Weeknotes #10 — Neostalgia
Mozfest started last week and it is a BLAST. Like any other Mozfest, it is chaos, even online. Thta’s the magic of Mozfest though, and I would not have it any other way.
Last week was also International Women’s Day and the events following Sarah Everard death shook me as well. A week of Feminist Struggles. I live a mile and a half from where she disappeared, and I see that place safer than my current (and temporal) home in South Africa. However, I did find myself pondering more than once what is the best running route in the area after dark or which way is the safest to come back from the tube after a night out (when we could have nights out). This burden should not be on me or my fellow women. It should be on men to make me feel safe.
Stuff I did this week
Mozfest — I have attended a session by Muckrock on FOIA as API, which is a long dream of mine for Israel, but I don’t think we have the funding to pull it off.
I also attended a great session by Jackie Liu, which looked at from Nostalgia to Neostalgia, where we imagined what if we could have a different piece of tech in the past. I wish I had a piece of technology that will make me be less addicted to technology… but the power dynamics are that tech companies wants us to be addicted to their tech. I really liked that session not only because it used meditation as an excresice, but also because I don’t get to imagine future that often. It was a good reminder to try an imagine more. Check out Jackie’s work on creating a new OS system based on her childhood!
I also took part in #ShetTansformsTech , and got to learn once more how the internet can be a challenging space for women, unfortunately, just like the public space is.
Open Heroines — This week I finally publish a blog that I’m trying to write for months now. I decided that international women's day is the best date to release it to the world. It wasn’t an easy blog to write, the writing was not as fluid as I would like, but I am glad I took some hard topics off my chest. You can read my honest refelection about five years of Open Heroines here.
Data collective — I also had time last week to reflect what a community of data people in charities means and why communities are not same for everyone. Check it out here.
Helpline data — Last week I tried to dig in more to our helpline data at Parkinson’s UK after hearing that Mencap are doing work on their helpline data at the data collective. Our data quality needs to get better, but we are not in a bad starting point.
Workshops planning — We are planning our new data architecture, and we want to test some of our hypotheses with users from across the charity. I am working now on creating an agenda for the workshop, drawing inspiration from the Red Cross and Red Crecent Data Playbook.
Podcast Alert
I am on another podcast! You can listen to me speaking about power dynamics and open data here. Thank you for hosting me Caroline!Things I read
Not related to work AT ALL, but I found this New York Times article helpful to feel that I don’t need to be a super mom.
