Aaron Swartz Day co-founder Lisa Rein talks about about her work with the annual hackathon. Founded in 2013 after the death of activist and programming wunderkind Aaron Swartz, the event draws attention to Aaron’s story in hopes of protecting others from similar circumstances and offers a yearly showcase of the many projects initiated by Aaron as well as new projects inspired directly by him and his work.
Lisa also talks about her background as archivist for Chelsea Manning: “When I learned more about Chelsea, without getting into whether you agree with what she did or what she didn’t do, she definitely followed her heart and wanted to improve the world and that’s an Aaron Swartz Day thing.”
Produced by Michal Wisniowski and The Kitchen Sisters
Lisa Rein, Co-Founder, Aaron Swartz Day. Chelsea Manning’s Archivist, Dr. Timothy Leary’s Digital Librarian (Photo: Kevin Footer – Art Design/Concept: Kenneth Bryan Smith)
Projects to Hack On at the Conference (so far – as people can invent their own projects at any time over the course of the weekend!) (Including projects for non-programmers!)
VR Faire (new page coming soon), featuring:
-The EFF’s “Spot the Surveillance” –Noisebridge‘s BCI (Brain Computer Interface) Application,
(new page coming soon)
–GameBridge‘s VR Tour of Noisebridge
We’re training volunteers every Friday at the Internet Archive, leading up to our November 9-11 event.
We need folks from everything from taking tickets to being a back up sound person, runners, hackathon & reception set up and break down and much much more. Get some experience and learn about what goes on behind the scenes.
Plus if you volunteer for part of Saturday or Sunday you’ll get yourself and two friends in for free. ^_^
If you are interested, please write us at aaronswartzday@gmail.com by Wednesday at 11am, each week, to reserve a spot.
Okay hope to see you Friday :) (And besure to RSVP :)
I’m a believer in the potential of P2P technologies and the decentralized web to change the way knowledge is disseminated. I consider open science/scholarship to include equity, justice, and opening the profession of scholarship to historically marginalized communities. Building offline-friendly tools, baking in free access, and creating decentralized communities can help open the profession of research and scholarship. A personal goal is to build systems that provide free access to knowledge.
Working with the open access movement via OpenCon, the Code for Science & Society community, and projects like Dat, ScienceFair, and the decentralized data sharing project – I am privileged to wake up everyday and work towards that goal…
Like many people, I felt Aaron’s actions were justified and in line with the spirit of science and research. While the actions of MIT, JSTOR, and the federal government appeared to be motivated by a desire to restrict access to academic work for the protection of moneyed interests. This was the first time I’d heard about the open access movement and first exposure of activism around academic issues. I saw that the problematic incentive structure I experienced in my lab were part of a much larger issue that impacted global access to knowledge. Aaron’s writing on open access inspired me, in part because he focused on what a person could do today.
As a graduate student at a US institution, I was in a relatively privileged position to impact the system. I was inspired to find the community of scholars and activists working on open access issues around the world. I found my local open access community though Robin Champieux at my home institution’s library, got involved in the OpenCon and Mozilla Science communities, and found the way to put my disillusionment to work…
It’s hard for me to consider his work without thinking about his death. Although there is nothing I can say about his death that is new or insightful. Any suicide leaves pain, sadness, and questions unanswered. It’s a reminder that life is messy, and messed up, and often too short. I’ve also struggled with depression. Who hasn’t? I got treatment at a critical point after the birth of my son. Depression isn’t rational. It’s deeply irrational. My personal goal is to be honest about my own experiences and try to support my colleagues and friends (and myself) to do work that (hopefully) matters in a world that doesn’t make sense…
Sadly my PhD advisor is not an open access believer, so until my paper is out of review my dissertation is under embargo (until March 2020), which drives me nuts.
To give you more context regarding my dissertation being embargoed: I understand the incentives that lead my PhD advisor to prefer to keep unpublished work, such as what’s contained in a dissertation, under wraps. I get it. But I think it’s the wrong path for science, in the big picture. It’s also personally frustrating to me, as I know how long it took to get some of those protocols working and I’d prefer preprints or the dissertation to be freely available. I want to save some other researcher that time.
Looking at the field today, open access, preprints, and other approaches to make research freely available are becoming the norm in neuroscience research. It’s a huge change from when I started my degree in 2011. The work isn’t done, and the embargoed dissertation illustrates that for me (on a very personal level).
These Early Bird Passes are only available until midnight on August 15th.
Hello everyone in Aaron Swartz Day-land. We are expecting a full house this year for our San Francisco Hackathon and subsequent Reception & Evening Event. This will be our largest event to date, and many of our speakers are flying in from out of town.
For these reasons, in order to supplement our finances for this year’s grand extravaganza, we have decided to sell some “Early Bird All Access” Passes.
So, until midnight on August 15th, you can buy an “Early Bird All AccessPass” for only $20! (For up to 100 passes, while they last.)
Each “Early Bird All Access Pass” Includes:
1) Admission to both days of the Hackathon ($25 value) (Don’t panic. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. See the note at the bottom of this announcement :)
2) Admission to Reception and Evening Event ($50 Value)
3) Admission to After Party – 10:30 pm-2am ($20 Value) – Location TBD
8pm – Evening Event – Special Guests Speaking or Performing (or both):
As always, please write aaronswartzday@gmail.com if you need a free ticket. There are student discounts too, but you need to write us first to get the code.
Can I get a Hallelujah! :-) Looks like we got through to someone re: bringing back RSS!As we explained back in November:
We now realize that centralized news is “bad” for all sorts of reasons. Many of us have let Google News and Facebook become our primary news filters, which was stupid and naive and lazy of us, but I think I can safely say we are now paying the price.
But what’s done is done. Time to fix it now. Let’s revive RSS and dig up all the old news readers. The news outlets still use it, and they will use it more, if we demand it of them.
The Wired article has pointed out the newest tools (below)! Just like we asked! Thanks to Brian Barrett :-)
From the Wired article:
“There are multiple approaches to connecting to news. Social felt pretty interesting at first, but when you mix social and algorithmic, you can easily get into these noise bubbles, or areas where you don’t necessarily feel 100 percent in control of the algorithm,” says Edwin Khodabakchian, cofounder and CEO of popular RSS reader Feedly. “A tool like Feedly gives you a more transparent and controllable way to connect to the information you need.”…
…Feedly has plenty to offer casual users. It has a clean user interface, and the free version of its service lets you follow 100 sources, categorized into up to three feeds—think News, Sports, Humor, or wherever your interests lie. …Paid accounts—of which Feedly has about 100,000—get you more feeds and integrations, faster updates, and better tools for teams.
For more of a throwback feel, you might try The Old Reader, which strips down the RSS reader experience while still emphasizing a social component…
Power users, meanwhile, might tryInoreader, which offers for free many of the features—unlimited feeds and tags, and some key integrations—Feedly reserves for paid accounts…
(Dave) Winer has re-entered the fray, this week introducing feedbase, a database of feeds that makes it easy to see what others subscribe to, ideally prompting discovery and an even more open approach. “I thought it might be a good time to try to add an important feature to RSS that was always part of the vision, dynamic subscription lists,” Winer says.
