Category: blog post

Best Coffee in Uganda

I’m in Kampala for a few days and found an amazing coffee house. Its pretty well known but well worth finding if you come this way… 1000 Cups….

check it…some of their specialty coffees, all made with Espresso…

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Above coffee is ‘salted caramel’…delicious…

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In the above the coffee has ground peanuts and chocolate in the bottom….mmmm

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Looking for work?

eLife, our buddies and comrades, are looking for a Node dev to work with them (and us) on their PubSweet platform…

“We are now seeking a full stack Node.js Developer to work on the development, automation, monitoring, architecture and testing of a system we are co-developing with other non-profits and publishers.”

https://elifesciences.org/jobs/ef3f306c/open-source-developer-node-js-react-aws

Would be a (Pub)Sweeeeeeeet job!….

 

In Uganda

I’m in Uganda (Kampala) working with a collection of East African countries to help them move towards some agreements on renewable energy policy. Here for two days at the invitation of UNECA and the East African Science and Technology Commission (EASTECO), presenting tomorrow.

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How is this possible? Well, this presentation brings together two worlds – Book Sprints and Coko. They are looking at a Book Sprint which would also use Editoria. There is some chance they may also need help with Journal tooling for a new journal (East African Journal of Science, Technology and Innovation)… looking into it all.

The presentations so far have been very interesting, covering the renewable energy policy and practices in each of the East African nations. Some interesting facts including the largest use for non-sustainable energy in these regions comes from cooking as most homes, workspaces and restaurants use wood and coal (biomass).

The interesting thing about their use of Book Sprints, is that it is not the book that is important, but the process of generating consensus that the method is so successful at. Its a similar story we have also heard from large NGOs like USAID. It is also what the European Commission were most interested in when I spoke to them last week in Brussels.

Hey Zeus, Where ya going?

So…. when I first came to Europe, around 1998 or so, I came for a conference in Amsterdam, and then found myself walking across the Macedonian – Greek border trying to get away from a potential war zone. It’s a long story, but once over the border I took a taxi to Thessaloniki, then a train to Athens. I got the first hotel I could find, booked a room, went to the roof and drank as many cocktails as my remaining DeutscheMark could buy while watching the sunset over the Acropolis…

It was quite a night for me. I was definitely relieved to be safe, although looking back I don’t think there was anything to worry about. But also, I was super happy and it was quite a surreal experience as I loved studying ancient Greece when I was at college. I knew everything about the Greek gods and myths, and there I was looking at the Acropolis. I spent the next day a little hungover crawling all over it, checking the Parthenon out, trying to work out which was the temple of Athena Nike etc…

Now… many years later, when I come to see the Athens Coko team, I walk to work passing the Acropolis. Is kinda amazing. And then every now and then I take the time to check things out. Like today… my route took me past the Temple of Zeus… so I took the time to have a wander around….

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Whoot! That building in the background is the Parthenon 🙂

Also, today I arrived at the Athens office and a radio I had ordered had turned up. It is the same model as the one I had when I lived in Latvia as a radio artist. It’s from the 1960s and was the first mass-produced transistor radio in Russia. They used to be made in Riga where I spent a lot of time.

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So happy to have this…it kinda was the inspiration for one of the artworks I did a long time ago… http://wifio.net/

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Lotte Meijer did the beautiful design and we made a big two-dimensional cut out installation. You could actually tune the cardboard radio into the local wifi networks and listen to local net traffic read out using a sniffer and text-to-speech synthesis.

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Anyways… cool days…here’s a video that the title of this post sorta comes from… Hey Seuss by NZ band the 3Ds…one of my favs from the ole days… awesome…

PubSweet – How to Build a Publishing Platform

Ever wanted to build a publishing platform but didn’t know how? Here is a book that encapsulates a lot of learning … Here’s the front cover:

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Be part of the change you want to see in the world… build your own publishing platform…  and if you do, please let me know 🙂 We’d love to have you at the community meetings…

Back cover below… we are also printing a few hundred to give away. Let me know if you want a copy.

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