Again, there were over 500 finalists from the participating countries, and while it is an absolute pleasure to get the opportunity to look at them in detail, it is also a tough work ranking them against each other. After a first round, about one quarter of the images were left for a final round. The tooling was just as great as last year, and the organizers did very well in guiding us jurors in our work. And that got us to a result.
So once again I have the pleasure to see that twenty winners have finally been announced. Head over to wikilovesearth.org and check them out, there are some true gems there.
Of course, in a jury with 11 jurors, there will be some compromises, but as my favorite images made it to the top ten I am still happy with the overall result. My absolute favorite of them all was this stunning landscape.
A few months back, I stumbled upon a call for submissions to a zine by Climateverse: Futurescapes – Visions of Earth 2024-2100. They were looking for art or stories around the climate in a future setting. The way it asked for submissions for different time frames got me thinking about a problem I have been thinking about for a long time, namely how to reduce the amount of flying in the world. While there are systems with taxes, those quickly become unjust as the very rich ones just pay and keep flying. And systems with steep progressive taxes (like where the tax increases exponentially for each flight) need to track how much everybody is flying, and thus is a concern for the privacy.
But the problem remains.
And the last idea got me thinking. What if, if we somehow anyway need to forsake some privacy, instead of tracking where people go, have an agency that decides if you are allowed to go somewhere in the first place. And it makes that judgment based on the necessity of the flight in light of the harm the flight itself causes. Basically, reframing it by treating flying as such a pollutant that you need an exception from the baseline of flying not being allowed, and you will only get permission if you can prove that the flight will bring some kind of benefits for humanity. The purpose of the agency would be to reduce carbon emissions.
On the website, there is a form for applying for permission to make a flight as the landing page. The form is really meant to show that there needs to be good cause for a flight and that pleasure is not an option to base travel on.
After working on flight permission form and the website for a while, I felt that there is more to explore in this space. I want to expand this site to both be an experiment of radical ideas and a showcase of good steps in the world.
Therefore, I will be adding news as I find them, and I would also love if you help me out if you see good and previously radical ideas implemented. Send them to me at ideas@carbonomission.org or make an issue or pull request on GitHub.
And on the more provocative side, I will keep adding ideas that an agency could do. Here, too, I would be thankful for any ideas that you have. Use the same email or GitHub to share them with me. The purpose of this is to show what an agency could do, increasing the Overton window in the public discussion, perhaps finding solutions that are going in this direction.
Now, this started with this call for submissions, so I sent my idea in and a little bit to my surprise it was accepted. And here is a preview of the zine Futurescapes – Visions of Earth 2024-2100! There will be an online flip book with a 2-page layout featuring presentations of the artists after the new year, I will update this section then. There might also be a printed version somehow, we’ll see how that unfolds.
As another preview, here is an animated GIF of the website, selecting the first dropdown in the form.
We did have a tiny but constructive user group meeting (minutes) in November which brought up one good new idea about exploring new media and coordinating that work. I added it to the strategy which is starting to come together to the point that I think we can use it for 2025 and then incrementally improve it. As the year is quickly coming to an end, I also set up a page for our annual plan for next year to start collecting some tangible ideas.
Newsletter
The newsletter came together this month too, and this time also with a new contributor which was nice.
CEE catch-up call #8
The Central and East Europe hub have catch-up calls and for their 8th I was invited to give a brief introduction to the user group. It was recorded but neither the video nor the slides (I added mine to their slide deck) have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons yet.
As previous months, I continued to share news about the Fediverse on Mastodon, in particular I enjoyed this analogy to Fediverse being vegetarian, organic, locally produced food and other social media being ultra-processed food by giant corporations. I also enjoyed this personal and educational explainer of the Fediverse:
This month I also encountered a lot of comparisons to Bluesky. While planned to be decentralized and federated, I read enough now to know that it isn’t yet.
Deactivating Twitter
I guess the biggest news is that I finally deactivated my personal Twitter account, @Jan Ainali. Taking the plunge was easier when I figured out how to share my archive, and you can find it on aina.li/twitter. Similarly, I published the much smaller archive for @openbydefault on openbydefault.se/twitter. What is left for me in this regard is to deactivate that account and figure out where and how to start a new Fediverse account, preferably using my own domain.
Streaming and podcast improvements
I continued to do some live streaming on Everything video. Unfortunately, there seems to be something causing to video and audio to lose sync after a few minutes. I think I need to file a bug report somewhere.
On the more fun note, I got into a conversation with the developer of the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on Mastodon and got some tips to make the audio file from our podcasts playable directly in the feeds. That’s a really nice step forward.
Europeana has this fun challenge every year, GIF IT UP, which is about modifying a public domain image in one of the connected collections in some creative way. I have thought about doing something for it several times, but never got around to it. But this year I finally did. My entry below, I call Beach Level Demise, and it builds on the painting Summer evening on Skagen’s Southern Beach by Peder Severin Krøyer. If you like it and have the time, please vote for it.
The meaning is probably quite obvious, a remark about the rising sea levels due to climate change. When I made this, I had no idea about the Danish TV series Families like Ours, but now it feels even more fitting.
I created a first draft of the strategy for 2030 by moving the ideas we came up with at our last meeting. It’s not fully fledged, but perhaps it is good enough to provoke a reaction, or to see what is missing when we get down to annual planning.
This month, after a discussion I initiated, we opted to deactivate the Twitter account @wikisusdev: Internet Archive.
On a more constructive note, I also engaged a new moderator in the Facebook group. I truly hope to be able to get more people involved like this, by taking on quite small tasks. Not only will it unburden me, but my ambition is that it will increase the sense of belonging, community and agency in the process and development happening in all these ends.
I also found the niche instance Urbanists.video so now I have also started an account dedicated for biking in Amsterdam (but not published any videos yet).
Deactivating Twitter accounts
This month I got around to closing down some Twitter accounts I have been managing. Some I tried to archive properly using the instructions from the Internet Archive, but it looks from the logs that X makes it nearly impossible, as all new tweets failed to be retrieved. Some I just did a quick archive of the profile page before deactivating, some even failed archiving the profile page as Twitter makes a (hostile) redirect to another tweet instead. Here are the ones that I have already deactivated:
Riksdagen redigerar, @RiksdagWikiEdit: Internet Archive, archive downloaded
Svenskspråkiga Wikipedia, @SveWikipedia: Internet Archive, archive downloaded
For Open By Default, @openbydefault I haven’t deactivated yet. I am both in need of starting a Mastodon account somewhere, and get around to publish the old tweets: Internet Archive, archive downloaded
On Tuesday, 29 October, Wikidata turns twelve, and I had been thinking about creating a small birthday gift to celebrate. Earlier, I had experimented with creating an animated background to use in our Editing Wikidata live streams, but never got one that worked well. But the thought popped up again, and perhaps I could do something different.
As it were, another thought I had also been pondering was how to do a refresh on the older web slides I used to present and if I could use the animated background I have on aina.li. Two thoughts turned into one, and I made an animated Wikidata background for the web.
Yes, it is a bit silly, and not hugely useful for the sum of human knowledge, but a celebration has to be a bit fun too. So happy 12th birthday Wikidata, I hope you enjoy all your gifts.
September was more hectic than planned, so here comes two months of reporting at once.
Wikimania
As I mentioned last month, I organized a meetup for anyone interested in sustainable development. While decently attended, it did not pan out the way I had planned. Instead of sharing ideas of what to do, there were plenty of people who felt a need to vent their worries about the climate change. I think for the future, having a separate climate café where people just can talk about that would be useful and can make the community more sustainable in itself.
I don’t know if many others used the list all sessions related to the SDGs that I created, but at least it was useful to me during the event.
User group meetings
We had meetings in both August and September, in the first we mostly did some planning and in the second, we started the work on a strategy for the user group. More work to do in the following weeks.
Newsletters
While hectic, I managed to get the newsletters sent both for August and September.
September was more hectic than planned, so here comes two months of reporting at once.
Just as lately, these two months were largely similar to the last ones. I have continued to boost information about Fediverse apps, news and tips and tricks.
