Pelle Wessman

Came up a brief discussion on task managers like Wunderlist and the possible indiewebification of them in the #indieweb IRC-channel today and it got me thinking:

The IndieWeb community in general prefers composition of post features over post types.

So in the IndieWeb world there would never be something like a Task post type that has certain properties like due date, completion status etc etc.

There would rather be a Task feature that a post could have or not have. So – what feature is it that makes a task a task? The completion status of course.

So the first stept to start doing IndieWeb task managers would probably be to agree on how to mark up completion status of posts.

Second step could maybe be to agree on how someone else can try to complete the status of another post through webmention.

Then stuff like assigning a task to someone and such so one could have collaborative task lists would probably be interesting and after that all additional features some may perhaps want, like due dates etc.

So: Completion status? First step?

Imposing cruel sacrifices on entire nations in the name of rules that you don’t understand, and forgetting about those rules as soon as your political cronies break them, creates the climate of amorality and cynicism in which the far right advances.

​After the Brexit vote it’s easy for EU to look like the good guys with the brexiters as the bad ones – the rascists etc. ​ ​Would be great if things were so simple. EU itself has a lot to work on as well though. When it comes to transparency, democracy and being a leader that can be perceived as supporting the whole of society rather than as an elite that prey upon the people. ​ ​No matter how much or how little one agrees with the political goals of the EU, the current path that it is taken to achieve the goal (along with the path taken by many of its member states) creates dangerous reactions amongst society that can truly break apart Europe and it’s member states. ​ ​EU needs to refocus on compassion and inclusion. No matter the political goals, everyone needs to feel part of the journey and feel that the journey is also one with a purpose for them. Else they will look for their journey elsewhere and that journey we might not want to see where it ends.

Apps are “very expensive to produce, and they’re very very expensive to maintain because you have to keep updating them when there are software changes,”

How did the UK reach an increasingly mobile population? Responsive websites, he replies. “For government services that we were providing, the web is a far far better way… and still works on mobile.”

Sites can adapt to any screen size, work on all devices, and are open to everyone to use regardless of their device. “If you believe in the open internet that will always win,” he says. And they’re much cheaper to maintain, he adds, because when an upgrade is required, only one platform needs recoding.

​I agree very much with this. The simplification of having just one team and building just one product should not be underestimated – the benefits in terms of decreased costs and increased velocity can often be of greater benefit to the organization than the app itself would be.

the GDS has an approach that “Google is the homepage”. They don’t assume that citizens will visit the main government site; instead, they design for them to have come to a page after looking for a search engine

Each agency will want its own page with its own branding, but citizens just want information presented in a simple way.

​That the front page is more a need to have for the sake of completeness than an essential part of the user navigation is really true, not just in regards to Google but also in regards to social media where a link to your front page is much more rare than a link to any of the actual content of your site.

”The best way to do this stuff is to get a multi-disciplinary team of people in house – designer, user researcher, developer, content person – you’re talking a team of about twelve people”

“You’re not spending money on huge IT contracts or huge teams of people, so a team of 12 might be replacing a team of 100. And you’re not building features that no one wants and no one uses and you’re not wasting time duplicating.”

​Prototype, test, build, learn – iterate that over and over again with multiple small teams and you’ll gain much much more experience than to have your giant team just execute on a predefined roadmap which to no degree can be affected whatsoever by any of the experience gained throughout the project.

Don’t ever let agencies suggest ideas without justifying why it benefits citizens. The temptation is always there for them to meet internal objectives without building a simple service

“If you build the thing that people want, all the worrying about engagement and driving traffic all goes away because people find it and they come there,”

​Focus on the people. Not on your organization and its structure. Not on the metrics and your desire to measure everything. It’s the people that matters. Everything else is a bonus. ​ ​Great thoughts from the UK!

I think relying on rel-webmention is the right thing to do long term. If one advertises that one accepts mentions, but still doesn't do it, then something is wrong and since it's still early on we should try to fix the cases where rel-webmention is advertised wrongly rather than try to build workarounds. If we are to build workarounds, then we should first document why rel-webmention doesn't work and why we can't fix it so that it works.

+1 on bringing it up!

(I hope to contribute by making it very easy to set up such a mechanism using my Webmention endpoint. I have one set up at http://voxpelli.com/mentions/)