Pelle Wessman – Links

007 - Öppna sociala nätverk med Pelle Wessman | Kompilator

2019-04-23T10:00:34+00:00

Jag är med i en podd och snackar distribuerade sociala nätverk, IndieWeb och bhur det är hög tid för pendeln att svinga tillbaka till gamla miljön så som den var på bloggosfärstiden: Att alla har sitt egna krypin på webben, fast såklart med de moderna sociala funktioner vi förväntar oss idag.

Upphovsrättsdirektiv och dylikt bara visar än tydligare på det behovet och på varför det inte äör bra eller rimligt att låta allt innehåll ligga på en och samma plats på nätet.

Lyssna du med! 🙂

Jag läste Säpos granskning av IT-skandalen i Transportstyrelsen – så du slipper - Breakit

2017-07-24T15:46:42+00:00

Bra sammanställning av Emanuel Karlsten och en bra slutsats – att det nog är faktumet att IT-säkerhet ses som lågprioriterat foliehatsnagelfareri som bara är dyrt och krångligt utan något egentligt värde.

Det finns mycket som kan gå fel i det tekniska även med rejäla skyddsbarriärer, men ofta är ju säkerhetsnivån på närmast löjeväckande nivå – galet lätta lösenord som återanvänds inom team för var och varannan tjänst.

Om det ska komma något gått ur detta säkerhetshaveriet så är det väl då just det som Emanuel pekar på – att IT-säkerhet kanske faktiskt sätts i fokus och ges det värde det förtjänar. Det är inte foliehattar – det är den uppkopplade realiteten i dagens samhälle.

Steg ett för alla: Sluta med lättmemorerade återanvända lösenord och sätt upp vettiga unika lösenord genom typ 1password. Fortsätt därefter med 2-faktorsautentisering, kryptering av datorns hårddisk, självklart lösenordsskydd på telefonen etc etc.

CM2- Night Rider, our first ££ commercial bus route

2017-07-20T12:10:51+00:00

This bus experiment from Citymapper feels so much more relevant to me than anything Uber has done.

In cities that have been built for humans – where you can walk, ride a bike, take a bus, subway, train etc – this makes so much more sense.

Uber feels like the solution for cities where cars are the focus. Citymapper feels like the solution for cities where people are the focus.

Is this the European take on solving modern transportation?

Adactio: Journal—Container queries

2017-07-20T12:05:30+00:00

Good update on container queries.

Looks promising that the Houdini Layout API eventually will enable polyfills for container queries – or at least attempts of such.

Where there is polyfills, there is hope.

Trump, the know-nothing victor

2017-01-15T10:52:45+00:00

There is a problem in journalism that we favour lots of diversities over economic diversity … We don’t have enough folks who grew up in working-class rural communities.

This is probably true for many places that want to be actively working towards gathering a more diverse crowd. When measuring the diversity one picks a few dimensions, but forgets that there are many others as well. The diverse crowd one then gathers might only be diverse in some very specific ways, but far from diverse in other ones. The diverse city crowd is eg. still a city crowd and might differ from the diverse non-city crowd.

Why the far right is on the rise - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition

2016-07-04T09:32:31+00:00

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.

Why Britain banned mobile apps | GovInsider

2016-06-06T13:32:55+00:00

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!

The Division isn't just Ubisoft's next game, it's the company's future

2016-03-11T21:56:35+00:00

Imagine a game that combines the open world chops of Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed with the near-future aesthetics and clever online components of Watch Dogs with the best of The Crew’s take on peopling a virtual world with players and non-players. Now give that concept to a team that has been quietly helping on some of those games, always striving — even before its days at Ubisoft — to make online play better. The result is Tom Clancy’s The Division and, Ubisoft hopes, a glimmer of what the future of the company and games in general has in store for all of us.

Snowdrop is designed from the ground up to empower the sorts of worlds and experiences that Ubisoft has increasingly made its core design philosophy.

“I think there will be more online presence in [all] games but it will take many new forms,” he said. “I think that developers have some ideas about what these new forms could be, but we can’t just draw the line from point A to point B and expect to get there. It’s going to take [the] community of players and fans to help guide what each step along that path looks like. Online and especially persistence is a form of social experiment so it could take a myriad of different forms depending on how each game community evolves.

Interesting read on how Ubisoft dares to experiment with new mechanics and try to learn from those experiments and continually evolve their gaming experiences by iterating on successful concepts and building technological backbones to enable continued experimentation. While Ubisoft games hasn’t really been a favorite of mine in general, I’m pretty intrigued by The Division, not only because it’s the biggest game ever to be produced here in Malmö, but also because it seems to involve an interesting combination of mechanics packaged up in a very well polished world.

HBO doesn't care that people aren't watching Vinyl and here's why

2016-02-21T17:08:46+00:00

The networks are constantly worried about finances and because of that, rely on ratings more than anything else to see if a show is worth pursuing.

Simply put, they’re willing to give up pursuing awards and critical acclaim in order to keep profits up and shows on the air.

HBO, on the other hand, doesn’t have to worry about advertisers because of its subscriber-based system and can afford to explore a variety of different series, seeing which ones spark an interest with audiences and which ones don’t.

The future is bright when subscription-based services gets more and more common and more and more services follow HBO and others in thinking more long term in what they offer and ensure that their full portfolio of content makes a compelling offer to customers rather than that the prime spot on the TV appeals to advertisers.

It enables for a long tail kind of approach to things as a complete offer means providing both the big hits and the niche content and to take responsibility for experimenting, exploring and discovering new ways to push things further so that the boundaries for what a complete service entaisl getspushed and redefined as time goes by.

I’m looking forward to the future of fighting for customer appeal instead of the current day’s fight for advertiser appeal.

Here's what Warren Spector's doing about System Shock 3

2016-02-21T16:56:14+00:00

At Origin and Looking Glass that whole idea of players solving their own problems and telling their own stories took root. It was about players playing the way they want to as opposed to the way designers force them to.

design for me is like sculpting. You whittle away all the things that don’t look like the game you want to make. It’s not an additive process like painting. You take things away. I am in the process of building myself an enormous lump of clay, and then we’ll start whittling.

Looking forward to see where this ends up. I have a lot of respect for Warren Spector and the types of games he has been creating and the games that those in turn have inspired. It seems to be a lot about managing freedom in such a way that it empowers users to create engaging stories. Some games like Deus Ex manages that well, while others gets a bit too sandboxy and makes the user unable to have any meaningful impact on things. I myself think about managing freedom in eg. such a way as whether to put the stories in the sandbox or the sandbox in the story. A story in a sandbox can be rather limiting as it plays to each other’s weaknesses – a sandbox can’t support all possible actions and a story is prescripted. If the script is limited to the sandbox rather than the other way around, then the freedom will in practise be rather limiting. If one instead lets the prescripted story be the container of the sandbox then they play to each other strengths instead. The script can contain a story of epic proportions, unlimited in its scale, and every part of that story will make the user feel fully free by giving them a sandbox to solve the problem presented by the story within. Deus Ex has managed all of that really well and it will be really interesting to see if these new games from the original creators of that philosophy will be able to push it even further and enable even more compelling stories to be a experienced.