluso narrativas) estamos creando formas de ser. Una idea clave en este sentido es lo que Anne Marie Willis ha llamado “el doble movimiento de diseño ontológico” (2006), a saber, la toma de conciencia de que diseñamos nuestro mundo y que, al hacerlo, nuestro mundo nos diseña —en pocas palabras, que el diseño diseña—

el diseño y la diferencia tienen que ver con la creación de la forma. Se trata de la morfogénesis, en el sentido amplio de la palabra;

el metarrelato del ‘razonamiento abstracto’ del conocimiento ignora una característica muy importante de la producción de conocimiento que el pensamiento de diseño no olvida: el hecho de que la creación es siempre emergente, en los dos sentidos del término, es decir, auto-organizada y ‘alter-organizada’. Este último calificativo significa que el académico/diseñador también establece elementos y toma decisiones que permiten que la dinámica de auto-organización despegue y haga su trabajo.

co. El diseño es ontológico porque cada objeto, herramienta, servicio o, incluso, narrativa en los que está involucrado, crea formas particulares de ser, saber y hacer

actors increasingly invest human, technological and financial resources in ‘“being the media” instead of hating it’ (Cammaerts 2012: 125). The CCC is no exception in this regard. over the past two decades, Club members have initiated a reg-ular radio show (Chaosradio), podcasts (e.g. CRE and Alternativlos), accounts on both popular and alternative online platforms such as Twitter, Quitter and personal blogs, to name some of the more promi-nent examples. Instead of abandoning outward oriented channels such as the Chaosradio show or the Datenschleuder magazine, the Club inte-grates its ‘trans-media’ (Costanza-Chock 2014) efforts into a ‘media manifold’ (Couldry 2012), where one communicative practice does not necessarily substitute for the other, but plays a part in the Club’s overall media ensemble.

Richard Ericson and his colleagues (1989) make a useful distinc-tion between media access and media coverage. By access, they mean the news space, time and context to reasonably represent one’s own perspec-tive, whereas coverage entails news space and time but not necessarily the context for favourable representations (Ericson etal. 1989: 5). This distinction is vital because it demonstrates that media access—as with access to all kinds of resources at institutional levels—remains a politi-cal question (Freedman 2014). While media coverage simply denotes the amount and prominence of attention and visibility a group receives, media access indicates that an actor has a particular standing and is treated as an actor with a serious voice in the media

a lower number of partici-pating members also meant a lower number of differing opinions; which, in turn, enabled the group to keep the frames of relevance more focused and to make decisions in a timely manner. Accordingly, performing direct digital action in the form of hacking was directly related to com-municative practices, as they later played an important role in relation to organizing, coordinating and executing the Club’s political project

Pads were an advancement on wikis, for example, as they brought different technological affordances together and ena-bled CCC members to act interlinked, multi-locally, and time-efficient. Depending on the particular need of the group, different communica-tive practices that formed layers of exclusivity fluently merged from one application to another. While the use of particular tools such as IRC and Pads was creating and underlining organizational structures, this was not only done for reasons of secrecy or exclusivity. The fact that only a selected number of individuals were involved in particular activities and included in exclusive communicative practices was to a large degree also down to practicality. Considering the growing size of the CCC, the Club’s activities and internal organization would be simply unmanage-able without the discussed practices

, IRC was a much more restricted channel: it allowed longer-term, active and trusted mem-bers to communicate amongst each other and to form small groups that shared valuable information. Being able to communicate with each other through online systems such as IRC allowed the CCC to create different layers of exclusivity in which members could communicate one to one and amongst a selected few. These layers permitted the hackers to solve most of the issues related to keeping up boundaries between internal and external communication. Likewise, these layers formed and deepened existing organizational structures within the Club by creating exclusive communication environments for the sake of executing political work in more dynamic and secretive ways.More recently, the spectrum of these tools has, of course, increased beyond IRC.

CriticalArtEnsemble(CAE)

differentplatformsproducedifferentsociotechnicalarrangements—rules,norms,procedures,protocols,code,andalgorithms—inordertocreateaneffectivepresentationfortheirusers.Thesearrangements,orwhatwecallconventions,accomplishnotonlyasenseoffairnessbutalsostronghierarchiesthroughwhichnewsisproduced.[19]Thereisnoreasontobelievethattheseplatformsfeatureflathierarchiesorsmoothspacesofdialogue;rather,theyarehierarchicalandstriated.Theissuesofstatusandgatekeepingareasprominentintheseplatformsastheyareelsewhere.

Thatis,ratherthanasimplequestionofchoiceorexchangeeconomy,citizensubjectsarecaughtbetweenthedemandstoparticipateandconnect—andallthereasonsandvaluestheyattachtothis—andtheinterests,imperatives,andtrade-offsconfiguredbyplatformowners.Butitwouldbewrongtoreducethistomerelytheinterestofplatformowners,whichareonlyoneelementinthemake-upofconventionssuchasbrowsing.Theconventionsofsocialnetworkinginevitablyembodythesocialandculturalnorms,rules,andcustomsofwhichcitizensubjectsareapartandtakepart

filterbubblessortandnarrowtheknowledgecitizensubjectsaccessandseparatethemintoindividualizeduniverseswheretherulesoftheirformationareinvisible.

Soifopennessisanimaginarythatcallsuponcitizensubjectstoparticipate,thenclosingsseektofurtherconfiguretheactionsthroughwhichparticipationisdone.Butthisisneversettled.Thetworemainintension.

‘equipthewholecountrywiththeskills,motivation,andtrusttogoonline,bedigitallycapableandtomakethemostoftheinternet....Ifwesucceed,by2020everyonewhocanbedigitallycapable,willbe.’

Mossbergeretal.,forexample,understanddigitalcitizenshipastheabilitytofullyparticipateinsocietyonline,whichrequiresregularaccesstotheInternet,withadequatedevicesandspeeds,technologicalskillsandcompetence,andinformationliteracy.[21]Equippingthusincludesnotonlyhardware,suchasinstallingcomputersinclassroomsandlibrariesandexpandinghigh-speedbroadbandservices,butalsodevelopingskillsandcapabilitiesthroughtrainingcoursesincomputing,coding,andprogramming

‘Theforceoftheperformativeisthusnotinheritedfrompriorusage,butissuesforthpreciselyfromitsbreakwithanyandallpriorusage.Thatbreak,thatforceofrupture,istheforceoftheperformative,beyondallquestionoftruthormeaning.’[22]Forpoliticalsubjectivity,‘performativitycanworkinpreciselysuchcounter-hegemonicways.Thatmomentinwhichaspeechactwithoutpriorauthorizationneverthelessassumesauthorizationinthecourseofitsperformancemayanticipateandinstatealteredcontextsforitsfuturereception.’[23]Toconceiveruptureasasystemicortotalupheavalwouldbefutile.Rather,ruptureisamomentwherethefuturebreaksthroughintothepresent.[24]Itisthatmomentwhereitbecomespossibletodosomethingdifferentinorbysayingsomethingdifferent.

The "doing it together" instinct in HMSs may be one precipitated out around projects. Cognitive, classroom-based definitions of project-based learning tend to be formulaic (Blumenfeld et al., 1991). By comparison, the colloquial definition of project can be handily ambiguous about what is under construction. A project can be artistic, technical, or culinary (in the case of "food hacking"). It can be related to one's occupation, entirely recreational, or part of a movement from one to the other.

FC: But there could have been another way? AK: It’s been an idea in the ARPA/PARC community—which hasn’t been funded since 1980 or so, but a lot of us are still alive—one of the ideas was that in personal computing, what you really need is some form of mentor that’s an integral part of the user interface. FC: Something like a digital assistant? AK: It’s something just like the GUI, which I had a lot to do with designing. I did that, more or less, as a somewhat disappointed reaction to realizing [AI] is just a hard problem. We had some of the best AI people in the whole world at PARC, but the computers were really small for what AI needs.

FC:But there could have been another way?AK:It’s been an idea in the ARPA/PARC community—which hasn’t beenfunded since 1980 or so, but a lot of us are still alive—one of the ideas was thatin personal computing, what you really need is some form of mentor that’s anintegral part of the user interface.FC: Something like a digital assistant?AK:It’s something just like the GUI, which I had a lot to do with designing. Idid that, more or less, as a somewhat disappointed reaction to realizing [AI] isjust a hard problem. We had some of the best AI people in the whole world atPARC, but the computers were really small for what AI needs.

To Mills, the imagination was activated according to the structure of society, conceptualization of “the mechanics by which it is changing” (p. 6), and prevailing “varieties” of individuals of the period. Individuals have personal troubles that can be connected with issues of a public matter. The civic imagination has the potential to be activated around deep societal problems, which may involve institutional crises. The civic imagination is closely connected with participation. Castoriadis (1987)diverged from Marx by believing that not all futures were determined by history.Castoriadis believed that society’s future was collectively created and given traction through the imagination. That is, it was only “through the collective agency of the social imaginary that a society is created, given coherence and identity, and also subjected to auto-alterations” (Gaonkar, 2002, p. 7). To Appadurai (1996), the imagination was also intimately related to action because it was only in the service of fulfilling an as-yet unproven goal that we are driven to act.

A more diverse range of participants attended, as civic hackathons were more frequented by community organizers, activists, and students than seasoned software engineers. Those who turned up were also more diverse in ways other than occupation – racially, ethnically, and by gender. These events were largely run by Hack for LA with a wide range of partners. Rarely did sponsors emphasize working code

the civic hackathon violated the very conventions of hackathons. It had “no hacking” in the traditional sense of creating or modifying working software. This curious disappearing act of code in hackathons over the last several years was controversial among programmers. Thea Aldrich of Random Hacks of Kindness wondered aloud when I interviewed her in 2013, “don’t community organizers already have ways to engage politically?” To Thea “civic hacking” was a form of civic engagement particular to the technically adept.

Civic hackathons have been hotly debated in recent years. Critical studies scholars have lambasted civic hackathons for aligning with middle-class citizenship(Irani, 2015)and co-opting participant labor (Gregg, 2014a). Silicon Valley is often the fait accompliin these perspectives, bringing a flawed ideology that seduces organizers and participants into transposing technological language onto civic issues (Also see: Barbrook & Cameron, 1996; Morozov, 2013). In this paper I refer to this perspective as an “imposed civic ideology.” The second perspective comes from design scholars interested in material participation (Marres, 2012) as cohering publics to work on particular social issues. Lodato and DiSalvo (2016) suggested that civic hackathons served two purposes. First, they help people think through civic issues using props — “objects, services, and systems that engage with issues” (p. 16). Second, they cohere ephemeral proto-publics for short-term engagement on issues of public concern. As they summarized, "what is important is not the inventiveness of a particular prototype product or service, but rather, how the event fosters opportunities for collaborative or collective issue articulation" (p. 15). They drew attention to how outcomes of civic hackathons may more likely be social and cultural than functional material objects. I refer to this design perspective as an “emergent civic subjectivity.”

Creolization, however, does not seek or avoid conflict but aims to transform tech-nology or come up with new practices so that the technical systems better serves user needs. Creolization draws on bricolage practices (Lévi-Strauss, 1966), identifying the components of the technology that can be re-used, modified, or recombined to create something new. Creolization finds users more deeply involved in transforming technol-ogy than baroquization.

First, the range of possibilities explored depends on the latitude for experimentation afforded by the technology. Second, the intensity with which innovations are explored reflects the

In fact, the manner in which providers negotiate this transition (how they handle the power shift) matters to the future success of technology and to the likelihood that users will further adopt and experiment.At the end of the repossession stage, a new or modified technology becomes availa-ble, upon which new rounds of adoption, appropriation, and repossession take place

Initially, user practices do not change fundamentally: users do old things in new ways. For example, users make calls on a mobile phone instead of a wired phone or a public phone, but they carry out similar conversations, with the same people. New technology may allow existing practices to become more efficient—cheaper, faster, less place-bound—but not fundamentally different.

Our three-stage cycle of technology evolution begins when users adopt a technology and employ it to support their social or business activities. In a second stage, users appropri-ate technology: they experiment, try possibilities, and shape technology to fit their needs. In the third stage, providers take back control and repossess technology to re-configure it, reacting to the changes introduced through user appropriation. A new technology results, entering a new cycle as users adopt, appropriate anew, and prompt further repos-session, and so on (Bar, 1990).

First, we view technology evolution as a three-stage cyclical process of adoption, appropriation, and repossession. Users drive adoption. Users and providers alternatively drive appropriation and repossession, as users lead appropriation, while providers react when reclaiming the resulting innova-tions. Second, we identify three appropriation modes—baroquize, creolize, and canni-balize—that represent increasing degrees of power contestation by users. And third, we identify three repossession modes—co-opt, combine, and block—that represent increas-ingly antagonistic reactions by providers and mirror users’ appropriation strategies.

Users may modify a device, download, or program new applications, invent unintended uses, or develop new practices that leverage its possibilities. This experimentation constitutes a re-negotiation of the power relationships embedded in the technology. This creative re-negotiation is the core of appropriation, the process through which users take something external and make it their own.

For a technology to evolve in accordance with users’ needs, aiding social and economic development, the focus must move beyond mere adoption. When users appropriate technology and make it their own, new uses and innovations emerge. The appropriation process is a contest for control over a technological system’s configuration, as users, designers, and manufacturers battle over who can use that technology, at what cost, under what conditions, for what purpose, and with what consequences. This confrontation, we argue, constitutes a powerful innovation mechanism.

I like to think of Pollen markup a way of capturing not just the text, but also my ideas about the text. Some of these are low-level ideas (“this text should be italicized”). Some are high-level ideas (“this text is the topic of the page”). Some are just notes to myself. In short, everything I know about the text becomes part of the text.In so doing, Pollen markup becomes the source code of the book.

Might “utopian realist” be applicable to the practices of civic hackers, intertwined with particular repertoires, technologies, and affective publics? McKenzie Wark (2014) sug-gests that the relationship between utopian and realist might be mutually constitutive rather than dialectical. He re-frames utopia as a realizable fragment or diagram that re-imagines relations. From this perspective, civic hacking gets traction not because they were ever intended to be the sole “solution” to a problem, but they are ways of acting and creating that are immediately apprehensible. Prototypes capture the imagination because they are shards of a possible future and can be created, modified, and argued about (Coleman, 2009).

Projects, as an entanglement, are “open, partial and indeterminate” (Hodder, 2012, p. 159).They might be being showed off at the next open house, orentirely forgotten. Peter noted that his hard drive was filling up with “functionally dead” shelved projects that got boring or require expertise from outside the space. Yet, to Peter failure was an indication of project success. He believed, as scholars of innovation do, that embracing failure contributed to better ideas. Projects also carried an ethical charge. Michael, a quiet member and software professional, reflected at length on what he called the “philosophical” side of projects. He saw them an inroad to “participation in the fabrication process” that was empowering. In his words, projects were “manufacturing liberation.”

These more formalized gatherings were an attempt to get people working and collaborating in a space that had mainly turned into a spot for hanging out, drinking and foosball. The shift to the new space was seen as an opportunity to encourage members to use the space in a more productive way. The space needed members as much as members needed the tools. Members echoed a liberalist concern with increasing freedom of individuals to act, while retaining hobbyist cultures’ engagement with materialities. Often hackerspace members also described the need for a hackerspace as part of a shift in their city’s economy

Interactions through things, and perceptions about their potential, were ways to negotiate between seemingly conflicting imperatives of the individualism and communalism (A. L. Toombs, Bardzell, & Bardzell). Members would deliberately design activities that were incomplete to encourage a playful material improvisation. In these ways, the “material sensibilities” of members were particularly important. Similarly, reading a history of craft into software hacking, Lingel and Regan (2014) found that software hackers identified their work with craft as process, embodiment, and community. These sensitive readings of interactions with stuff seemed to more accurately capture the genre of hackerspaces, more so than action was guided by culture.

This work perceptively suggested that people often don’t arrive at hackerspaces with an identity fully-formed. Tools and projects, as socio-material assemblages, shepherded new arrivals in and helped them understand

Computing is to take the role of an infrastructure: much as books need light, but are not modeled after the light’s logic, the medium might draw, where necessary, on the computing possibilities provided by the OS in the background, but it should not be driven by them. Instead, the dynamic spatial medium should be driven by properties of the medium itself, and as such, it should drive technology.

in a continuous process of “augmenting human intellect.” According to Engelbart, the latter can be achieved through the process of “bootstrapping.” This is a term that can mean many things in the Silicon Valley, from initiating systems to kicking off startups, but in the context of Engelbart’s work, bootstrapping is the “…interesting (recursive) assignment of developing tools and techniques to make it more effective at carrying out its assignment. Its tangible product is a developing augmentation system to provide increased capability for developing and studying augmentation systems” (Engelbart and English 2003:234). Just as Moore’s so-called law, this is a dream of exponential progress emerging out of nonlinear, self-enforcing feedback. How much more Californian can you be?

Elaborating on what I said earlier, RoR has an appeal to web developers because, given the skills they have, it provides an "instant gratification" that's very real for them, in the same way that Squeak does for graphics and text. In that way it's approachable. That approachability makes it "worth the trip" to learn about more of it.

Furthermore, the results could focus on drawing the user into the virtual app space (immersive) or could use the portable nature of tablet to extend the experience into the physical space inhabited by the user (something I have called ’emersive’). Generative (emersive) Books that project coloured ambient light and/or audio into a darkened space Generative (immersive) Books that display abstracted video/audio from cameras/microphone, collaged or augmented with pre-designed content Books that contain location specific content from the internet combined with pre-authored/designed content

From far away, successful Bazaars look like moneyless anarchic systems, but up close, the bulk of responsibility falls on a couple of people, who are usually being paid to do the work.

Open source projects don’t start as communitiesMany would agree that open source projects don’t start out as Bazaars, but just in case, I’ll emphasize the point. Raymond himself wrote:It’s fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn’t try it. I didn’t either.Somebody has to be chiefly responsible for an open source project’s initial development. In Linux’s case, it was Linus. Somebody has to live and breathe the problem all day. Once that project is in a stable position, the community helps support it.

Not every committer has the rights to release or make high level decisions, so we can be much more liberal about giving out commit rights. That increases the committer base for code review and bug triage. As a wider range of expertise in the committer pool smaller changes are reviewed and adjusted without the intervention of the more technical contributors, who can spend their time on reviews only they can do.

A key part of the liberal contribution policies we’ve been building is an inversion of the typical code review process. Rather than the default mode for a change to be rejected until enough people sign off, we make the default for every change to land. This puts the onus on reviewers to note exactly what adjustments need to be made in order for it to land.

Vocabulary* A Contributor is any individual creating or commenting on an issue or pull request. * A Committer is a subset of contributors who have been given write access to the repository. * A TC (Technical Committee) is a group of committers representing the required technical expertise to resolve rare disputes.

“Funding infrastructure” means more than funding maintainers. This is partially why I think crowdfunding platforms and donation campaigns, while helpful, can only go so far.Instead, we need to take a holistic approach to sustainability: fixing systems, not just throwing money at the same old problems and forcing developers to figure it all out themselves.

But ultimately you have to stop being meta. As Jeff Kaufman — a developer in Cambridge who's famous among effective altruists for, along with his wife Julia Wise, donating half their household's income to effective charities — argued in a talk about why global poverty should be a major focus, if you take meta-charity too far, you get a movement that's really good at expanding itself but not necessarily good at actually helping people.

The second reason for avoiding the GPL is that it does not work well in the context of systems which embed their own code in documents. Programs such as GCC avoid this by having specific exemptions for the embedded code, but it is not possible for us to add this exemption to code taken from elsewhere. This is a problem, since a document in an object-oriented environment is a collection of objects, and objects are a combination of code and data. This could lead to the documents becoming accidentally GPL'd.

If we must be gods, we should at least be cautious and well-informed gods, with the best possible tools for seeing, understanding, and debating our interventions, and the best possible meta-tools for improving those tools.

Imagine an authoring tool designed for arguing from evidence. I don’t mean merely juxtaposing a document and reference material, but literally “autocompleting” sourced facts directly into the document. Perhaps the tool would have built-in connections to fact databases and model repositories, not unlike the built-in spelling dictionary. What if it were as easy to insert facts, data, and models as it is to insert emoji and cat photos?

When pursuing the Early Adopters, don't spend time putting in features that only the Conservatives care about.

So you have to treat them like they are very special.  Give them everything they want, almost as if they were ordering a custom application.  You may have to implement special features just for them.  You may have to give them substantial discounts.  You should visit their site and meet them in person.  You may have to install your product for them. 

But mature languages can't change easily if at all. This situation is described in theory of frozen evolution. Basically the evolution of language is similar of the evolution of a new specie. Evolution happens in short burst when the new language(specie) is created. In this period language design is plastic, there are few if any users, little amount of code and libraries and the community consists of enthusiasts. This short period of plasticity is fallowed by a long period of stability. The evolution of the language is frozen. There are few tweaks here and there but nothing radical. And nobody , not even the original creator could change that.

As a result, while plenty of amateur developers use open source projects, those people aren’t interested in, or capable of, seriously giving back. They might be able to contribute a minor bug or fix, but the heavy lifting is still left to the veterans.