https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck
Pretty funny. Sent to me from a buddy who probably prefers not to be named š
https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck
Pretty funny. Sent to me from a buddy who probably prefers not to be named š
The Wax (a web based word processor we are developing) lead dev -Christos Kokosias – yesterday embedded another editor, in the editor. We need this for the PubSweet Book Sprint where we will be including code snippets inĀ the documentation we create. So we need a nice way to manage that… consequently Christos embedded the CodeMirror code editor into Wax. So it has things like syntax highlighting, line numbering, auto complete etc all built into the code blocks…its pretty cool… below is are two short vids Christos made to show it in action:
Pretty cool stuff and extremely useful for writing documentation that includes code…ask yourself… can MS Word or Google Docs do that? #opensourceisbetter
I had an interesting chat with Dirk Slater from Fabriders yesterday. It was a live online interview/discussion about the work I’ve done since FLOSS Manuals which I started 10 years ago.
Here are a few points I want to distill out from my experience evolving the Book Sprints, the Cabbage Tree Method, Workflow Sprints and others…
And as a last coda, a note on who makes a good facilitator… I do believe some people, through a combination of nature and nurture, will make excellent facilitators, while others should really not even attempt it. I must say that this is a very hard thing to determine before training someone. I have some clues as to what qualities may contribute to being a great facilitator but it’s still largely a mysteryĀ to me. You never really know it until you see it, which is why I prefer to train people with the option of stopping if I can see it won’t work out.
I will say however, that I have found that most unconf facilitators do not make good ‘production’ facilitators. My best attempt to understand this hasn’t got me very far, although I’d say it has something to do with the two processes looking like they overlap a great deal, but in reality they overlap less than you imagine. Consequently the internal rationale and ’emotional position’ you take, as well as the facilitation tools and tricks, don’t actually transfer, and, worse, will probably lead you in entirely the wrong direction. You need to be rewired, and I haven’t seen this work (yet). This my best take on it and is purely anecdotal – garnered from training several people who knew how to facilitate unconfs only to abandon the effort to facilitate production part way through. I can’t entirely explain it, but there you are – take it for what it’s worth.
The Coko community is having a Book Sprint in Cambridge next month. It will be about 10-12 people, and facilitated by BookSprints.net and featuring folks from Hindawi, eLife, EBI and Coko! Community making docs for the community.
We will use Editoria in the process for writing the book, which is a classic case of dog fooding. Looking forward to it!
A document worth remembering – http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02991.pdf
I don’t like reading Twitter, let alone quoting it…but this thread is something that came into my view and admittedly it has some very good points.
1/ Product Management isnāt a major one can study, few folks graduate into, and most people learn by apprenticeship. There are number of dangerous myths about what the PM role is. Here is a thread with fiveā¦
— Noah Weiss (@noah_weiss) May 23, 2018
IĀ particularly like these points:
4/ āPMs are the decision makersā: Many people who convert from another role into product see it as way to get to āmake the callsā. Itās a common pattern, especially for disempowered engineers on dysfunctional product development teams.
— Noah Weiss (@noah_weiss) May 23, 2018
and
6/ That does not, however, mean they should make even a small fraction of decisions themselves. They should be the ultimate facilitator: pull the best ideas from their team, coordinate with xfn partners, get exec context, etc.
— Noah Weiss (@noah_weiss) May 23, 2018
I have problems with the Product Management role, which can also be called Product Owner, Project Manager, … there is a ill defined ‘scopeless nature’ of each of these roles and they are often used evasively and interchangeably. Product Owner is particularly insideous as it is tinged with the Agile religons practice of ‘proxying the user’ (of which they use many tools – empathy maps, avatars etc).
I don’t know Noah Weiss, never heard of him before today, but he seems to have some culture capital in this area going by the amount of chatter on that thread. I can only say it is refreshing to see someone with such high cultural capital speaking sense.
My own take on all of the above is that the role of facilitator is never called out or given a central focus. Noah Weiss speaks of facilitation as a feature of ‘product management’ but I think it is the definition of the role. So much so that I prefer to throw away terms like ‘Product Manager'(etc) in favour of Facilitator. Titles are strong sign posts, navigational instruments that act as framing devices. Hence where lang doesn’t work I like to seek out a more compelling and accurate lexicon. Which is why we (at Coko) don’t have Product Managers etc… we have a Facilitator, which is basically me, and as we scale my job now is to embed that understanding and role definition/practice in the culture and school others (gently) as to what that means.
Twice a year the Shuttleworth Foundation hosts present and past fellows in a one-week meet. This time it was in a beautiful estate in the UK. I have struggled at times to understand the beauty of the UK but this week the English countryside was luscious and beautiful…
A write up of the event I presented at last week in Berlin.
http://epubsecrets.com/notes-from-berlin-dpub-summit-highlights.php
In case you are curious
By fellow Fellow (at the Shuttleworth Foundation) Sean Bonner. Awesome chap.