My Fediverse February 2024

This is the first half of my second monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

This month was slower than January, but I did continue with similar positive reinforcements, namely boosting information about Fediverse. That activity was mainly on Mastodon, but I am aiming to widen that scope in the future.

I had planned to watch Fediverse related sessions on FOSDEM and State of Open Con, but could to my surprise not find anything else than very technical talks about integration on specific platforms. If you watched something good, please let me know!

Migrating Let’s talk about public code

In bigger news, I was influential in one substantial task, moving the podcast Let’s talk about public code to a Funkwhale instance: open.audio. The move itself was manual, but fairly easy due to the low number of episodes. Mostly, it was simple copy-and-paste work, and nothing really tricky at all.

One deciding factor for choosing this instance was that rather than open registration, all accounts are manually screened and all content need to have a Creative Commons license. Hopefully, this will be enough to keep the platform full of only properly licensed and sharable material.

My Fediverse January 2024

This is the second half of my first monthly reports of my New Year’s resolutions.

In contrast to the other resolution, this has seen less progress, and it is still brewing a lot in my mind. What has come to change in my behavior on Mastodon, though, is that I this month has been actively boosting toots related to different Fediverse news, tools and platforms.

Learning

I watched this excellent conversation with Evan Prodromou and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue:

I was also experimenting with getting the MP3 into the toot on Wikipediapodden, a WordPress site with the ActivityPub plugin enabled, but to no success yet. It would be nice if it could be playable from inside Mastodon, just like an attached MP3 is.

Contributions

I started translating PeerTube to Swedish. Not in bulk, but at least I found where to do it and got my account going.

Planning for the year

I started a larger document with ideas of things to do during this year. Many small ideas that I need to think more about.

In particular, though, I am planning to transfer some of the Wikipedia bot accounts I set up on Twitter to Mastodon, but haven’t found frameworks that are simple enough yet. Any tips, especially guides rather than empty git repositories, for how to run that would be appreciated.

Resolutions for 2024

A few years back, I got inspired by Daniel Mietchen for New Year’s resolutions. While inspiring and important, the way I did it was not really what I imagined, and I did not continue in 2022. Basically, I hadn’t thought through how I wanted to document it, and it all became a bit too ad hoc to feel like I was doing it with purpose.

Themes

Now I have given it quite some thought and have two new themes that I am inspired about. The themes are Wikimedians for Sustainable Development and Fediverse. To read about my ambitions in detail and see the progress overview, check this dashboard for my 2024 New Year’s Resolutions.

Documentation

I have also figured out that the way I want to document my progress is by monthly blog posts here, one for each theme. I’ll create a tag for each of them so that they all can be found easily later (fediverse 2024 and sustainability 2024).

Running

While not really a resolution as such this year, with the results from the last two years, I will keep my ambition of running 5 km every second day.

EDIT (2024-01-19): As I am also planning to do a lot more hiking this year, and that usually “eats up” running days even though it is also beneficial for general health, I will allow for those to be counted as a third of the distance. For example, a hike of 15 km would be counted as a 5 km run.

Building a Govdirectory

Which Swedish municipalities have YouTube accounts?

Sometime in 2016 I got the idea of building a website that would display all the social media channels for all Swedish public agencies. The idea popped in my mind as I was learning the flexibility and power of Wikidata. But my confidence in the more advanced tooling to edit it was low, so I put this in the backlog to revisit later since it felt like a huge task.

Unlocking the idea

Five years, almost 50 live streams of editing Wikidata, a won contest, and about 70 Wikidata meetups later, when the announcement of the Unlock accelerator by Wikimedia Deutschland flew into my Twitter feed, not only did I feel more confident, I also had a potential collaborator. So I pitched the idea to Albin Larsson, my co-host of the live streams, but this time on a global scale, not only for Sweden. The idea at this stage was bold and simple:

a global directory of all government agencies and their online presences

We now also knew that by using Wikidata, we could show even more information than only social media. The accelerator program is unusual in that it doesn’t aim to create a startup and make a profit, instead it aims to enable a social impact on the world. The theme this year, (Re)building trust in the digital age, felt really fitting. We worked on an application and short thereafter we were accepted and in a sprint. The first sprint was really great, with the help of our coach Fabian Gampp we took our somewhat technical idea into a purpose driven project by forming a vision and a mission that extended way beyond the technology. Even though we had some ideas of what this could be used for when writing the application, it was still somewhat fleeting in our minds. Our ambitions became these:

Vision

Our vision is a world where people are empowered to engage with their government to ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels.

Mission

We will enable a community powered directory where the online presence of every public organization is easily findable, queryable and trustworthy.

Early days

We are still in the midst of the accelerator program, and just published the midterm report. If you want to give us feedback on our early version at govdirectory.org it would be valuable to us. If you would like to help us even further, check our contributing file on GitHub for improvements on the website and our project page on Wikidata for improving the data displayed in it.

Jag har ett skämt

Det kom en flod av tweets som alla hade samma form: “Jag har ett skämt om X men Y.” där Y inte bara är hindret utan också skämtet. Jag gillade typen eftersom att många av dem bästa också är på någon slags metanivå.

Jag kunde så klart inte motstå frestelsen, så här är en samling av mina skämt på temat. Formen gör ju att de inte är roliga för de som inte är insatta i ämnet, men kanske är det någon som får smilbanden att vinkla uppåt?

Har du hittat några tweets på detta tema som du skrattade högt åt? Länka gärna i kommentarerna eller pinga mig på Twitter.

Tionde mest retweetade

Jag såg en intressant tanke i en sluten grupp på Facebook i mellandagarna så jag skrev om den lite och twittrade den så att fler skulle få tänka till lite.

Det tog en väldig fart och notiserna duggade tätt och nu visade det sig att det var den tionde mest retweetade tweeten på svenska vecka 52.

Jag är @sweden

Veckan 23-29 maj har jag den stora äran att vara @sweden! Det innebär att jag styr över Sveriges officiella twitter i en hel vecka. Den kommer såklart att domineras av min vandring men jag kommer också att väva in en hel del annat ur mitt perspektiv på Sverige.
Det betyder också att jag inte kommer att twittra så mycket från mitt vanliga konto, men oroa er inte, det är bara sju dagar innan jag är tillbaka.

OpenBadges

Som ni kanske har sett på den här bloggen har jag lagt till en ruta där jag visar upp några OpenBadges som jag har fått. Än så länge är just de inte så mycket att stoltsera över, de är sådana som man snabbt tjänar på ett litet test, och deras verifieringslänkar när de är inbäddade i WordPress fungerar inte heller något vidare. Egentligen ganska dåliga exempel för en annars utmärkt idé. I min backpack på Mozilla ser det hela mycket bättre ut.

Det finns en otroligt stor potential här tror jag. En massa tjänster och webbplatser använder sig av olika medaljer i sin spelifiering för att höja motivationen hos användarna. Och med en ordentlig verifierbarhet så skulle det också kunna vara rejält användbart. Ta till exempel sociala medier kursen jag gick förut, där fick jag ett diplom på papper, vilket ju känns lite ironiskt i en sådan kurs. På min Linkedin-profil finns det alltså ingen direkt möjlighet att kontrollera det påståendet. Men om Linkedin hade haft stöd för att visa sådana, och kursen hade utfärdat dem så hade det varit en riktig höjdare, till nytta för både de som har en badge och för de som läser deras profiler. Nöjdare kunder för Linkedin helt enkelt.

Min förhoppning är att fler tjänster använder sig av riktiga OpenBadges istället för hemmasnickrade varianter för att ge användaren ett större värde och att fler tjänster ger möjligheten att visa dem i sin profil. Hur skulle du vilja använda OpenBadges?