No-time February - weeknotes #71, #72, #73, #74

Hold on – March? I know February’s always a bit shorter than usual (I love this Britannica summary) but boy was this one short. I blame a combo of physical therapy (twice a week) and a whole lot of running (~120km this month, a lot by my standards) for the relative scarcity of long work days.

I started a couple of new things this month:

• I joined a Correctiv/Beabee project creating a local-journalism-in-a-box software to enable communities to set up a membership system (💰) and interaction with their community. That will be ~10 days a month for the foreseeable, and is probably the largest codebase I’ve worked on. Everybody involved is remote, and it’s been good fun so far.
• I also started a collaboration with the Digital Threats to Democracy team at Global Witness, designing experiments testing hypotheses about TikTok and political leaning.

And some things are carrying on:

• I’m preparing a hosted version of the Digital Evidence Toolkit, per request of a person in Berlin. That means moving to a remote store (hello, S3) and thinking about how to permission delivery and database additions.
• Speaking of, there are two funding opportunities that, fingers crossed, I’ll have more to tell you about when I publish March’s notes… 🤞

• What I talk about when I talk about running
• “Propositional density in dataviz”, an oldie from Moritz Stefaner, about “the associative, evocative character of our visual information vocabulary” with wondeful examples
• “How to capture satellite images in your backyard”, by Sophie Dyer (Amnesty) and Sasha Engelmann (Royal Holloway Uni), which – come on! – makes you want to place an order and spend some time faffing outside
• “What I learned running a SaaS for a year”, by a guy who’s run a SaaS for a year.