Looking for a home for the public G+ Postmortems community. Is there a good place to host this? It's not a huge group, only 250 posts, but I would like to see it land in an appropriate place for the participants.
Is there a community of practice around Postmortems that I could reach out to?
Removed a New Tab Page Extension and some other junk. Which led to a bad set of search results that led to this modal that blocked the entire browser..
- Force Quit, restart Chrome
- Remove shitty extensions
- Install uBlock Origin
- Add site to custom blocklist
- Restore Tabs
- Cry a little.
This mentality applies to internal projects too....
The losses from the blitzscaling mentality are felt not just by
entrepreneurs but by society more broadly. When the traditional
venture-capital wisdom is to shutter companies that aren’t achieving
hypergrowth, businesses that would once have made meaningful
contributions to our economy are not funded, or are starved of further
investment once it is clear that they no longer have a hope of becoming a
home run.
https://qz.com/1540608/the-problem-with-silicon-valleys-obsession-with-blitzscaling-growth/
This is an easy event for folks in the SF Office. Tickets are still available for this Jan 30th event at the Commonwealth Club.
The https://www.npr.org/2019/01/28/689215618/team-human-stresses-that-the-future-lies-in-connection-and-... sums why I think Team Human is important:
In the last few chapters he offers a vision that is neither anti-technology or techno-utopian. There are many ways to create the future (a word which Rushkoff says should be considered a verb). "Human beings can intervene in the machine," he tells us. "That's not a refusal to accept progress. It's simply a refusal to accept any particular outcome as inevitable."
https://commonwealthclub.org/index.php/events/2019-01-30/douglas-rushkoff-team-human
"The first step toward reversing our predicament is to recognize that being human is a team sport. We cannot be fully human alone. Anything that brings us together fosters our humanity. Likewise, anything that separates us makes us less human, and less able to exercise our individual or collective will."
In 100 psalms-like entries Rushkoff's manifesto presents a way forward for the situation we find ourselves in.
The two takeaways everyone should understand are
- The inversion of "Figure and Ground"
- Mechanomorphism - treating humans like machines.
It's a breezy, short read and has my highest recommendation. It also gives me hope that we can rediscover
Available at:
https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Douglas_Rushkoff_Team_Human?id=4Y5gDwAAQBAJ
http:///
https://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294997566
2 openings on the Arcs team - one Android-ish, one Cloud-ish. Come work with me and the rest of the Arcs team in SFO...
https://grow.googleplex.com/jobs/e8f3fd1f-59d5-4bfe-9a95-0fb706947891
https://grow.googleplex.com/jobs/bb80a320-2a69-4236-8618-21f5799a8b15
The http://go/arcs is part of the http://go/cerebra team in Google AI. Arcs is an early stage project creating a new open ecosystem for privacy-preserving, AI-first computing. In this vision the user owns their data, software comes to the device and runs on the data locally, and data egress is carefully managed. The user has a Personal Cloud server that acts as a secure, reliable data repository while also acting as another device with greater resources (power, storage, bandwidth, etc.) than the user’s phone.
We develop software across server (TypeScript/JavaScript, Node.js, Docker, GCP, C++), Android (Java, WebView, TypeScript/JavaScript), and desktop/mobile web (TypeScript/JavaScript, CSS). Much of our work is done in the open on GitHub at https://github.com/PolymerLabs/arcs.
You have a week left to see these creative uses of Youtube Annotations before they're gone forever..
https://waxy.org/2018/11/a-tribute-to-youtube-annotations/
Seems like a missed opportunity to keep the data available for someone to implement a video.js/chrome extension to provide the overlay...
"We must go deeper"
Also a little surprised that we're logging IPs here..
$ more Takeout/My\ Activity/Takeout/MyActivity.json
[{
"header": "Takeout",
"title": "Initiated a Takeout",
"subtitles": [{
"name": "Requested the following services: Data Shared For Research (all resources) and My Activity (all resources)"
}, {
"name": "You specified that you wanted the archive in zip format, split into 2.00G files, and requested that the output be sent to your email"
}],
"time": "2018-12-28T23:00:00.582Z",
"products": ["Takeout"],
"details": [{
"name": "From IP 100.119.151.149"
}]
},
Looks like you can get Play Music activity with Location History for free :-/
Visit https://takeout.google.com/
- Select My Activity
- Click on Edit products
- Toggle All
- Select Google Play Music
Downloaded Json has searches, opens and listens going back to ~ June 2017.
Here's an example:
{
"header": "Google Play Music",
"title": "Listened to Wait so Long",
"description": "Trampled By Turtles",
"time": "2017-07-13T21:28:54.126Z",
"products": ["Google Play Music"],
"locations": [{
"name": "From your current location",
"url": "https://google.com/maps?q%5Cu003d37.804363,-122.271111"
}]
},
To the top of the reading/study list...
https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08916
This paper describes something I've known in my gut, especially as someone that can remember the pre-internet analog world, and wonders if we've though through the knock-on effects of the technology we are creating....
Businesses also optimize: a business as a whole optimizes marginal revenue, data science finds best-fit models, and websites iteratively improve
click counts by random A/B testing. Unfortunately, optimizing a business
goal often involves sculpting customer perceptions and behaviors, thereby
reducing the entropy of human behavior, choice, and autonomy. In short,
to calibrate our brains, we need autonomy; to submit it to organized optimization, we must forgo it.
Some days I dream that we renamed Google Assistant to Google Steward,... as in:
3. a person employed to manage another's property, especially a large house or estate.
synonyms:
(estate) manager, agent, overseer, custodian, caretaker;
historical reeve
"the steward of the estate"
a person whose responsibility it is to take care of something.
"farmers pride themselves on being stewards of the countryside"
Instead of reflecting on the past year think about what's happened for the last 50 years. I finally got around to listening to a 4 part series about computing in 1968. Highly recommended, very very well done and will blow your mind.
Makes you realize that most of what we've been doing has been riffing on groundbreaking things from that era.
Art? Computer Animation? It all started then with some #cybernetics .. (Ep 1)
https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/11/23/1968-when-the-world-began-part-one-the-pivot/
Google Glass? Augmented Reality? Ivan Sutherland's "Ultimate Display" conceived of it. (Ep 2)
https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/11/30/1968-when-the-world-began-part-two-sword-of-damocles/
Hangouts? Shared Docs? Remote Collaboration? Doug Engelbert's The Mother of all Demos was already there. (Ep 3)
https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/12/07/1968-when-the-world-began-the-mother-of-all-demos/
And the impact felt, with +110664632946820915121 and others:
https://nextbillionseconds.com/2018/12/16/1968-when-the-world-began-return-to-a-square/
Sadly I missed out on the retrospective at the Computer History Museum (was fighting urgent legal/policy fires then)
We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Trying to figure out if some Google Feed issues rise to a pageable threshold. go/whodoinotify has escalation paths, but go/news-policy is locked down.
This is regarding:
https://twitter.com/justkelly_ok/status/1076666201521180672
and some Moma searching reveals an internal escalation path here:
https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/interest-feed/teams/quality
and another escalation doc "https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GxGqThElJyrQ0odnSYpGLx1RhRN5w4xNuzITTnOOhvE/edit?ts=5ae0ab73" I also found an A/C Privileged doc that I won't link here.
Also found a related https://b.corp.google.com/issues/29310297 in 2016, but that was before the Interest Feed reorg...
See b/121203202 about a horrific experience ordering from Home Hubs from the Google Store. Appears to be stuck over one month in Ingram-Micro Limbo-land.
The sad part is that there's hundreds of these devices in Target Stores nearby. We also happen to run a kick-ass shopping system: "Google Express".
If I felt empowered as an employee I'd buy three hubs from Target, expense them to the Google Store cost center and fix this. I hope someone on the Store team *does* feel empowered to do so; since I know that the playbook reading CSRs won't be able to...
Add in G+ logo choice and you can probably identify when the last refresh was..
(As seen on ticketfly.com)
Looks like the old go/culture, which was frozen in amber in is here.
https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/google-culture/home/google-at-the-edge-of-chaos
Of course that site has links to some old Buzz content that's gone forever:
I've kept a Webvan pen in my bag as a reminder to never get too comfortable. And a reminder to never pay Bechtel a billion dollars to build warehouse infrastructure...
History doesn't repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.. Back in early 2000s Microsoft temps were organizing against the raw deal they were getting** They won, but that then led to the onerous, exclusionary caste system we have today instead of more full timers.
The really sad part is that many advocacy groups turned towards reactionary, nationalistic, anti-India racism. (see programmersguild.org if you can stomach it.)
I hope that this time will be different and better outcomes are the result.
** techsunite.org which is now washtech.org
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/12/05/googles-shadow-workforce-demands-more-from-ceo-sundar-pichai.html
Testing this fancy extension on my non-corp browser. (Could possibly be used on corp since it stores all data locally.)
I've always wanted to search the documents I read and this does it very, very well. Full text search, annotations, notes and more.
Thank you Louis Gray for giving this horrible fire a human perspective.
and hey Googlers: there's still 60k of funds for the matching at
https://g-give.googleplex.com/campaign/2018-California-Wildfires
A good way to keep up with changes in the Ads/Sales part of the org is via go/saleshub -- click the gear icon and enable 'Receive SalesBulletin'
This week contained a comprehensive overview of all the upcoming features.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1z5_z3IgiOqwA75uj5Y-LhvNO__SIQmlGpbnXBPiczMs/edit
This is an older paper (1983), but it's very spot-on showing the power dynamics that exist at macro/micro level that predate technical solutions. Recommended.
Sit back a spell and let me tell you a story about the Association of Concerned Employees (ACEs).
Back in 1991 the academic computing teams at the University of Minnesota were set to be laid off and we could "apply" for a job with the new quasi-private sector outfit the "Minnesota Supercomputer Center" (MSC).
So none of us liked that. Over 300 of us set up an effort to stop it. The VAX/Unix/MVS/Unix/PC/CDC units stopped fighting for crumbs and joined forces. Letters to the editor were written, politicians where contacted, petitions were circulated.
Mailing lists, and even a BBS were put into use to coordinate.
Even, ahem, a listening device was placed in the Board of Regents office.
We were not in a union but AFSCME supported our demands and upped the pressure.
The efforts worked. The privatization was called off. There were job losses, but we had a voice that we used to make the best of the situation. We had input into how we could reorganize the units and better support the students and faculty.
Oh and we finally got the audit of the corrupt MSC a few years later:
https://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/ped/1994/backgrd.htm
`U' backs off of plan to privatize computer services
Published: October 23, 1991
By Jim Dawson; Staff Writer
Intense pressure from many of the 330 civil service employees who
operate the University of Minnesota's computer systems apparently has
forced school officials to back away from a plan to privatize computer
services and place them under the Supercomputer Center.
Ettore Infante, vice president for academic affairs, who
announced the privatization plan last week met with computer workers
Tuesday.
He told them that because of concerns regarding his
original plan, a reorganization of computer services would occur
"without the involvement of the Minnesota Supercomputer Center or a subsidiary of it."
Instead, Infante said, an outside consultant will be hired to
determine the best way to consolidate and reorganize the university's
several computer service centers.
About half of the 330 computer specialists would have been laid off at the end of the year under Infante's privatization plan.
There will probably be layoffs under any new plan, but how many and when hasn't been determined.
Infante's privatization announcement caught the computer
specialists by surprise last week, but they quickly used a computerized
electronic mail network to organize their opposition.
Their main objection focused on the involvement of the Supercomputer Center.
The center, a quasiprivate corporation partially owned by
the university, is not subject to public accounting. Gov. Arne Carlson
recently cut $8 million in state funding from the center's budget, and
many of the computer specialists believed that Infante's move was simply
a way to funnel new funds into the center.
Infante denied that charge and cited the inefficient,
outdated computer systems and networks throughout the university as his
reason for consolidation.
His move yesterday was welcomed by most employees, but many remained skeptical of his motives.
"I was encouraged that they seem to be backing down," said
Cheryl Vollhaber, a specialist with academic computing services.
The employees demanded to be involved in the planning for
consolidating the computer systems, something most agree is badly
needed.
However, Infante was noncommittal about employee participation.
The computer specialists said that they have been calling for
a consolidation and reorganization of computer services for a long
time, but that the administration has ignored them. They are
frustrated, several said, because although they are the computer
experts, they are not being consulted.
"Our focus will be having an employee representative on the
planning board," said Stephen Collins, of the university's
micro-computer center.
Combat outrage overload and numbness with empathy.
I'm seriously thinking about starting a shareholder initiative to add employee representation to Alphabet's Board of Directors. We'd at least have an elected board rep that could be accountable for bad decisions.
In the long run I also believe Alphabet is going to need to think long and hard about their governance structure. My hope is for something durable, similar to the Bosch/Zeiss model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_representation_on_corporate_boards_of_directors
Some interesting takes here, including this:
Should we treat digital remains by the same code that museums use for human remains? Doing so would severely limit the ways in which companies can use (or exploit) our data. If digital remains are like “the informational corpse of the deceased,” they write, they “may not be used solely as a means to an end, such as profit, but regarded instead as an entity holding an inherent value.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612257/digital-version-after-death/
Of course mentions the Black Mirror episode. However I always go back to the original Max Headroom episode: Deities
This is a key insight from Nathan Schneider.
We should also ask ourselves "How do we make Google's hardware, software and services more Accountable." (and also find a metric that describes this...)
We should care less about whether something is centralized or decentralized than whether it is accountable. An accountable system is responsive to both the common good for participants and the needs of minorities; it sets consistent rules and can change them when they don’t meet users’ needs.
https://hackernoon.com/decentralizing-everything-never-seems-to-work-2bb0461bd168
A little gem from 1988 talking about automation, way way before self driving cars...
It is at this point that you have this relatively new choice: either
to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable humans a
delegated nonhuman character whose only function is to open and close
the door. This is called a door-closer or a "groom." The advantage is
that you now have to discipline only one nonhuman and may safely leave
the others (bell-boys included) to their erratic behavior. No matter
who they are and where they come from-polite or rude, quick or slow,
friends or foes-the nonhuman groom will always take care of the door
in any weather and at any time of the day. A nonhuman (hinges) plus
another nonhuman (groom) have solved the hole-wall dilemma.
I've been involved with a number of turndowns, Buzz (1st time, and then the double-tap project). Orkut, Hangouts on Air, Google+ Stories, +1s on the web and more. As stewards of user data I would like to propose that we do something different this time.
While we can't keep the service active we can at least do something useful with the output and give back agency to the users that created the data. So here's my proposal.
1) Create the Plus Cooperative(*), owned by the users of Google+. Each post you made prior to a cutoff date gets you one share in the new entity. Decisions are one-user, one-vote.
2) Transfer the plus.google.com domain over to this new entity or redirect to a new plus.coop domain. Generate a static dump of the public** contents and transfer that to new infrastructure run by the Plus Cooperative. In addition Google provides a full dump to the Internet Archive.
3) Google funds the organization for at minimum 10 years off a one time grant.
4) Google publishes a set of identifiers/claims that would allow a user to gain access to the public data in question. The user could choose to remove data from the plus.coop domain or add their own redirect (a super idea suggested by +104122652599862501408)
5) The Plus Coop would be governed by it's user-owners and could choose how to invest in their infrastructure/product. They could create migration tools, publishing tools -- they could even revive the service starting with the seed data.
To me this is full-on "Respect the Opportunity". There are enough passionate users out there to keep the spark of G+ going; let's not get in their way.
And let's not 404 8 years of cultural history.
* There was an attempt to transform twitter into a Co-op, so this idea is not really my own.
** We could conceivably export private data if it was suitably encrypted and a user could claim it at a later point. But that's very much a stretch goal.
*** I also think that all products should buy Bonds that would fund a similar data preservation effort upon failure/cancellation.
cc: +110664632946820915121 / +115753604102260948135 / +101587921131889992978 / +110940801340246898787 / +115283013747081617765
There's a lot that I'd like to share about recent Google+ developments, but.. cannot.. due to... reasons..
What I can do is reaffirm my faith in the team that is now running Google+. They are are smart, determined and working with a limited set of resources towards a crazy ambitious goal to improve workplace communications.
Now if I was someone like Vic I'd trot out some parable about the arch-angel Gabriel or Buffalo facing the wind... But that's not me. So I'm going to give you a few lines of the ever inspirational I Still Believe byThe Call.
If you see or work with the G+ team tell them you still believe. In their Mission; in their Work; and in the Impact they can make on the world.
But I still believe
I still believe
Through the shame
And through the grief
Through the heartache
Through the tears
Through the waiting
Through the years
For people like us
In places like this
We need all the hope
That we can get
I still believe
Move into new office space -- find DoubleClick Posters that go against YSW training...
[see official logo in the lower right corner]
Gave a talk about Perkeep at the Decentralized Web conference this week. Very happy that I was finally able to re-use my "confused developer" slide from OpenSocial in a new way...
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1r3hENcuI4E5uR3kFOh4eKAlm91g75sthatOZrgp2c3c/edit?usp=sharing
*The Fourth Age of Google+*
There’s a new Google+ on the way. It’s led by new energetic people that are creating *the* Premier Enterprise collaboration system for GSuite customers. It’s my trust in these strong, capable leaders that now allows me to fade and transition to something new.
After almost 8 years working on Google+ I've decided to tackle a new role on the combined Arcs and Cerebra team in SFO. This move returns me to my roots of building open ecosystems using protocols, open source, and sovereign user data. It's an area I've always been passionate about -- working on federated es-protocols was one of the reasons I joined Google in the first place. The move to SFO also allows me to be a more effective caregiver for my family.
While tackling new technical challenges on Arcs I will continue to work on a number of critical privacy and infrastructure needs for Google+. So you’ll still see me in SVL from time-to-time as I continue my quest to slay the Oz Binary.
And finally, thank you to everyone (there are too many to name) who has helped me learn, lead and develop products that improve people's lives. I am grateful and humbled to be working with the best, and confident in the future of both Google+ and Arcs!
[1] https://arcs.googleplex.com
[2] https://cerebra.googleplex.com/
[3] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wPKmKBKXteFv-FU-18Nctx9C9ptunzIkt4V6i-MfyBw/edit?usp=sharing
*The Right Kind of AI*
Really enjoyed the wide-ranging discussion with Google's own +104315190395846060684 on the Team Human podcast. I'd love to see a TGIF covering these deep topics sometime, and hope there are more Kenrics in our midst.
You also get Douglas Rushkoff's entertaining rant on Facebook. (!)
http://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-80-kenric-mcdowell-the-right-kind-of-ai/
brb, closing my Tumblr account instead of clicking 320 checkboxes...
Tumblr tried to sneak in data collection under the radar. After a few taps, you can get a list of who they're sharing data with.
The list takes 19 screenshots to see all the names on my phone.
NINETEEN.
*Incognito by Default*
Redesign all of our systems to operate without direct access to user data while maintaining quality.
This is my dream after reading https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/quirk/ and filing data retention plans for the past month....
Ambitious enough?
_"The web is being used for engineering society"_
_"Browser vendors cannot avoid taking a side"_
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZg1vIpno6I
Finally watched that Selfish Ledger video...
I didn't find it "unsettling", to me I found it to be your basic tone-deaf techno-utopianism.
Especially given the ugly fact that the research of Hamilton and Dawkins supports eugenics.
I'm curious if +102251792736752917169 is aware of _All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (ep3)_?
https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/
Treating humans as programmable computers is a dangerous path to go down. We're already seeing the negative externalities of this today. Filter bubbles, Facebook Ads, Deep Fakes and more show the non-altruistic version of the ideas presented in this concept video.
That said, the user-data story for Fuchsia (which this was an input to) is a good one. And I suspect we won't be breaking out virtual brain calipers any time soon.
_Tracking the illustration style of choice in our tech dystopia_
Warning: once you see this you'll notice this design pattern almost everywhere you look.
Thought provoking presentation on how Information Architecture impacts user behavior. Also a great anecdote about how Open Plan offices were intended to _"give the company’s clerical workers a sense of community and nobility."_
Strong finish with this call to action:
_"Are the things that I’m designing creating conceptual structures, distinctions in the world, that are viable? Are the systems that I’m working with respectful of the broader context that they’re in? And are they sustainable, economically, socially, and ecologically?"_
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/living-in-information/
At my desk you can read the paper version of "The Best of Creative Computing" v1/v2. What's really eye-opening is the large amount of privacy related articles that were published in the mid 70s, post Watergate era.
Here's one about logs processing. Maybe we can use this for the next BYCTWD...
Stop by or you can read volume 1 here:
https://archive.org/details/Best_of_Creative_Computing_Vol_1_1978_Creative_Computing_Press
Added "Zot Protocol" from Hubzilla to my reading list.
cc Brad Fitzpatrick for the webfinger ref.
Zot is a JSON-based web framework for implementing secure decentralised communications and services. In order to provide this functionality, Zot creates a decentralised globally unique identifier for each hub on the network. This global identifier is not linked inextricably to DNS, providing the requisite mobility. Many existing decentralised communications frameworks provide the communication aspect, but do not provide remote access control and authentication. Additionally most of these are based on 'webfinger', which still binds identity to domain names and cannot support nomadic identity.
The primary issues Zot addresses are
- completely decentralised communications
- independence from DNS-based identity
- node mobility
- seamless remote authentication
- high performance