Computing for Social Change
I’ve added these from eleven years, they’re doing quite well. Certainly I’d be putting collectors and sensing for Covid at certain wastewater points. This is John Snow all over again.
The question now for sensors is ‘whose sensors’ and ‘whose data’?
two essays
This is unfinished, but in the spirit of release early, release often, I’m publishing. Comments to my email or Twitter, welcome too. I ‘m not opening comments here because of the spam.
After recent adventures with the Covid champions and a couple of other instances of asymmetric coproduction, I may produce a revised version in a while. Meanwhile, I’m working fairly seriously on this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/cclite2/
Very little is known publicly about the ‘new’ app, this: https://github.com/nhsx/COVID-19-app-Android-BETA having been abandoned, I believe.
Here are a couple of straws in the wind from Wired, usually solid tech commentators:
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nhs-coronavirus-tracking-app
and very recently: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nhs-covid-19-tracking-app-contact-tracing
Since so little is known, the list of questions is ‘long’:
I’m sure that there are a few more, but that would be a good start.
I wrote this quickly, mainly as a local support tool for the pandemic. One can send a simple SMS, it’s stored in an sqlite database and shown, clustered on a map. Lots of ways of changing the values too. Since it’s Perl, quite a lot can be done with the message parsing.
Also, it’ll work with an SMS dongle now on very low powered systems. It’s available as source code and a Debian package here.
I’m sure that a few other things are ‘wrong’. But here’s the story, so far.
shape-newham-critique.pdf
This is my Bookchin influenced take on a sociable, resilient ‘forest city’. I’m aware that it’s not a whole solution at the moment. It’s a second attempt to think about a human scale integration of technology and ecology for city landscapes. The ‘best’ bits (if there are any!) are the final section and bibliography. Beware analytic philosophers, it’s not (heavily) in that tradition.
This first attempt was here https://hughbarnard.org/index.php/2018/06/19/noham-a-thought-experiment/
dissertation-final.pdf
This is the presentation of the talk given at LARC on the 15th August with many links to authors and themes. I won’t update again until I give a new version of the talk, probably as part of Autonomy Now themed talks in the autumn.
| : LARC Presentation with Links |
Since a) I’ve been thinking about this for a year or two and b) recently agreed to describe it to someone, here’s a little document about it.
At the moment, it’s a thought experiment (again) but I have done some Elasticsearch and other prototyping, though not recently.
I’ll have to write a long essay (it’s somewhat pretentious to call it a dissertation) as part of my final year at Birkbeck. If the powers that be agree, I’m going to base it on this essay that I wrote in 2016, some of it has already ‘come true’, like the (in)famous William Gibson quote.
When I’ve finished it’ll probably be less like this and more like a Socratic dialogue. Comments welcome, you (probably) know where to find me, not on FB, anyway.
This is an update with a list of references at the end of the document and these are now clickable links.