Larry Brilliant on his plan for responding to a Pandemic. Build out team starting from existing Canadian operation (GPHIN - the Global Public Health Information Network) which detected SARS and other epidemics and disasters in time to help the world respond and contain them. (Disease Tracking) (more)

An Epidemic that everyone gets. (more)

Copenhagen Consensus is based on the aim to improve prioritization of limited means. The world is faced with a countless number of challenges such as diseases, environmental degradation, armed conflicts and financial instability. Copenhagen Consensus takes a new and critical-analytical approach to assessing the effects of international opportunities for solving the challenges. (Public Policy) (more)

I’m currently a product manager helping turn a big company around and an advisor to 5by5 Studios, Archer Avenue, and MixZing. My insight, photography, and work has appeared in Betabeat, Fader, TechCrunch, PandoDaily, Rolling Stone, The Weekly Standard, Calgary Herald, Post Carbon Institute, International Relations and Security Network, Small Wars Journal, Pajamas Media, and Pragati Magazine. (more)

"The Resilient Community Wiki" (more)

Albert Wenger: A Word on NFTs. A lot of people seem to think that it is completely insane to spend money for something that is freely copyable. Why would anyone pay if you can simply go to Twitter and see the tweet there? Screenshot if you want to? (more)

a thing on which you build other things :) (more)

Blockchain-Based Creator Organization Rally Raises $57 Million, Plans Eco-Friendly NFT Platform. Rally, which describes itself as a “decentralized organization,” was founded in 2018. (more)

An indirect metric you use as feedback because more "real" metrics are laggy, or too dependent on multiple inputs. Has increased risk of triggering Goodhart's Law.

a metric which feels good but doesn't actually indicate real progress/success - aka "pageviews"

Goodhart's law is an adage named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who advanced the idea in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom, Problems of Monetary Management: the U.K. Experience:[1][2] "Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes." In a paper published in 1997, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern generalized Goodhart's law beyond statistics and control to evaluation more broadly. The phrase commonly referred to as Goodhart's law comes from Strathern's paper, not from any of Goodhart's writings: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." (metric, feedback) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Multi-level marketing (MLM), also called network marketing[1] or pyramid selling,[2][3][4] is a controversial[5] marketing strategy for the sale of products or services where the revenue of the MLM company is derived from a non-salaried workforce selling the company's products or services, while the earnings of the participants are derived from a pyramid-shaped or binary compensation commission system. An MLM strategy may be an illegal pyramid scheme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-level_marketing

Albert Wenger: Against Technological Determinism: Blockchains and Encryption. When the web first emerged I remember vividly the excitement that I and many others felt about the potential for decentralized and permissionless publishing...A massive shift of power to the people. (more)

On programmer behaviours that make Scrum so bad. Respectable persons of this parish of Internet have been, shall we say, critical of Scrum and its ability to help makers (particularly software developers) to make things (particularly software). Ron Jeffries and GeePaw Hill have both deployed the bullshit word. (more)

Albert Wenger: Sign All Things. I have written repeatedly about why I don’t think “encrypt all things” is the right answer for constructing a democratic society going forward. I am, however, a fan of the idea to “sign all things.” 2016-04-08-WengerAgainstTechnologicalDeterminismBlockchainsAndEncryption (more)

Epic Games, Bored Apes, and the Story of the Metaverse. This week, a 'superstar' will hold an event in Fortnite as part of the Rift Tour. It's rumoured that Ariana Grande will 'perform' (more)

Ron Jeffries: Scrum is not an Agile Software Development Framework. Scrum is not a software development framework at all. (more)

Gavin Newsom's Recall Election Divides Silicon Valley’s Elite. Silicon Valley is a famously left-leaning place. Technologists have been known to spend their riches advancing gender equality or eradicating homelessness, occasionally even proposing higher taxes on the very wealthy—that is, themselves. These generous allowances appeared most recently in the form of support for California governor Gavin Newsom, who is currently facing a recall in a September special election. Not surprisingly, Newsom has received donations from an elite circle of tech luminaries (more)

Albert Wenger: Thinking about Leaving Tumblr: Looking for a Decentralized Blog Network. My blog Continuations has been on Tumblr since I started writing it a bit over eight years ago. But now I am seriously considering moving away from Tumblr. (more)

Albert Wenger: Limited Edition Digital Music. This is another post in thinking out loud about the economics of abundant and digital goods. In particular, I am interested in mechanisms that allow producers to recapture some of the consumer surplus even when the price for (a version of) the good is zero. (more)