The Web as filtered (and hopefully enriched ;-) by Adrian McEwen
July 25, 2022
Interesting Things on the Internet: July 25th 2022 Edition
- What would “Retrofitting your town/city” courses and workshops be like in practice? Excellent thoughts on how cities should be getting on with the work we need to do to tackle the climate emergency.
- NYC x MFG. As in New York, also in Liverpool.
- Restoring American Competitiveness. Again, not just America, rebuilding our industrial commons is important. We need to stop giving decisions about manufacturing policy to people who don't realise you can't separate supposed "high value" manufacturing from the rest of manufacturing, and stop thinking that property folk running facilities that house certain types of businesses can productively speak on behalf of those businesses.
"In general, government has been effective in its support for innovation when it has acted as a customer seeking a solution to a concrete, compelling need or when it has been a patron of basic or applied research that has the potential for broad application. Conversely, its support of innovation has generally failed when it has not had a user’s stake in the outcome or when it has bet on unproven technical solutions that required extensive knowledge of commercial applications or market realities that it lacked."
July 18, 2022
Interesting Things on the Internet: July 18th 2022 Edition
- Equipment Supply Shocks. DoES Liverpool is a good, albeit small, example of this — we've made laser-cutting and much more available to lots of folk in Liverpool. We don't measure or care (at a filling-in-forms level) about how that impact spreads and achieve more impact as a result. I like the applying-in-public ideas in that article too, that might help make all the innovation and regeneration funding do something useful.
- It's worse than you think. But that might not be a bad thing.
- The week the open web won. More of us should be writing our truth into the public record, on sites that we control. I want to read more of them.
July 04, 2022
Interesting Things on the Internet: July 4th 2022 Edition
- Manufacturing an Ecosystem. You can replace the US with Liverpool in this article and get most of my thoughts after doing the Indie Manufacturing project. The "high value manufacturing" jobs won't exist in a vacuum, they'll be mixed with supposed-"low value" manufacturing processes, and will need such capabilities locally.
- Am I on the IndieWeb Yet? (aside: I love the fact that the jauntily-angled text for the header on that site is just text, so i can highlight and copy it) The IndieWeb is great, but it needs to be easier for non-web-developers to get started with.
- ‘A massive betrayal’: how London’s Olympic legacy was sold out. A depressing but entirely predictable article about the "regeneration" of East London. It would be good if the media asked more questions and were less credulous when these things are proposed. At least we're starting to see alternatives coming along with councils such as Liverpool taking Community Land Trusts (CLTs) seriously.