Steve Herrick @Steve@social.coop

Current Affairs gets it: we need #WorkerOwned #Media.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/the-urgent-need-for-worker-owned-media

Of course, because we're so f'cking cool, we've already got social.coop and GEO people working on this 😎

Computer screen sizes should have followed paper sizes .. that way when you split up an A4 screen you'd just get two A5 screens, and it would be easy for applications to design for them since the overall shapes would be consistent. Like, this is a solved problem.

if democracy is so good how come we don't have it at work

Little #coop win of the day:

To secure the space for the #btv co-op brewery project that has been in the works for ~5 years, a group is forming a real estate co-op to buy the commercial condo that we'd like the co-op brewery to end up in.

We've set the minimum investment for the REC at $1k, and want the (future tenant) brewing co-op to be a members, but it's currently tight on cash, so we put the word out for new members & added equity from current members.

Raised the minimum $ needed today!

:D :D :D #sttng

via @Crash, via dm_cross on

The ‘software as machine’ view is so ingrained in people’s thinking that it’s hard to imagine organizing computing without some notion of applications. But let’s return to first principles. Why do people use computers? People use computers in order to do and express things, to communicate with each other, to create, and to experience and interact with what others have created. People write essays, create illustrations, organize and edit photographs, send messages to friends, play card games, watch movies, comment on news articles, and they do serious work too–analyze portfolios, create budgets and track expenses, find plane flights and hotels, automate tasks, and so on. But what is important, what truly matters to people is simply being able to perform these actions. That each of these actions presently take place in the context of some ‘application’ is not in any way essential. In fact, I hope you can start to see how unnatural it is that such stark boundaries exist between applications, and how lovely it would be if the functionality of our current applications could be seamlessly accessed and combined with other functions in whatever ways we imagine. This sort of activity could be a part of the normal interaction that people have with computers, not something reserved only for ‘programmers’, and not something that requires navigating a tedious mess of ad hoc protocols, dealing with parsing and serialization, and all the other mumbo-jumbo that has nothing to do with the idea the user (programmer) is trying to express. The computing environment could be a programmable playground, a canvas in which to automate whatever tasks or activities the user wished. -- The future of software, the end of apps, and why UX designers should care about type theory

Want to reduce your personal carbon, methane, etc emissions? You need to reduce or stop your use of single usage plastics - including food wrappers and so on. It's hard but plastics are petrochemicals and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.

Plus, you'll be reducing waste.

GEO is hosting an all-day Friday intensive at the upcoming Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy. The theme is building #grassroots peer-to-peer #WorkerCoop support networks. We've got a lot of long-time cooperators coming from all around the country. It's going to be good.

Register here:

https://east.usworker.coop/friday-sessions/