My side project for the last month is to try and collect the Curriculum Vitae of everyone standing for Parliament.

It’s called Democracy Club CVs.

I’ve been working every spare hour - mainly around midnight and on Sundays. Partly it is technically interesting, partly the other Democracy Club volunteers are fun to hang out with…

It’s also just enjoyable, with leaflets from ex-whips, professional musicians and raving loony leaders (that last one is standing against Boris).

But that doesn’t really explain … why am I doing it?

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One of the pitched battles in this century’s cyber war is about advert blocking and injecting.

It’s in full flow.

You can tell - journalist friends complaining that ad blockers have killed Joystiq, a 10 year old gaming magazine; web friends complaining that an ad blocker charges advertisers to not block some ads.

I’ve got some perspective.

Back in 1996, I helped make one of the earliest web advert blockers, WebMask.

Why did we do it?

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We’re really bad at thinking about innovation.

To improve my own sense, I’ve been gradually absorbing Simon Wardley’s Value Chain Mapping since first seeing him talk about it a few years ago.

The picture to the right is an example of one of his maps. Each blob is a technology need.

As you go from left to right in the map, the technologies go from custom built, through product to commodities. (You can read more in an introduction by Simon, also see my post about the product/market space).

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1. Virtual bugs

I first really knew that all software was fundamentally insecure back in 2001.

I was working for an artificial life games company. We made virtual pets - amazing ones with a simulated brain, biochemistry and genetics.

I’d just built a new networked version called Creatures Docking Station. It let the cute, furry, egg-laying Norns travel through portals, crossing the Internet directly between player’s computers.

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Let’s keep this post simple.

We’re near the start of a long cold, cyber war. Many things make this clear - from Stuxnet to Snowden, from the Sony hacks to Chinese DNS poisoning.

This is a hard time to be in information technology.

Just in raw, technical security terms this is tough - rebuilding every layer of computing infrastructure so that it is safe.

And that’s the easy problem.

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I blinked.

A long, slow, twenty year blink.

And meanwhile, space exploration went… Phoooom!

From a distance it looks bad. We haven’t sent humans to the moon for over forty years. There’s no grand, visible, memorable showpiece - apart from space shuttles exploding and being decomissioned.

And yet, when I recently got interested again, I found a flurry of things had happened. Many I had seen in passing, but not really looked at. All together, they add up to something amazing.

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Dear Nicholas,

Thank you for your previous two letters. I’m sorry I was so slow getting back to you after the first one, that you had to write another.

I didn’t know Canon meant essentially the same things as Round. I’m sure I must have been told, but I never got what it meant or cared. I only really appreciated rounds at all in actually singing them with people at Kentwell (the Tudor recreation thing I do).

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Politics is broken.

At the last election, a few people made an amazing organisation to try and fix it.

Democracy Club is a non-party-political group of volunteers. At the next election, we want to hold candidates to account, and stimulate public engagement.

We do this by emailing people small, easily achievable tasks. These small tasks will add up to hugely useful resources. (Democracy Club about page) 7000 volunteers (in every constituency!) found out who the candidates are, what they thought about local and national issues, and monitored their election leaflets. (I wrote up what they did on the OKFN blog.)

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I thought I was ruthless at not installing browser extensions. It’s part of the process of getting old, customising things less and less. Despite that, I’ve accumulated seven extensions.

(The most unusual and interesting one lurking in there is Churnalism, which tries to tell you whose press release each newspaper story is copied and pasted from)

As you can see, this morning I disabled them all.

Why?

I noticed that to load my list of datasets on ScraperWiki, a relatively complicated but in modern days not untypical SaaS application, was taking round about 2 seconds (that’s the DOMContentLoaded number in the Network tab of Chrome’s developer tools - actually I use Chromium on a Mac, if that matters).

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When delivering a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty, you need a range of skills.

To help understand what skills are needed in a startup team, I’ve found it useful to think of people’s skills as being spread out along this line.

Consider people you know, and place them on the line. e.g. A UX designer who can also code Javascript is maybe somewhere towards the technical end of product.

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