Two weeks ago, I went to the FOSS Backstage conference in Berlin. I have been to one before, and also presented virtually on it, but this was the first time with a full size talk on-site. Even though it was the first time I talked on this topic, it felt okay. And now the video of the talk Using the commons without causing a tragedy is published on their YouTube channel.
All in all, the conference was well organized and the catering was lovely. I am looking forward to participate in and contribute to future editions of FOSS Backstage.
Screenshot from the central course register Ladok (the only possible grades were pass or fail).
And this time in the assignment I managed to tie together my thoughts about openness and sustainability. I wrote about how Houdini Sportswear with all their experience in sustainability can become more than a role model and even reach the level of a public educator. In this spirit, I have also decided to publish my assignment publicly and get a DOI for it (as the university does not do this by default or offer that services optionally yet). It is available on Zenodo as DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15011039 (it is written in Swedish).
I 2019 tog jag och Magnus över programledarrollen för Wikipediapodden, och vi har hållit i sedan dess. Precis nyligen gjorde vi avsnitt 300!
Det har varit en kul resa och över tiden har vi gjort små förändringar här och där. Vi har prövat olika segment, olika längder och frekvens. Men två saker har varit konstanta.
För det första att det främst är en nyhetsuppdatering. Det var så det började, och det är också det som jag tycker främst saknas. Det gör det dessutom att vi behöver vara mindre kreativa varje vecka, eftersom att vi återspeglar vad som händer i de olika gemenskaperna.
För det andra att vi har fokuserat på att ha kul själva och vara generösa mot oss själva. Vi siktar på ett avsnitt inspelat samma tid varje vecka men om livet slänger in oväntade händelser har vi alltid enkelt spelat in en annan dag eller hoppat över en vecka. Jag tror att det är en viktig del att vi fortfarande håller på.
Samtidigt vill jag ge ett stort tack till Wikimedia Sverige som ger oss stöd för webbhotell, inspelningsprogram och teknik. Utan det skulle nog vi aldrig tagit oss dit vi är idag.
With some irregularities, I have had some New Year’s resolutions. Since 2021, these have been inspired by Daniel Mietchen, not only publishing them publicly, but also doing continuous follow-up. This year, I had the basics done on the Eve, but at the last minute, decided to go into more details, with quarterly goals, and that took some more time. But now I am done, and have even done my weekly documentation twice. Perhaps it is not really resolutions in the traditional sense, but more of themes and projects fitting in them.
My themes for the year will be Sustainability, Openness Advocacy, Learning and Health. Each of them has several and more specific sub-themes, and each of those are broken down with quarterly goals. Find the full breakdown and dashboard on GitHub.
The documentation will be different from last year. Instead of monthly updates here, I will try to update the dashboard weekly (and as much as I can, with details in the code commits) and for each quarter write one summary blog post here with reflections and possibly even course corrections.
2024 is over and just like last year, it is time to reflect on the resolutions that I made. I must admit I totally forgot to use the resolutions page as a dashboard like I was planning. But I did do quite well with monthly reports (August and September were lumped together, but otherwise great). So with those meta questions covered, how did I do on my themes?
🔴 Sustainability
make efforts so that the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development becomes a vibrant, healthy and self-sustaining user group
I want to give myself a pass on the efforts made. However, it is clearly not a vibrant, healthy and self-sustaining user group yet. Some more activity has been seen, and a few more people have shown interest in the user group, but I think it is fair to say that it isn’t vibrant. Related to the health, the Wikimedia Affiliates Committee announced that they are considering some “health criteria” which we have started talking about in the group and included in the annual plan for 2025. More on that in my 2025 blog post.
promote the Fediverse by being an active and curious community member and role model
Even though my activity some months was low, I am giving myself a weak pass, as I think I have been quite vigilante in promoting the Fediverse in various ways. This includes exploring different parts of it and not only quitting X, but also being vocal about it. Now, I am pretty sure I haven’t moved the needle on any topline numbers, but at least I am fairly certain that people who followed me in other places and peeked into the Fediverse have been finding a lively and positive part of the internet.
This year was tough. I was sick a bit and had trouble with my calves. But thanks to a good start, and new shoes enabling a strong finish, I made my goal. The running in itself was just a few kilometers from reaching the average, and with the added hiking (where I only count a third of the distance) I was averaging 5.14 km every second day (or 5 km every 1.94 day).
We had a well attended meeting and managed in the end to agree on the annual plan. It’s our first, so I consider it a big success, even though the ambitions in it are fairly low. We didn’t get around to finalizing the strategy yet, though. That will be for early next year.
Newsletter
I did get a last newsletter of the year out, too. An interesting study there that gets on my reading list.
As previous months, I continued to share news about the Fediverse on Mastodon. One of the things I shared, and also partook in, was a research survey, and I think it is still open for you to answer it too if you like.
Plugin development
The issue described last month was resolved and was shipped in version 4.5.0. Pretty cool to see an idea bloom into a reality. It also felt like that, even though I didn’t build it myself, my most tangible contribution to the development of the Fediverse this year.
Loops.video
I created an account on loops.video, which will be some sort of short video platform for the Fediverse. It’s not fully connected to ActivityPub yet, but they got a grant to do it, so I expect it will happen. Find me at https://loops.video/@ainali
Leaving Twitter
I left X with OpenByDefault, the last of my own accounts that I had there. I am still researching how to self-host a server to get me an account on the Fediverse. So far, I am leaning towards a Linux server (VPS) at time4vps as they offer it with Cloudron which would make it fairly easy to get a server up and running. The possibility to host other open source software is also tempting. If you have any experience of them, Cloudron, or other similar setups that you could recommend, I would love to hear from you.
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. Or flip through the full jury report.
Certificate to jurors.
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.
