Extremely online

For the Extremely Online™, this last week has been a continued horror show. It’s renewed and revitalized my impulse to have whatever I write (post, photo, etc) on the web under my roof, to homestead my digital presence.

To that end, I finally took some time to follow an idea I’d noted in August, to make my own site more IndieWeb, by setting up an IndieKit server. (Words!) That’s now running happily, enabling me to post notes to my site, which then get syndicated out to Mastodon. (Back then, I’d planned to send them to Twitter—alas, the time has come to leave.)

My first syndicated post was a test (successfully syndicated to Mastodon), to which I exuberantly replied shortly thereafter (it was posted originally on Mastodon, then copied back—still figuring out how I’ll handle that). It’s very nerdy, very fun, and deeply satisfying—who knows if I’ll actually post more short notes, but the plumbing’s all in place now, if I want to.

• You should really just subscribe to Mandy Brown’s website, A Working Library, as I’ll link most every post I read there. “Out of time” explores the idea of restlessness and technology, how tech “consumes rest”—and Mandy reminds us of radical definitions of rest, which oughtn’t feel so radical.
• Combining many of my interests (disaster / emergency management, insurance, policy, bureaucracy, to name a few), a profile of the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements program caught my eye. One point that struck me: the idea that “governments just don’t know how to say ‘no’”, to requests for assistance beyond the program’s parameters, or to building in known danger zones (like floodplains). To whom are governments comfortable saying “no”, and in what contexts? In the domestic disaster context, the answer seems clear, but I contrast it to the countless, often invisible or unpublicized “no”s that governments make, direct (decision) and indirect (indecision) alike, often suffered by the most vulnerable.
• It was a pleasure to watch Sean Boots and Amanda Clarke present their recent research into the scale of government contracting (specifically IT spending, in this context) at a recent meeting of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates (OGGO). A scholar-practitioner combo for the ages!
• Interesting to consider the various mechanisms and incentive structures through which government can help to secure open source software. Of course, there’s an argument to be made that making software open source in the first place is a (potentially, at least) positive contribution to security, because it enables otherwise impractical scrutiny. (Amanda made a similar point toward the end of the OGGO session, pointing out how, if ArriveCAN’s code were open source, weekend hackathons could be spent scrutinizing work, instead of recreating it.)
• Enjoyed Rach Smith’s description of her “lifestyle-centric career”.
• Anil Dash with the how-to for two key kitchen staples: roasted garlic and pickled onions.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas