There are a number of blog posts I need to write about the last Mozilla Festival in the UK but I wanted to start with this one about my art piece in the all new neurodiversity space.
I started a physical mindmap on Saturday morning in the neurosiversity space and hung up information from the dyslexic advantage book, something I have written a lot about. I then invited the public to read and write on postage tags what they thought the advantages of dyslexia look like. These were hung up for others to read and explore.
Here is the document I wrote if you want to read the MIND strengths in more detail.
I left it over the weekend and let people just add more and more. I also had some great conversations with different people about the advantages. One lady didn’t know there were advantages and lived with dyslexia all her life. As a whole lots people were correctly diagnosed at University and College, which is the norm as the book says. I think I met about 4 people who were diagnosed in School.
I have some great photos and when Mozfest finished I took them with me. Reading them in full it was quite amazing to read.
Here’s the almost complete list (I couldn’t read some of them and I removed the duplicates)…
- Right maths, wrong numbers!
- Creative
- Sequencing
- Non-reading information sensitivity
- Interconnected thinking
- Spatial thinking
- Network of thoughts
- Advantages?
- Telling stories
- Attention to details
- Improvising & Creativity
- Pattern recognition / Recognition pattern
- Ability to tell stories
- Link themes
- Empathy to others
- Empathy
- Lateral thinking
- Concept formation
- Storytelling
- Crasy?
- Mapping strengths
- Roles can lead to success
- Future prediction
- Understanding
Glad I did it and the conversations were amazing, shame I couldn’t be around in the ND space all weekend. Massive thanks to the Spacewranglers of neurodiversity for accepting my session and helping out.
3D’s: Dating, Deception and Data Portability | Mozfest 2019 from Ian Forrester
There are a number of blog posts I need to write about the last Mozilla Festival in the UK and I have already written about the dyslexic advantage previously. So its time for my workshop session the 3D’s Dating, Deception and Data-portability in the openness space. I added GDPR edition to the workshop, as I did submit it last year but did so before I actually got my GDPR data back from the dating sites. I assume the lack of clarity about having the data made it tricky for privacy & security to accept it last year?
I was looking forward to this one but on the week of Mozfest, my Dell XPS laptop woke me up in the middle of the night with a bright screen. I thought it was odd to have it on, as its usually a sleep. On closer inspection I found I couldn’t do much, so rebooted it. On the reboot I was able to login but not launch almost anything, so I rebooted again. To find I dumped into a GRUB recovery console. Its a long story what happened next but ultimately my plans to host the dating JSON files on my local machine with a nicer interface was never going to happen.
With all this in mind I changed the presentation (google slides are my friend) and scope of the workshop. Luckily I had redacted enough of the data in advance, and I kept a hold of my data instead of letting people rummage through like I had planned.
I focused the presentation into the 3 areas, dating, deception and data-portability. My slides are all online here.
The people who came were quite vocal and engaged with everything. There were many questions about the dating and deception part, which made think I could have done a whole bit similar to my TEDx talk a few years ago. But I really wanted to get into the meat of the workshop, beyond requesting your data, actually getting it but now what?
This is exactly what I posed as a question to people.
The replies were quite different from what I was thinking…
A group said if you could get a number of data dumps over time, you coul mine the data on your profile to look at positive & negative changes over a longer time scale. This would work great especially on the OKcupid questions, which you can change at anytime and I have.
Another group suggested something similar to Cambridge Analytica using OKcupid questions. I did suggest its highly likely they (Okcupid) are already doing this and its reflected in the people you are shown rather than your vote and news you see. I wasn’t making light of it, just sadly saying everything is there and yes it could be turned into a personality profile easily enough
There was a interesting thought to tally up messages and changes in profile data with historic weather, moon, quantified self data and other data. To see if there is a link. I think this one might include the person who asked why I redacted the star sign data?
The idea of creating a dating bot of yourself was quite shocking, but the thought was with enough of my chat transcripts you could easily train a bot to answer people in the future like I would. There was a discussion about ethics of doing so and what happens when a bot meets another bot pretending to be human
Finally group suggested visualisations to help make tangible choices and things I wrote. This was good in the face of what was missing and how to inform the dirty little tricks dating companies do for profit. Its always clear how powerful visualisation can be, you only have to look at my twitter gender data visualisation from openhumans.
Its clear the Plenty of Fish data was less interesting to people and it would be trivial to move from OKCupid to POF based on the dataset. Other way would require a lot user input.
Massive thanks to Fred Erse for keeping me on time and collecting the ideas together.
So what happens next?
Well I’m keen to put either the actual data or the redacted data into openhumans and try the Jupyter notebook thing. Maybe I can achieve the final groups ideas with some fascinating visualisations.