Recently a Spotify playlist curated into my feed. The playlist was a perfect match for my soul when I needed it most. This led me to wonder, who or what curated this playlist? What caused it to appear in my feed that day?
Continue readingCategory: Perspective
This is my soap box. These articles are more personal and intimate. The best way to describe this category is “the way I see things.”
Rosie
I put on our playlist,
Pure poetry to untrained ears.
My heart taken by the hand,
But led back to the Atlantic blue,
Wondering if I am singing your tune?
Breakfast in Bosnia.
Four years ago, on March 13th in 2017, I woke up for breakfast in the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia & Herzegovina. As I ate breakfast on the morning of March 14th of 2021 in the seemingly eternal era of COVID-19, it struck me.
Unsaid.
When I launched my blog, I always envisioned writing cute snapshots of insight into my life. As much as I would publish them for the Internet, I was also publishing for myself. Or so, it started off this way.
Continue readingYour Software Freedom is not my Software Freedom: A reflection on Chadwick Boseman
Trigger warning: Grief, police violence, death.
This blog post was first written on August 28th, 2020.
Today is a sad day. Chadwick Boseman is dead. At 43 years old, he lost a terminal battle with stage IV colon cancer. As his great light dims, I am left to wonder what loss will happen next in 2020.
But like the ashes of a phoenix, we will rise. His death reminds me of the fierce urgency of now, as said by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That in the moment of darkness that follows death, a new bright light will emerge. It is just so human for us to cling to the embers of hope, in the fear that we will one day be delivered from suffering.
Boseman was a social leader and source of inspiration for many. His life and many roles championed racial equity on the Hollywood screens. Boseman was passionate about what he did. He led a committed life.
Boseman’s death caused me to reflect on the definition of Freedom in the movement I am embedded within: the Free Software movement. Yet in this community I value, there are seeds of discontent. The fierce urgency of now has revealed that systemic social injustices continue to exist in our society, as they have for centuries. The generational question we must answer as witnesses to this moment is: will we continue to tolerate the systemic faults within our society? Or must we imagine a more fair society? A more just society? I know we can because we have to.
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A reflection: Gabriele Trombini (mailga)
Trigger warning: Grief, death.
Two years passed since we last met in Bolzano. I remember you traveled in for a day to join the 2018 Fedora Mindshare FAD. You came many hours from your home to see us, and share your experiences and wisdom from both the global and Italian Fedora Community. And this week, I learned that you, Gabriele Trombini, passed away from a heart attack. To act like the news didn’t affect me denies my humanity. In 2020, a year that feels like it has taken away so much already, we are greeted by another heart-breaking loss.
But to succumb to the despair and sadness of this year would deny the warm, happy memories we shared together. We shared goals of supporting the Fedora Project but also learning from each other.
So, this post is a brief reflection of your life as I knew you. A final celebration of the great memories we shared together, that I only wish I could have shared with you while you were still here.
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Facilitation, collaboration, and webcams: A story about Principles of Authentic Participation
This is the story about the facilitation of the Principles of Authentic Participation.
This post does not describe what the Principles are (click that link to learn more about them). This post describes the story behind the Principles, and how our Sustain Working Group worked together over three months of virtual facilitation during the COVID–19 crisis to build these Principles.
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FOSDEM 2020, pt. 2: Can Free Software include ethical AI systems?
This post is a follow-up to FOSDEM 2020, pt. 1: Play by play. This post summarizes the talk given by me and my colleague, Mike Nolan, at FOSDEM 2020.
FOSDEM 2020 took place from Saturday, 1 February, 2020 to Sunday, 2 February, 2020 in Brussels, Belgium (shortly after Sustain OSS 2020 and CHAOSScon EU 2020). On Saturday, together with my colleague and friend Mike Nolan, we presented on a topic he and I have co-conspired on for the last six months. What are the intersections of Free Software and artificial intelligence (AI)?
What is a rights-based approach for designing minimally safe and transparent guidelines for AI systems? In this talk, we explore what a Free AI system might look like. Then, taking research and guidelines from organizations such as Google and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, we propose practical policies and tools to ensure those building an AI system respect user freedom. Lastly, we propose the outlines of a new kind of framework where all derivative works also respect those freedoms.
Freedom and AI: Can Free Software include ethical AI systems? Exploring the intersection of Free software and AI
This post is an abridged summary of the key ideas and thoughts Mike and I presented at our FOSDEM 2020 session.
Continue readingHannah/Honor Loeb: A reflection on death and forgiveness
[tw – death, grief, gender discrimination]
Grief is a strange emotion. One text message read early in the morning can send your day into a long walk down the beach of your own memories. Memories flood back, making us conscious that these lost moments of time were never really lost to us, but locked under deep layers of interlocking memories and contexts that only had to be connected back together, like a broken circuit. Today, my memories and heart are on my former summer camp roommate and friend Hannah/Honor Loeb. (I knew her as Hannah in her life, but at time of death, she identified as Honor, so that is the name I will use for this post.)
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How did Free Software build a social movement?
The Free Software movement is rooted to origins in the 1980s. As part of a talk I gave with my colleague and friend Mike Nolan at FOSDEM 2020, we analyzed how the Free Software movement emerged as a response to a changing digital world in three different phases. This blog post is an exploration and framing of that history to understand how the social movement we call “Free Software” was constructed.
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