Currently in a plane, flying over the Pacific somewhere from Singapore to San Francisco. Was playing around with the Links browser (there is wifi on the plane but low bandwidth). Links (http://links.twibright.com/) is a good solution for a situation like this, it is faster and more responsive that a complete graphical browser… I think I’ll use it more now!
and in graphics mode… for those that want to get fancy
Tamlyn Rhodes from YLD in London has developed a cool robot for our instance of Mattermost. It is a newsbot. Essentially, anyone in the Coko Townsquare channel can message ‘@newsbot subscribe’ and will be subscribed to the Coko community newsletter.
The newsletter is an automatically prepared email, compiled once a week. The robot looks through all posts that start ‘#weekly’ (we use this for weekly updates) or ‘:cokobot:’ (tags with a cokorobot icon) and adds these items to the weekly 
newsletter (bot icon by Julien Taquet)….we are trying it out this week! Cool stuff. You can see Tamlyn in the pic below, center stage in orange. Photo taken last week at the London PubSweet meet.
Just arrived in Singapore for Crossref Live. It is a two day conference, I’ll be presenting on publishing, open source, and community on day 2 (Wednesday).
So, I’ve thought about Open Source and design… I’ve even written some articles on opensource.com (https://opensource.com/users/adam-hyde) about the subject, and created a methodology for bringing the use-case specialist (user) into the center of the process, along with designers and everyone else…
I’ve also brought this subject up a number of times in Shuttleworth Foundation meetings and received some invaluable advice and insights from fellow Fellows and Shuttleworth staff… many of whom have heard my whacky ideas several times over now and are still patiently listening and offering advice! Forever grateful to y’all… especially Helen, Sean, Arthur, and Andrew for ideas and feedback.
But what I didn’t expect, is that I’d be part of a wider community where these ideas could form the basis of the culture. This is what I saw happen this week in London as part of the PubSweet Global meet Coko hosted (& I facilitated).
There were about 25 of us coming together to discuss all things PubSweet with particular emphasis on building Journals. Present were many folks from eLife, Hindawi, Ubiquity, and Coko. We got to the topic of ‘Technical Council’ and I tabled the idea that we need some kind of process in place so that all stakeholders feel they are getting a say in, and are being heard, the future of PubSweet – since it is their technology too.
When I tabled the idea that we need some form of technical council, Catriona MacCallum, who I used to work with at PLOS, asked the very salient question – and what about the users?
I’m very grateful to Catriona for that question as it gave me the opportunity to open up the concept and talk about how there are very few communities in open source that treat software development as anything other than just a technical problem, and further that we should take this opportunity to experiment in making this community strong on solving ‘user needs’ and design… it was a great discussion and I’m also grateful to eLife’s head of product – Giuliano Maciocci – for having a strong voice in favor of this and really stepping into, what looks to be, an emergent leadership role with regard to design in the community.
As a result, we formed a Dev Council and a Design Council. These are oversight/communication groups of 5 people each. So, they don’t ‘govern’ but the choice by the community to form these two groups is a testament to how seriously the community is to making beautiful products that solve real problems in publishing for real people…
All in all, a pretty fantastic 3 days.
The Restart Project – https://therestartproject.org/ – is looking for an ops lead…they are a really cool project and good people…highly recommended! Apply even if you are faintly interested, you won’t regret it!
https://therestartproject.org/ops-lead/
We are looking for the next stellar member of our small team. As we are poised to make a real step-change, this is an opportunity to help build a fun and inspiring organisation. We have been growing quickly, moving from 2 people in early 2016 to a team of 6 now. We need someone to ensure we are well organised including managing our office space, providing information to funders, managing our performance information and ensuring we keep up to speed on HR policy, pensions and finances.