October 2017

There were 3 posts published in October 2017 (this is page 1 of 1).

Conferences with social media hashtags are great, because those hashtags mean that you can still glean from them even if you can’t attend. It can also be overwhelming when there’s so much goodness happening on a conference hashtag that you want to share everything you find. There’s also the problem of all the great content being generated on one social network essentially being locked into that network as long as we’re only sharing it on that network. So I’ve decided to start sharing the cool stuff I find from various conferences as blog posts. That way everyone can take advantage of it whether they’re on a particular social network or not, and I can avoid filling up people’s timelines with reposts. I can also take the liberty of providing screenshotted text in text form so that everyone can read it.

Here are my gleanings from MozFest. MozFest was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 2010. Originally named “Drumbeat,” the festival convened a community of people dedicated to learning, freedom and the open Web. Each year MozFest centers around a particular theme, and this year’s is the health of the web as a whole, (spoiler alert: It’s not good), and how we as contributors to the web can improve it. Everyone is a contributor to the health of the web, not just the people who make the software that powers it or allows people to access it or allows people to easily create content for it. This year, MozFest consisted of nine floors of talks, workshops and exhibits. Once the speaker talks are available somewhere other than Facebook Live, I’ll share some of those as well, in separate posts.

All of the content I’m sharing is publicly available within the constraints of Twitter or Facebook. I’m sharing it in the order I read it. I’ve also transcribed any screenshots I’ve shared. I’ve shared directly from the social networks, so you have the opportunity to share on your own timelines if you want, without copying and pasting. Enjoy.

Meet this year’s Mozilla Festival speakers.

Only 20% of the world, primarily white folks, are
editing 80% of Wikipedia’s content—that’s kind of
telling. Together, we realised that most of our
collective understanding of the world is still being
written by a minority.

–SIHO BOUTERSE

What we need are companies that are
not advertising platforms, to make
browsers — the basic tech of the net.

Mishi Choudhary

Have a security policy. You can think of it like the
things you are already doing to be digitally safe.
Maybe this is where it all begins.

Matt Mitchell

Digital inequality is just as bad
as any inequality.

–Alan Knott-Craig

To be digitally safe as an organisation, you need
to think of a checklist. It is a matter of time until
something happens… This checklist saves
people. If anything happens, you know what to
do.

–Matt Mitchell

Making a healthy
Internet is not a spectator
sport

–Mark Surman

More products include software inside them to be
updated over time, but practically the support to these
products ends a lot sooner than the companies are
willing to provide a warranty for the product—which is
probably insane.

–Ugo Vallauri

“I think all of us are feeling [an] urgency….You have
instability—I have been thinking about the need for
knowledge, the need for inclusion, the need for the
power and potential of the movement.

–Ryan Merkley

The Trump Administration thinks that letting some
telecom companies treating some content more
favourably than others is a good thing. Think about
how these companies treat it already. It could not be
any worse

–Ashley Black

You’ll now detox one of the browsers you use on your computer (you’ll clean up your mobile browsers
later, on Day 5). By the end of todays detox, you should be blocking a lot more information from trackers, and this in turn should make your browser less unique – since there’s less information to form a
“fingerprint”,
The devil’s in the default “Privacy Settings”
No browser’s default privacy settings are actually private by default: most store cookies, as well as
your browsing history, webform entries and other information-which can then get shared.
But Chrome, Firefox and Safari all offer a special “Private” or “Incognito” browsing mode, set to
automatically delete your browsing history, cookies, temporary files and webform entries every
time you close the browser. Note: your bookmarks and downloads are not deleted.
Try it out:
1. Open your browser (Firefox, Chrome or Safari) and go to File -• New Private/incognito Window
(depending on the browser).
2. To set Private Browsing permanently in Firefox or Safari, go to:
Firefox: menu>Preferences>Privacy>settings for history

Note on this transcribed screenshot: The last bit of text at the end is too garbled for me to make out and correct, but the steps listed above are still useful. There will be an online version of the data detox kit coming soon, and as soon as that’s available I’ll link to that instead.
https://twitter.com/hennazb/status/924229826617147392


https://twitter.com/Audesome/status/924265970516090885

Inclusive Design 24 (ID24) is happening again on November 16, and I can hardly wait. If you’re not aware of what ID24 is, it’s twenty-four hours of free talks on accessibility and inclusive design. Each talk runs for about an hour, and the entire event lasts for twenty-four hours straight. I told myself I wasn’t going to stay up for twenty-four hours again at the end of the last event, but now that it’s happening again I’m seriously reconsidering that, because it’s so much fun and there’s so much stuff to learn and cool people to engage with using the hashtag on Twitter.

In anticipation of ID24 happening again, I thought I’d share my favorite web-related talks from past events. The one I’m sharing today is “Designing for Inclusion with Media Queries,” and it was given by Eric Bailey. Eric is a Boston-based user experience designer who helps create straightforward solutions that address a person’s practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs using accessible, performant, device-agnostic technology. You can find him on Twitter as @ericwbailey and you can read more about his work at ericwbailey.design.


For me, one of the best parts of the web has always been blogs. They’re an expression of the web as it was meant to be, at least in one aspect. Open and independent. Somehow we all got sucked in by the convenience of social media, and while social media has meant that it’s sometimes easier to stay connected, we’ve traded a lot in exchange for that ease of connection, and most of it isn’t good. But more on that in another post.

What’s a blog challenge?

Put simply, a blog challenge is setting yourself a goal to write a blog post at least once a day for a certain number of days. The one I’m participating in this month is called the Ultimate Blog Challenge, and I’ll be shooting for thirty-one posts in thirty-one days. It starts today, and you still have time to join if you want to participate. Once you sign up, you’ll get an email each day with blogging tips and prompts. You can either use the prompts from the emails, or chart your own path. There’s a Facebook group you can join to share your posts and read posts from others, along with a Twitter hashtag: . If you’re participating, make sure to comment on other people’s posts. It’s a great way to build community and relationships, and it’s also part of the rules.

What if I don’t have a blog?

If you don’t have a blog yet, why not start one? It doesn’t matter what platform you use or how technical you are. If you have an old blog, why not dust it off? And you don’t have to write three hundred words every day. It’s perfectly fine to write a short post, or just share a photo with its caption. You could even use the challenge to begin to own your data, or just get a writing habbit going. Microblogs also count.

I’m not sure if there’s a point at which you can’t sign up anymore, so I’ll encourage you to give it some thought, and if you’re going to join, do it as soon as possible. Even if there’s not a closing date for sign-ups, the sooner you join, the less you’ll need to catch up. So give it some thought, and come press publish with the rest of us. It’ll be fun.