Elijah van der Giessen

TechSoup Connect Western Canada is hosting a free online workshop for nonprofits on June 20. This will be a practical workshop about how to write better prompts. I hope to see you there!

https://impactdaos.xyz/

“The guide to everything Impact DAO, the future of organizing for good. A book written by a DAO for those who want to build their own DAOs”

“My monetization strategy is to ask you for money over and over.” I’m not kidding. That’s exactly how the grant system is set up. It doesn’t work well for any of us.

How do we value Public Good Technology? — crank.report

As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible?

By Ted Chiang

https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey

“We should all strive to be Luddites, because we should all be more concerned with economic justice than with increasing the private accumulation of capital. We need to be able to criticize harmful uses of technology—and those include uses that benefit shareholders over workers—without being described as opponents of technology.”

After several years on hiatus, TechSoup Connect Western Canada is returning to in-person events. If you’re in the Metro Vancouver area, I’d love to see you in person for an exploration of emerging nonprofit technology, including Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Virtual Reality (V.R.), and Mastodon. Jai Djwa is presenting, so you know you’re in for a fascinating discussion.

Healthy, adaptive, vibrant communities have a few things in common:

• clear boundaries that are not rigid
• a sense of belonging among members
• a pattern of service and care between members and of common resources

Turning Community Engagement Inside Out

imagine that all the world’s knowledge is stored, and organized, in a single vertical Steelcase filing cabinet. Maybe it’s lima-bean green. It’s got four drawers. Each drawer has one of those little paper-card labels, snug in a metal frame, just above the drawer pull. The drawers are labelled, from top to bottom, “Mysteries,” “Facts,” “Numbers,” and “Data.” Mysteries are things only God knows, like what happens when you’re dead. That’s why they’re in the top drawer, closest to Heaven. A long time ago, this drawer used to be crammed full of folders with names like “Why Stars Exist” and “When Life Begins,” but a few centuries ago, during the scientific revolution, a lot of those folders were moved into the next drawer down, “Facts,” which contains files about things humans can prove by way of observation, detection, and experiment. “Numbers,” second from the bottom, holds censuses, polls, tallies, national averages—the measurement of anything that can be counted, ever since the rise of statistics, around the end of the eighteenth century. Near the floor, the drawer marked “Data” holds knowledge that humans can’t know directly but must be extracted by a computer, or even by an artificial intelligence. It used to be empty, but it started filling up about a century ago, and now it’s so jammed full it’s hard to open.

From the outside, these four drawers look alike, but, inside, they follow different logics. The point of collecting mysteries is salvation; you learn about them by way of revelation; they’re associated with mystification and theocracy; and the discipline people use to study them is theology. The point of collecting facts is to find the truth; you learn about them by way of discernment; they’re associated with secularization and liberalism; and the disciplines you use to study them are law, the humanities, and the natural sciences. The point of collecting numbers in the form of statistics—etymologically, numbers gathered by the state—is the power of public governance; you learn about them by measurement; historically, they’re associated with the rise of the administrative state; and the disciplines you use to study them are the social sciences. The point of feeding data into computers is prediction, which is accomplished by way of pattern detection. The age of data is associated with late capitalism, authoritarianism, techno-utopianism, and a discipline known as data science, which has lately been the top of the top hat, the spit shine on the buckled shoe, the whir of the whizziest Tesla.