Week 434 - Interesting links

CoTech Discussion Group

CoTech - the network of technology cooperatives that we are a member of - recently launched a community discussion group powered by the open source Discourse software. There’s already been a number of interesting threads and event announcements and the decision to make the community open to all should help us in our mission to grow CoTech. — CL

Github: Press y to permalink to a file in a specific commit

I often find myself wanting to reference a file or lines of a file on Github. I’ve always been conscious that links which are based on a branch name are not permanent, because the commits on a branch may change. To get around this I’ve always done the following dance: (1) click the “History” tab; (2) copy the SHA for the latest commit; (3) hit the “Back” button and paste the SHA into the URL in place of the branch name. However, I recently discovered the “y” keyboard short-cut which does all this for me. Yay! — JM

Choose your own business adventure

Nat Buckley spoke about setting up your own business at the recent Alterconf conference in London. Nat has turned the talk into a very informative blog post about the hows and whys of setting out on your own. The post is an excellent, accessible accompaniment to the video of the talk (which should appear on the conference website soon). — CL

Principles for deciding what to work on: Jon Leighton

This article really resonated with me. I think we already unconsciously use some of these principles at Go Free Range, but I like the idea of going through an exercise to write down and publish how we make these decisions, so that we can get a better shared understanding and get feedback from outside the organisation. — JM

Loomio Cooperative Handbook

This was first mentioned to me by Chris L, but it was also referenced in Jon Leighton’s article (above). I haven’t yet read the whole handbook, but I found the section on Working Together really interesting. While I’m on the subject of company handbooks, I should mention that Basecamp have recently published their Employee Handbook. — JM

How to Fix Banking - Ben Dyson at Positive Money Conference 2013

This video [33 mins] is a talk by the founder of the Positive Money campaign eloquently explains the problems with our banking system and the flaws in the standard economic model, as well as how it can all be fixed. Highly recommended! — JM

ZX Spectrum Next

This is a re-imagining of the ZX Spectrum using new hardware, but still fully compatible with software written for the original computer. The option to buy just the mainboard and fit it inside an old Spectrum case is pretty cool. As is the ability to use a Raspberry PI Zero as an accelerator to run games at higher frame rates - I was particularly struck by the demo of Deathchase, a game from my youth. — JM