RE: https://mastodon.social/@wearenew_public/115729800203396909 We've been working hard over the past six months to ship Roundabout to our pilot communities. It's amazing to see them come to life, and I'm so excited to keep building & learning to support healthy online spaces for local […]

Canadians: am I out of line for thinking that an NDP (union-left, for those outside of Canada) politician probably shouldn't re-post Theresa May talking about the lack of civil discourse being the result of digital platforms, and positing that what we need is more gatekeeping of who gets to speak? 🫣

RE: https://mastodon.social/@wearenew_public/115645917115143165 Six months ago, I joined New_ Public to help build a new social platform for local communities. Today, I could't be more excited and proud to share what our amazing little team has cooked up, and is launching in closed beta this […]

RE: https://indieweb.social/@bonfire/115507615653471686 What @bonfire are working on is impressive and important and y'all should consider supporting their crowdfunder! Bonfire was absolutely the top contender for my work building New_ Public's Local project (https://newpublic.org/local); in […]

A decade ago, I was an invited expert at a meeting to review the technical architecture of a £330m fraud detection system for Universal Credit at the UK Treasury. My conclusion was that the proposal was not only massively over-priced (basically fraud-levels of overcharging), but that the system […]

I don't say this often, but Kneecap being banned from performing here makes me ashamed to be Canadian: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgrvw4ejn4o

The work is as important to the health of our communities as it is ambitious, and I’m deeply grateful to be a part of it. More soon!

Every once in a while, if you’re lucky, you get to share a “new job” update that’s more like a “life goal ✅” update. This is one of those times. I’m ridiculously excited to share that I’ve joined @wearenew_public, working with @clockwerks on their small-but-mighty Local Lab team to build a new […]

In the last five years, we've gone from "employees will never have to go into an office" to "employees need to be in the office because creative and innovative work can only be done face-to-face between humans" to "lol we don't need humans"

🌐 The Fediverse is meeting IRL! FediCon — August 1 & 2 in Vancouver 🇨🇦 Want in? Join the early bird list: https://fedicon.ca/ See you there? #fedicon #fediverse #opensocial #opensocialweb #socialweb #deso #feso #loso

Has Trump announced his candidacy for Pope yet?

It's easy to blame the UK government for being incompetent nitwits for writing the horrendous Online Safety Act (https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/14/online_safety_act/) that strengthens monopolies with the resources to implement it and weakens small communities without those same resources […]

Today @fedify launched an @opencollective to support the project. @hongminhee has been doing amazing work on it. :fediverse: Fedify has shown itself to be one of the most promising ways for other projects to become part of the #fediverse. If you liked seeing Ghost (@index) make such fast […]

25 years ago I was in Seattle protesting the WTO and "free trade" deals like NAFTA with many others who cared about local businesses and didn't want to see the exploitation of overseas workers. What's happened since is *complicated* but I wish there were more thoughtful analysis that didn't […]

Billionaires are the problem, not our neighbours to the South. So, let's target billionaires with a 30% tax on any transaction by any financial instrument (company, investment vehicle, etc) that's more than 2.5% owned by a billionaire. It's not even a usurious tax: it's exactly the same as […]

Since my time with the U.S. Treasury came to an end on January 20, I'm now available 10 hours/week for consulting. My expertise is the budgeting, procurement, and oversight of major custom software projects. If that is relevant to your interests, let me know!

My hot take for the day: Mastodon should implement support for atproto PDSes for every user account.

@kataclyst isn't that how Trump and his supreme court picks argued it works? 😅

Ok, hear me out: thanks to Trump, Biden has immunity. End Trump (and Musk). Biden refuses to leave the White House, in the end, Biden wins. November surprise. Everyone's happy, right?

#mastodonniversary 🥳🥳— It's my 3rd (ALREADY!?) birthday of joining Mastodon! To celebrate, I'm officially starting to post at a new 2nd account @[email protected] at the brand new SocialBC instance!! 🎉🎉. I will continue posting here but I'll do instance related posts from […]

I spent the past week using Croissant to post identical toots to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads all at once. Summary: 1. Mastodon: works as is—friends laugh at my dumb stuff, a few randos painfully explain my joke back to me 2. Bluesky: you get 2 likes or 200, no in-between. 3. Threads: my […]

I'm a massive @kissane fanboi, but don't take this with a grain of salt: Please go watch/read her XOXO talk here: https://mas.to/@kissane/113353287668829352 I'm not going to even try to summarize, because I think she shares everything I've felt but failed to communicate about the need for our […]

By my [extremely brief] count, there are 12 ridings that could have easily gone NDP under a STV poll that have gone to the Conservatives under First Past the Post. BC has two progressive parties and only one Conservative party. We're talking about this election as though it's some big shift to […]

I haven't spent a lot of time on Zoom for a while, and it's a little shocking that they're monitoring the video stream for weird stuff like "Thumbs Up" but not "mouth moving, on mute." On the upside, several people saying "you're muted, we can't hear you" remains as fun as ever. 😂

Weird question: what do you use for comms for small groups that are technologically disinclined, i.e., for a mailing list. Facebook isn't an option (thankfully) for a variety of reasons. Slack and Discord are also not options, nor are WhatsApp or Signal. Google Groups? There must be other […]

While I'm asking questions, do any existing federated systems deal with replies by allowing the OP to moderate the reply stream? I would imagine something like this would/could be implemented so that the OP republishes [signed or links to] replies, and clients would ignore anything not in that […]

What's the state of the art for maintaining a single account that surfaces in both Bluesky and Mastodon? Just bridgy? (not a slight against bridgy, just the only one I'm aware of right now 😊)

Two months after the fires started, they're still burning across the lake from us, but it's chill, feels like a natural fuel reduction rather than the apocalypse. The 100 km/h gusts tomorrow should be interesting; feeling pretty grateful that faller crews have been cleaning up burned-out […]

Who called it 'Sarco Pod' and not 'Doomba'? https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/sep/24/several-detained-in-switzerland-over-suicide-capsule-death-police-say

We need a word like "arson" but for acts that have egregious climate impacts. Private jets (for example) aren't just tools of arson, they also cause floods and other extreme weather. The word should be cognate with arson, because at this point, with vanishingly few exceptions, flying in a […]

As we (at least in Canada) move towards a situation where government organizations are not* (in general, locally at least) engaged in direct suppression of less privileged people in support of more privileged people (i.e., as things get better), the state monopoly on violence is at risk of […]

It's pretty nice to be in a room where people are talking about niche subjects that I care deeply about. ❤️ #victoriaforum

The stories at #xoxofest of the experience of living through online harrassment feel very close to the experience of living through the destructive effects of climate change. It's strange to reconcile that with the fact that it's us ourselves, not online trolls and malicious bad actors, who […]

@kissane 😭❤️🙏

That's quite enough heartache for one lifetime, thanks. (Home safe, buildings are miraculously intact. Our land ... It's going to be some work. Good work, but hard work.)

Now two weeks in to evacuation from my home due to wildfires; we're fine, and despite "communication that could be better" from local authorities, our understanding is that so far our home has been protected and safe. Grateful beyond words to the fire crews. ❤️ The experience has really […]

Folks in my area have set up a gofundme to help recover from the devastating wildfires that have been raging for the past week. Ours is a remote area with very small communities that are tourism-dependent. Nearly 20,000 acres of pristine wilderness have burned since July 17th. Our visibility […]

Folks in my area have set up a gofundme to help recover from the devastating wildfires that have been raging for the past week. Ours is a remote area with very small communities that are tourism-dependent. Nearly 20,000 acres of pristine wilderness have burned since July 17th. Our visibility […]

On the plus side, I'm evacuated to the south and the air isn't so bad here. Sadly, many of my neighbours are evacuated north in the most toxic air I've ever seen on purpleair. 😢😱 #wildfires

Actually, if anyone who's comfortable with Tailwind (I went with Svelte/Skeleton) could help out, I'm working on a VERY BASIC site to help match evacuees from fires in my area with community resources, and I could really use some help making it look good (even readable would be an improvement) […]

I wish I was better at CSS.

Is there off-the-shelf software to help coordinate evacuation resources (housing, etc)? Hopefully the worst has passed and these evacs won't last long, but locals in our community are looking for better ways to coordinate and I'd like to help, ideally without writing new software or putting […]

This is Doukhobor Country.

Current status* *Earth

Cliiiiimmmaaatttteee Changggggeeee *shakes fist*

Watching a new reality TV show: "Will your house burn down" staring Wildfires and My House. 0/5 stars, do not recommend. This is Bad Science Fiction. All gallows humor aside, (1) we're evacuated safe, just watching the cameras and (2) the wildfire fighting crews up here are beyond amazing and […]

The world needs better mapping tools for simple sketching of "pirate maps." If you know of one, I would be very grateful right now to also know about it. QGIS 🙅‍♀️ (crashes doing simple things) Google Earth 🙅‍♀️ (seventy clicks to do one thing) ArcGIS 🤑 (expensive) Gaia 😖 (layer […]

Evacuated. We're safe with our cats, we'll see how the next few days go for our home. Apocalyptic scenes up here in south-central British Columbia. This photo was from when things were relatively calm.

The most contemporary of situations: Waiting for the evacuation order owing to a wildfire a few km north of us, while my partner attends her Canadian naturalization ceremony on Zoom. 🎉🇨🇦🔥