Carolina’s post reminds me of A Paradise Built In Hell by Rebecca Solnit:
In the face of disaster, survivors get together, make time and help one another regardless of their differences. It is beautiful and inspiring.
A global communications network now exists that’s cheap enough or in some cases even free to access, offering a pseudonymous way for people to feel safe enough to share a private experience with complete strangers? I give Facebook and Twitter a bunch of shit for their rhetoric about a global community (no, Facebook’s billions of users are no more a community than the television-watching global community) and creating authentic connection, but I will very happily admit that this, this particular example with people sharing what it is like to be me and learning what is it like to be you is the good.
This is the thing that makes free, open, networked communication brilliant. This is the thing that brings down silos and creates common understanding and humanizes us all, that creates empathy and the first steps towards compassion.
That someone can read about this insight and have a way to react to it and share their perspective and not even know who else might read it, but feel safe in doing so and maybe even with the expectation that this sharing is a net good? That is good. That is what we should strive for.
The transcript of Nat’s superb Webstock talk.
We need to start thinking about inclusivity the same way as we think about mobile design. We realised with mobile, that we have to put that experience at the centre of what we do, otherwise it won’t be successful and we’ll fail mobile users. We realised we have to design mobile-first.
The same is true for inclusivity. Instead of it being an afterthought if it’s thought about at all, it needs to be our first thought. It needs to be central to our strategy, embedded in how we analyse and solve the problems we encounter. Designing inclusive-first is the only way we’ll manage to serve and protect all of the people who use what we build.
A weekly list of short, concrete actions to defend the weak, rebuild civic institutions, and fight right-wing extremism. For UK people.
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A wonderful rallying cry for the indie web:
Do it yourself. Strip it down. Keep control. Make it for your community. Don’t do it for the money.
And this is where I start to understand what my friend Rebecca Gates means when she says that technologists and designers have a lot to learn from punk and indie rock. Leave the expensive, large scale, commercial arena rock to Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
We can be The Ramones.
And Bad Brains.
We can press our own records, and run our own labels.
We can make our own spaces based on our own values.
Such a shame that it’s only on Medium—the MOR of online publishing.
A heartfelt call to web developers to consider the needs of the many and varied people trying to use what we build.
None of this is about Javascript. None of this is about CSS transforms or WebGL. None of this is about technology at all.
It is about making products that serve all users equally. It is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes. It is about trying to imagine the frustration and difficulty of using our products when the conditions aren’t what we’re used to. It is about being human.