typo(s), tendency and text

self portrait split personality by atomicjeep

Anonymity, pseudonymity, identity management - important keywords for the discussion around the internet. They have been for as long as I have used the internet, and the topic still prevails. It seems like there are consistently topics being added to this discussion as technology becomes a more and more important part of everyday life. People have - depending on their level and type of experiences with communication on the net, different kind of approaches to the topic. Here are some thoughts about how I handle things and about my experiences. What are yours?

I started using the internet for good in 1998. I have been searching for and using information since shortly before the search engine Google became popular. I used information, and added to it. Both during my education and in my jobs, as well as in my spare time. I didn't have an online identity linked to jobs until later, and even then it was always for short times. I had my university email adress. But I always separated private and professional conversations, and they seldomly overlapped.

What always fascinated me most in the beginning was the pseudonymous approach to talking to people, and how much was still "me" with the pseudonym, or which facet of my interests was present. Of course also with the other people in the dialogue on forums and boards, IM or email communication.

In the last years with the major social networks like facebook, studiVZ (Germany), LinkedIn and others it seemed to become more and more important to people to always have their real name present. I also started doing that, although suddenly communicating socially seemed a lot more complicated than before. I am still not comfortable of mixing business contacts and friends in the same twitter stream, but it requires quite high maintenance not to do so. So, for now, it is problematic, but I still do it. That is the risk that I am taking.

However, if you plan some kind of professional discussion, and you want to encourage unexperienced people to use social media to make the quality of a service better, or make it available on other channels - what can we say to people?

During the third DIKULT110 plenary session (norwegian), Linn Søvig from Kaffehuset Friele told us about the coffee company trying out to get into dialogue with customers and potential customers of new coffee products on facebook. Facebook is the most used web2.0 platform in Norway, and often times mistaken for being the web2.0. In terms of identity management, Linn told us that she created another facebook identity in order to split her own  very active private online persona from her professional persona.If I remeber correctly, she also said that she encouraged her coworkers who want to take part in the discussions, to do the same.

This touches one of the most important problems of linked personal communications on the social web as our way of expressing ourselves, but also adding to a common knowledge our personal views on life and society gets decompartmentalized.

What does that mean?

In my experience and opinion, this means that people more and more use their real life name (+ maybe a nick name linked to it) across all social network platforms that they use. The point of this post is not to act as if this is a new phenomenon. What I want to say is that this is not "manageable". It is confusing and requires a lot of profile maintenance. I myself look in awe at some of the people I follow who manage the distinction daily.

There are people talking about post identity (german), claiming that the online persona falls into many bits and pieces in the many feeds that it produces. This is probably true for the (still) relatively small percentage of people who use more than 3 or 4 social networks/applications. But even this concept gets challenged when there are scientists developing textual/rhethorical analysis (video of talk at 26th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, english) of personal writing patterns, making it possible to identify the author of a certain texts.

I don't have a solution, although I really see it as a problem, that the many and constantly changing facets of a person and his/her interests should be visible/accessible to anyone. It should be possible to express yourself, to learn about new phenomenons and to share interests with groups of people, without being put on the spot by anyone who can use a search engine or figure out, how social networks work together.

For me, personally, I see no other way than using my "official persona" and other pseudonymous personas under different circumstances and changing/altering pseudonyms every once in a while. ut what do I tell others who have yet to learn about social media and are scared what their coworkers, neighbours, boss and bankers might think of their different personality facets and interests? What do you tell them? How do you handle these things yourself?

Ever since the content production and distribution industry has figured out that copies of text, music, film and pictures are not that easily to compartmentalize and contain as on analogue media, strategies have been discussed of how either digital copies can be compartmentalized and contained as well, or how payment can be organized in a different way.

Micropayments have been discussed since the late 1990's, but have not yet really become a real factor contributing to revenue for online content. There have been different payment solutions implemeted, and some have become widely used. But bloggers, podcasters or smaller news magazines had no real alternative to advertisement besides their content.

June 2010: Enter flattr.com. Founded to give people the opportunity to give for content on the internet made by others, and get back for their self-made content. The company is based in Malmö, Sweden. I was very excited to try it out, since the service was building on a different kind of interaction opposed to selling. You would literally give people credit for what they were doing, and if you got peoples positive attention with your own content, they could "flattr" you back. On the websites you can find all "things" that you can flattr, and websites can use the flattr API to connect their content production to flattr automatically. Flattr takes 10 percent of the amount of money that you load on to your account. Where social network platforms integrate flattr to let users get flattrd for ther submitted content, flattr and the platform provider share the 10 percent of the revenue.

What I saw during the first time of the public beta (it still is in public beta) were relatively marginalized online news media incorporating flattr into their websites. The lesser german newspapers "tageszeitung" (taz) and "jungle World" started using it. Being either opposed to a lot of ad content, but also not seen as a good environment for many campaigns by advertizers. The taz has made the observation that their flattr income got up to 1000-1500 Euros within the first months, and that the income spiked in july, and then went down a bit from there. They share their insights into the flattr revenue and how they can use to see what users flattr here. Tim Pritlove, a quite popular podcaster in the german tech blogger scene, works on projects like Mobile Macs, Chaos Radio Express and Not Safe for Work. In the medienradio podcast no. 32 he talks about his revenue which has been about the same amount, adding 1000 euros to his monthly income.

I myself have gained 1.09 Euro via 7 clicks on the flattr buttons on this blog in may. Since then I haven't blogged much, and have apparently not gained much attention or merit with flattr-aware users.

I think flattr is a very interesting project, since it is not yet clear how it will develop in the future. My guess is, that there will be some people who will gain a lot of popularity and good connections to their audience, and that the big heap of people will always be paying more than they gain. The difference between this content monetization model and the traditional copy-based model is, that this can be turned around impromptu, if bloggers or podcasts suddenly gain a lot of attention. Another positive point is that everybody is equal on the payment side. You can give money to projects, and give back to the community by that. And by giving content to the world, you gan get back by the community.

Something that might not be positive, is that "flattr" might be perceived as positive acknowledgement - as the "like"-button on facebook. Hard debates, criticism or confusing communication could get their flattr-button ignored. There it could be an incentive for content producers to streamline their way of expressing themselves.

I decided to make the social network profile of the organization I chose as a case, HackBergen, a flattr account. The reasons for that are that HackBergen both has to think about new ways of getting project funding, as well as being part of an international community about the projects that people want to work on. Where thingiverse implements flattr into its 3D object design-sharing community, and where other hackerspaces have flattr accounts, it might be good to give something back, as well as make it possible for people to show their appreciation for stuff people do at HackBergen.

More sources:

Podcast at medienradio (german)

Blog on a masters thesis on flattr (german)

Flattrs blog

There have been a lot of announcements about companies and organizations which have decided to join in conversations i social media. What mostly follows these announcements is some form of collections of rules or commitments to these conversations, which are mostly service statements or rules for the employees sharing knowledge and conversing on behalf of those companies/organizations.

While those all have their (mostly) legit purposes and are certainly not all bad, I would like to talk about something else. I would like to talk about the reasons why public service organizations and public administrations should commuicate and share their knowledge and experiences. Of course, tools like Fix my Street are viable for communication between citizens and authorities. But besides brushing up their image and making things easier - publicly funded institutions have a great pile of knowledge they are accumulating. Knowledge that doesn't belong to them, but to all people.

Often you see that digital information is not structured openly by governments. Open means here, accessible, widely usable by all citizens, or all kinds of applications build upon them.  Projects like data.gov.uk try to change that. I think that there are also boundaries for the involvement of governments and authorities. Obviously you should not build all the trust on you in a closed, privately owned network like facebook alone. But getting involved in wiki projects, funding projects on accessibility to digital data in and outside of public libraries (you know, the book storage), would be important. Here is a list of things that I would like to see:

- All public* data amassed and produced by governments should be published, well searchable and using well-formed APIs that everybody can learn and use.
- Every publicly funded employee that has special public knowledge due to their work should be allowed to talk about it.
- There should be no pressure for publicly funded employees to do so.
- Every organization should on every level reviews what information "is out there", and what they can do to enrich and further discussions.
- In doing so it should be clear to everybody, that citizens are the real stakeholders of these organizations, and that they serve the public, not the public serves them.

This is a very quick blogpost, that assumes a lot of givens and ignores a lot of boundaries. The given is that we talk about a western democracy form, and the biggest boundaries are set in existing national and regional laws and directives. So, of course, these have to be taken under consideration. So, please accept my idealistic approach for now. The aim is to overcome the view on social media by many bosses and information departments, that social media are merely some kind of automating aparatus for magically viral campaigns. Presences on social media are fragile and have to be maintained.

That being said, the royal crown prince coupe is really popular on twitter. (Not with me. )

Two fellow students, dillettantene and nomonym, have discussed whether the norwegian PST, a national police agency for security, should have a facebook page or not. After all, what positive image could an organization that works by spying on people deserve? I found an article by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an US-based organization that aids people in expressing themselves digitally in the name of free speech.

The article claims that it has become part of the guidelines of US immigration authorities to evaluate applicants, also based on their activity in social media ny befriending them without telling them who they are.

In other words, USCIS is specifically instructing its agents to attempt to “friend” citizenship petitioners and their beneficiaries on social networks in the hope that these users will (perhaps inadvertently) allow agents to monitor their activities for evidence of suspected fraud, including evidence that their relationships might not live up to the USCIS’ standard of a legitimate marriage.

Applying for Citizenship? U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Wants to Be Your “Friend” - eff.org, october 12th 2010

Facebook is really popular in Norway, if you are a resident and you don't have an account, is it almost as if you don't exist. I got a facebook account when I moved here. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered. Facebook has proven time and again, how little it is concerned with users need for privacy protection. When it suits facebooks economic plans, they change their terms and the behaviour of the complex application, making it really difficult for the masses of users to stay educated on what to communicate how without causing drama in their lives.

Facebook is celebrating its 150 million users. Don't count on me: I have closed my account yesterday the other! The book is a Public Domain image by Skander - cc-by-sa

That stinks. And its bad enough in itself. What is even worse, is that it never works for me. This has happened before, but now I have some real new and fresh frustration to shout out here. To comply with the task for the class DIKULT110 at the University of Bergen this semester, I have been trying to streamline the flow of how to communicate in different social media channels for HackBergen. Since it is based in Bergen and facebook is popular with the masses, I hvae been struggling the last days to connect the blog of the organization to the facebook group and facebook page. I have tried three different ways of doing this:

1. Using the WordPress plugin Simple Facebook Connect
Well, that didn't work. It made me go through the process of making an app on the developers pages on facebook, and then connect it with the public ID and secret key of the app. I tried, but all I got was an API Error that I couldn't find documentation for.

2. Using the "notes" app within facebook
Notes is supposed to use the import function to grab the feed of any page, and then automatically post new entried to groups, pages and individual users' walls. First I got an error, then I saw the feed didn't validate because of iframes and object tags which included stuff from Eventbrite, Google Calendar and presentations on Slideshare into the feed. When the feed finally validated I got the some "Sorry there is a problem, we will fix it soon" feedback that I have gotten before.

3. Using the app "Networked Blog"
Here, setting up everything worked and test post worked. Posts were imported. But none of the real blogposts showed up on the walls of either group or fan page.

So, why do I state "Facebook is broken" int he title? Those things should work. But facebook has - with its large user basis - become a monster of an application with a sheer unsearchable vast mass of things you can do with it. And then you can't. This is frustrating. But it is not obsolete, as so many people rely on it to keep and nurture their relationships and conversations with others.

Facebook is bad, for so many reasons. And I wanted this post to be a big sigh about it. What I still really hope for is that the crowd-financed and now open source (in alpha state) Diaspora framework will continue to be developed. But this is another story for later...

What is a hackerspace?

Since I started to use Linux and have been working on my masters thesis about Indymedia Germany from a journalists perspective in 2005/6/7, I have discovered a fantastic culture of amazing people, calling themselves hackers, makers, tinkerers, geeks and other illustrous names. Soon after my thesis I traveled as a jounalist with the Hackers on a Plane tour 2007, and witnessed the preliminaries of a becoming worldwide Hackerspace movement. After those people from the U.S. and Canada traveled through Germany and Austria to visit the existing community driven spaces, weld friendships and learn how a space like this can be made, creativity and openness can be nurtured, great projects like NYCResistor, HackDC, Noisebridge and others were founded.

Edit: It has been a while since I have had a look at the Hackerspace Design Patterns, and they actually say something about documentation, discussion and realtime conversation (wiki, mailing list, irc) in the Community Pattern. But does this really cover all kinds of communication needs?

Whatever happened to HackBergen and what can be done about it?

When I moved to Bergen, I had the profound need to get to know people and hang out at a space that is not work, is not university or school, or home - to work with other creatively. During the 24c3 I started the HackBergen website and mailing list, put it on the Hackerspaces wiki (list), and found someone currently living in Bergen, too, who also wanted to work on this. To our knowledge, HackBergen was the first hackerspace group founded by women. (And its fine, if I am wrong there.:) )

We gathered some other people interested int the same purpose, but ran into problems actually financing and finding a space. As it turns out, real estate in Norway is really expensive - and so are rents. Also, there are few to none open community projects, and creativity seems to be measured by its success, and the D.I.Y. scene is individualized to a high degree.

To solve these problems, communicating better would help. Although we had a website and a wiki from the start, both weren*t used extensively. We got a facebook group, too. What was better used, was the mailing list. But since people are getting their information in so many different ways, using one channel sometimes, and another one at other times is confusing at best, if not really annoying with people who want to get a better impression first before they can decide if they like the idea or not.

Quite soon we were allowed to gather at the Piksel Hut, the office of the organizers for the Piksel Festival. That was great for meetings and ad hoc workshops, but we still really need our own space soon. So the purpose of communication is:

• to reach people who want to tinker,
• to build a member base and
• to gather donations

Why I think communication did not work in the past:

• People in the group are very informed of communication possibilities, have strong opinions and different channels they are preferring.
• People in the group don't like blogging?!
• The blog wasn't very good interconnected, so stuff could be posted there and at the same time spread to other places like facebook, twitter, mailing list...
• We as a group did not give people guidelines or even hints where they can find the information and updates they are looking for

Now, what do I think about this?

The group, every member should ideally be equally responsible to tell about things they are doing, thoughts they are having  in order to help others see what we are about, show diversity, share ideas and let them flourish and develop.

Wiki: wiki.hackbergen.org

The wiki is the groups main documentation tool, to gather iformation about past meetings, work on the legal documents of the HackBergen foundation. Its also the place to document projects in a handbook/tutorial kind of way. The strength of wikis compared to blogs is that wikis track changes a lot better, and make collaborating on texts easier. So meeting notes, documents to collaborate on should go there.

Blog: hackbergen.org

So far a wordpress driven blog with mostly old entries. Even though more people have user accounts, only one person blogs mostly. When people concerned about things happening in the group like workshops, classes and the trek for a sustaining space find things here, there actually are comments. Its important that different voices answer and talk. This can not be the responsibility of one person, because it would be exhausting and not very longlasting as an initiative. Also, building a community means, talking. A lot. By a lot of people. Building a geeky community means talking, too. On the interwebs.

Twitter: @hackbergen

The connection between the twitter account and the wordpress account is working. What is an important question, is if this is something that should be machine generated twittering solely, or if a person should be responsible for updates as well.

Facebook

A group has been existing for some time now, and a page has been made. However, at the time, facebook seem to have problems to connect to feeds or wordpress blogs. I have tried both ways today, but nothing worked. Connecting open source self controlled software to company made commercial apis can have its perks, as f.ex. with the latest change on twitter away from OAuth, where a lot of the many clients didn't work any longer. The group and the page have to be cared for, too. People have to get answers and we should have an eye on discussions there. This has not been working fully optimal in the past, and it would be important to find out why.

Other services:

Flattr, Kickstart, Eventbrite, Google Calendar

Flattr and kickstart can be helpful to gain awareness and fundraise for obtaining and sustaining a community driven space. In the case of flattr, awareness for smaller works and projects. Kickstart is a tool to fundraise money for certain goals and projects you have, where you try to find people with solidarity of your goals and maybe set aside something to give-away for especially generous people.

Eventbrite and Google Calendar can help to make our events wider known, and to keep track of people attending. To build a membership base we want to get to know people, and we want to become a bigger group. After all, we want to share knowledge and make something new and creative out of it.

Other services and technologies we could look at come to mind, like github for social development and versioning of code, the thingiverse for object design for 3dprinting and laser cutting.

Adjustments to further development

As the group grows, as the hackerspace gets found, equipped and filled with activities, shared and individual property, better communication structures will be needed. Already now having only one person holding all the passwords to all the official accounts is a problem, but with time it will probably become a bigger problem. So we should have an eye on the changing needs we have towards our communication infrastructure, and find creative architectures and flows that w can adapt to our needs, while still keeping the group and news about it accessible and open. The challenge here is to use a codebase and connections that is both easy to overview, maintain and upgrade, as well as easy to adapt to our needs.

What will also become more important is keeping contact to other hackerspaces in the region, and internationally. It is important that we are part not only of the local community, but also of an international community. We can learn a lot of how others do what they do, and they can learn from us, too. But only if we talk about what we do.

To Do - right now

• A short questionnaire of what people feel they need to participate more actively in the conversation. Evaluation of the answers.
• Write five texts: One about how people can contribute to hackbergen with donating some of their time and hold workshops and classes, one about where hackbergen currently stands. One about the state of the international movement, and one about my next class about LaTeX. And finally: One about what communication channels can be used how by the members.
• Be more available, and make my role clearly about enabling conversation, not steering it.
• Make a direct posting method from blog to facebook page.

In 2008 I contributed to the department I work in by introducing wikis for collaboration on texts and documents, aggregating and sharing knowledge about projects. Before that, there were lots of Microsoft Word documents floating around, which was a problem when the number of people contributing to a document became too big. Keeping track of changes was difficult, and when a deadline came close, lots of emails were sent and people tried to write on the document all at once.

There was also a wish to give the collaborating libraries in four regions of Hordaland a tool to work similar with their documents, and on their projects and events.

Enter DokuWiki

I rolled out 4, eventually 6 instances of DokuWiki for library groups in the regions, our own department, a book project within the international library organization IFLA and for one local library. All of the wikis were closed for internal use and their content was visible for logged-in users only. DokuWiki is well-documented and the localization to Norwegian Bokmål (Nynorsk is required for official communication at my workplace, but this was an internal tool, and it was free) is acceptable.

DokuWiki is a Wiki software written in php, which most shared webhosting services support. The main difference to other big wiki applications is, that is doesn't  store the content in a database, but rather in plain text files on the server.  If you use the hierarchical "namespaces" in DokuWiki for sorting your content, DokuWiki puts your pages into folders named after the namespace they are in. (This makes it really easy to use those textfiles in real geeky ways over the command line.  But thats just a sidenote.)

In practice using the DokuWiki installation worked for a while, but there was a huge difference in how frequent it was used and for what purposes by certain users.

The wikis used by the collaborting libraries were used a bit or a lot in the beginning, but after a while people stopped using them. The IFLA-wiki helped to make the process of finding new examples of best practices in libraries for library guidelines editable for all contributors in an international group. But after its purpose was fulfilled, and the project done, it wasn't used anymore.

Two problems: Purpose/design of the tool & missing WYSIWYG

The wiki of the Hordaland State library was not readable or writable to the general public, but all colleagues in the department used it to update their tasks in one long document. Working with one long document was what people were used to before, but the wiki didn't help much to do that.  Certain co-workers used it more than others. Those who used it the least, said that they found it diffcult to use the WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean)- editor for the wiki pages and that it was difficult to remember the syntax, when they were not using the wiki often. Most people are used to WYSIWYG-editors for documents such as Microsoft Word provides. While this is perfectly inderstandable, many WYSIWYG-editors in web applications are known to produce horrible html-code, especially if they have a wide range of operations you can do with them. The existing WYSIWYG editors for DokuWiki match that description - and my time budget too limited to do something about it.

The purpose of what this tool was used for and the way it was used did not really match its design. The head of the section encouraged everyone to use the wiki, but required only the use and updating of the long reporting document before internal meetings. What happened was: The document grew very long. Typical deadline problem: Everybody wants to update the section about their work 30 till 5 minutes before the meeting.

DokuWiki makes it possible to edit a document sectionwise, but everybody edited the document at once. Since DokuWiki tracks changes in documents in order to show differences between the versions and to make an RSS feed of the changes, only one user at a time can edit a page. So people grew frustrated because they could not use the report page when they had to, because a co-worker was working on it.

The reason why I write this in detail is not to complain about the users, my co-workers. I take the difficulties of working with those tools seriously. Which is why after almost two years we decided to take a second look at what tools we wish and need.

Audience and organizational setting

Some difficulties to mention here are:

• The rules and regulations which public service organizations have to behave when giving buying goods or services companies
• Public service in Norway has to give access to records in general, unless certain circumstances are met under which the citizens' privacy has to be protected.
• Not everything that is being worked on is ready to be disseminated to potentially everyone on the planet at once. Personal learning or work documents should be able to be protected.
• The corporate brand and identity of the mother organization Hordaland fylkeskommune and its main communication channel on the web, hordaland.no, should not be overruled. Official communications by the library department should still be posted there.
• People working in the department: Their privacy and right to opt out of their work being cached, stored and fulltext searchable. This is a particularly complicated topic, where I am not sure yet where I stand, how to solve it or if it is sovable.

At the same time, especially in Norway, libraries have policies that make them about distributing information, knowledge and cultural narratives and technologies freely to all citizen to enrich a free democratic society. The Hordaland State library works towards enabling the libraries to continually fulfilling and developing their services and skills to meet those goals. So, opening up discussions and the dissemination of information of how we work, what we work with and which ideas we come up with would hopefully help the other library aiding organizations, librarians in the region, colleagues from other places on the cultural sector understand and learn from what we are doing.

Several other public service organizations like the City of Oslo are right now working on a social media strategy, and the Norwegian Department of administration and ICT has published Guidelines for communication in social media based on an open discussion in their blog.  The Norwegian administration discusses initiatives openly.

More specifically in the library field, there has been a library blogosphere for years now, the library lab tries to help public libraries to develop and adopt new technologies, and aids in implementing social applications to their data and media collections.  A good place to start if you want to dive in to the norwegian library blogosphere is this handy collection of library and library blog rss. Some libraries and librarians meet their patrons on facebook, twitter and other social networks.

Purpose

There is a need for collaboration on internal collection of facts, document, processes and progress of projects for official reporting purposes. But their is also the need to share knowlegde, write tutorials and discuss ideas, questions and problems within the process of developing libraries.

What I see as the most difficult task is to embed the reporting part into a communication tool, that is also open to all audiences. If you use a fine granulation of open for all/closed for member permissions system, this might be difficult to understand/remember.

Possible solutions: multiblog cms

We are still discussing options for which software (our preference is something php-based, free and open source software) to use. When we set the reporting task aside for a while, and look at the other things we want to do, we probably want a multiblog system like WordPress's BuddyPress (example install for a creative writing group at Bergen Public Library) or something like Drupal Commons/OpenAtrium, two Drupal-based distributions for collaborating in groups.

I am in favor of a tool, that we can own, as opposed to a tool that is a free service provided by a company we as a department use as long as the company lets us. Using a blog/cms software for the core discussions, and making it possible to let discussions on facebook and twitter get through to us, or let our discussions be linked to on facebook is my favorite way of doing this. That way we won't lose our data on terms of a third party. But I think this process needs some more thought, and some deeper diving into examples, and we need to include the opinion and the way people want to collaborate into realizing the way of communicating.

Ich erinnere mich an den alten Heuwagen.
Ich erinnere mich an die rote, abblätternde Farbe.
Ich erinnere mich an die rostigen Scharniere und Leisten.
Ich erinnere mich an die platten Reifen.
Ich erinnere mich an das Gras, das an den Reifen emporwuchs.
Ich erinnere mich an den Jungen, der im Wagen saß.
Ich erinnere mich an die Scheune am Weg.
Ich erinnere mich an den alten Heuwagen, neben der Scheune.
Ich erinnere mich an den Baum, unter dem der Heuwagen stand.
Ich erinnere mich an das Rauschen seiner Blätter im Wind.
Ich erinnere mich, dass ich zu dem Jungen in den Wagen kletterte.
Ich erinnere mich an meinen Bruder.
Ich erinnere mich an die Geräusche, die der Wagen machte.
Ich erinnere mich an die Geräusche, die wir für den Wagen machten.
Ich erinnere, wie mein Bruder rief „Vorsicht! Da liegt ein Ast auf der Straße!“
Ich erinnere mich an die Bremsgeräusche.
Ich erinnere mich, wie unsere Köpfe nach vorne nickten.
Ich erinnere mich an die Wege, die dieser Wagen uns entlangfuhr.
Ich erinnere, wie der Wagen manchmal in den Kurven quietschte, ein Rad abhob.
Ich erinnere mich, dass der rote Heuwagen dabei ganz still stand.
Ich erinnere mich, dass wir die Leute am Weg grüßten.
Ich erinnere mich, dass wir ihnen laut zuriefen.
Ich erinnere Leute, die wir uns ausdachten.
Ich erinnere Leute, die am physisch stehenden Wagen vorbeikamen.
Ich erinnere mich an meinen Bruder.
Ich erinnere mich an seine guten Ideen.
Ich erinnere mich an den Wind.
Ich erinnere mich an das Salz in der Luft.
Ich erinnere einen Kuss auf die salzige Wange meines Bruders.

If you feel like you have missed the panel discussion "Women and Geek Culture", you can watch it now. The spectacular organizing team of the conference have made them available both as ftp-downloads, as well as embeddable videos from the CCC media server.

This semester I am taking two classes at the University of Bergen. INF100 is about programming in Java and learning concepts and practices in programming. DIKULT110 is a short and intensive class about communicating in social media, which has - of course - its own blog. Part of the assignments is to reflect on what we have learned in blog posts. So, bear with me as the next blog posts will be about social media.