User:Vanderven.se martijn/hwc-2017-319

Notes from Virtual Homebrew Website Club, November 15, 2017 taken as the conversation flowed. They don’t have any order to them other than time, and related items haven’t been grouped.

Attendance: Mark Dain, Jeremy Cherfas, Martijn van der Ven, Sebastian Greger, and Sven Knebel.

• How to grow the community.
  • Can we get people who show up to events like 2017/Berlin to interact more actively in-between events? IRC? Blogging?
  • How do we make the wiki seem more pleasant? Maybe wiki gardening is more important than just wikifying information.
    • Jeremy notes that many pages are marked {{stub}}. And even if he has contributed he never really knows when to take away the stub marker.
    • Jeremy also wondered what we do to attract people to weigh in on issues that are being tracked on the wiki. E.g. how are we asking people to comment on Updating the IndieAuth How To?
• Some talk of the bookmarking and archiving session from Berlin.
• exist.io - a service for aggregating data that is kept by silos.
  • It is a silo itself, but does offer export options.
• reading.am - a service for tracking what you read online.
  • Jeremy is looking for a way to get these reads onto his own site.
• Grav - Jeremy keeps hitting workflow problems with his Grav set-up, is considering cutting out a step by writing his own little application that generates the file-storage elements for a post without a need for the full PHP Grav back-end to run.
• sleep tracking
  • Jeremy uses his GARMIN health tracking device.
  • Sven would like to try some stuff but needs higher reliability than some phone apps have given him.
    • Considered just putting a webcam above his bed to create time lapses.
  • Jeremy mentions someone who did his own tracking by an app of his own invention: the application would make a soft sound and prompt the person the confirm being awake. If they slept, the application would log the non-response to the prompt.
    • Together with tracking of their feelings this person was able to show their actual amount of hours slept did not correlate with how well they thought they slept.
  • exist.io relates sleep data to whatever was done the day before.
  • I would like to track this but would have some second thoughts about the privacy of telling silos when I sleep.
• Privacy
  • What about Facebook’s People You May Know things? Jeremy brought up How Facebook Figures Out Everyone You've Ever Met.
  • What about sharing address books?
    • Case in Germany has said a woman needed to obtain consent from everyone in their address book before sharing it.
  • How does Signal do this, where accounts are phone numbers?
    • try to keep data for as short as possible
    • Blog post explaining what doesn't work: https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/
    • Description of new design using Intel SGX secure hardware enclaves(!): https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
  • There are different degrees of how public some data is.
    • My phone number was already publicly displayed online before I started publishing it, and I don’t mind making it easier for people to find it by putting it on my site.
    • My personal identity number is also public data and available online for people who know where to look, but I do not feel like I have to make it easier to obtain.
• Event tooling
  • Tool for more easily creating the IWC schedules?
  • Event organisers should point out the schedule during the introductions, so people know where to find the etherpads for note-taking.
    • During the Berlin event Sven noted at least 1 person who thought they couldn’t take notes because they needed an account. Demo would solve this.
• Daniel Goldsmith tracks his reading through IRC, but that’s just books.
• Brainstorming about a service that accepts reading.am’s webhook POST requests and forwards them as Micropub posts to an endpoint of the user’s choosing.
• Sven has noted a new form of POSSE/Data aggregation, people are making posts on their home pages of e.g. “all open source contributions made in October”.
  • Example he linked: My free software activities, April 2017 - anarcat
  • He is interested in doing something like this himself, as it also gives a great way to keep track of things that still need to be followed up upon.
    • Side note: GitHub makes it impossible to see what issues you are subscribed to. Subscribing isn’t even an event in their API.
  • Also see shurcool’s website that lists all his GitHub activity.
• reading.am Firefox extension doesn’t work any more, was only available in the legacy system.
  • One tweet conversation later the extensions were put on GitHub!
• What Micropub endpoints are out there and open sourced?
  • What can we do to stop completely reinventing the wheel on this every time?
  • Can parts of the endpoints be extracted and made useful for general consumption, or are they just always intertwined with the entire back-end of how posts are stored and treated?
  • nanopub gets a shout-out.
• Never forget: just running your website is enough to be IndieWeb. Even without having all of the tech implemented! (There was a quote, I think from Christian Weiske, that I can’t find now.)