Decentralize It

I love most anything Paul writes. It speaks to me. I too have a general longing for decentralized, private web, but don’t have the gumption to work on it. This article describes a paper Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization Back to the Future?

Digging into the specific technologies discussed is dissapointing. While we have the ability to do better, we don’t. Nobody is willing to pay for it.

Community Technology Field Guide

I found this guide while going down the rabbit hole of decentralized technologies. This is a collection of resources to help build community internet projects. The focus of this guide is sharing internet within a community. It includes the basics of installing antennaes and running a micro-ISP. The idea of having a local community take a larger part in their collective access to technology is exciting.

Liquid Democracy

I don’t know a lot about this project, but there is something interesting going on here. It seems to me that there is a real lack of innovation around technology and group decision making. We read about all kinds of cool platforms of the future in science fiction, but our current reality is pretty lacking.

This project from a non-profit in Germany is talking about this sort of stuff, and they have a lot of open source code, but I’m not quite groking yet how it works.

Leadership Principles

I expect most lists of corporate values or principles to be largely BS but this list from Amazon struck a chord with me. The devil is in the details, and they are well written. I love phrases like “we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time” and “Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study”.

There is one exception though, this is so awkward it’s funny: “Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume.” One can imagine the original version read different.